Terysa and Nick: Sailing Ruby Rose and Living Full Time on a Sailboat

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 397 — Terysa & Nick, Sailing Ruby Rose — how a dentist and a paramedic sold everything to sail full time and turned their journey into a YouTube business.

Terysa & Nick: Hi, we're Terysa and Nick from Sailing Ruby Rose, and you are listening to the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Welcome to the Show

Tom Rowland: Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast today. Man, got another great story of someone who drops out of normal life and starts a life of passion, following their passion, doing exactly what they want to do. Nick and Terysa from Sailing Ruby Rose are with me today. Nick was a dentist, Terysa was a paramedic. They decided they were going to stop what they were doing — sell everything, quit their jobs, save up all their money, buy a boat, and go sail off into the sunset. Well, it's not exactly that easy — they had to take stair steps up. We'll talk about all of that and how they actually made this dream a reality. They have a YouTube channel called Sailing Ruby Rose. It is fantastic, I really like it. In doing the research for this podcast I managed to watch a lot of their videos, and they do a very, very good job. It's a cool life they've managed to create, and that's exactly what they've done — it didn't happen by accident, they created this life. A lot of people that listen to this podcast want to do something similar, whether that's being a fishing guide or a hunting guide or getting into the outdoor industry in some way, shape, or form. Whatever it may be, you can take some advice from Nick and Terysa on how they did it, how they managed to quit their jobs. Not just any job — she was a paramedic, he was a dentist, those are real jobs. They managed to quit those jobs and go live their best life. So bear with me today, and here we go onto the show. Nick and Terysa, how are you?

Terysa: We're very well, thank you.

Nick: Yeah, very well. It's odd to be off a boat. We've lived on a boat for so long now that to be in something made of stone is a little bit — it freaks me out when I wake up in the morning.

Tom Rowland: How long has it been? How long have you lived on a boat?

Nick: Full time we moved on in 2015 — five years now, five and a half we've done. And we sold the boat about a month ago, so we're still getting used to everything being in the same place. We keep expecting it to move when we get into bed.

Terysa: Not rolling around. Yeah.

Tom Rowland: What kind of adjustment is that? I've done some longer mothership trips — my background is a fisherman, I'm not a sailor, so you'll have to explain some of the sailing terms and I don't want to get them wrong. I know some people who are way into sailing do not like it at all if you get the terms wrong, so I apologize already. I can help you with your fishing, though.

Nick: We need help. We definitely need help.

Tom Rowland: I can help you with your fishing, but I'm definitely not going to help you with the sailing. I did a mothership trip in Australia once and we were on the boat for almost two weeks, and then you get off and there's some adjustment. Do you like that adjustment, or do you kind of wish you were back on the boat?

Terysa: I think we like the novelty of being on land. When we're on the boat, we obviously love being on the boat — up until a month ago it was our home, so it's always nice to be home even when it's not comfortable, even when it's frustrating, even when you're dealing with bad weather, it's still nice to get into your own bed every night. But every time we come off the boat and live on land temporarily, it's fun — we get to have long showers, wash our laundry whenever we want, not worry about the weather, just close the door. It's always fun for a little while, and then after about four to eight weeks we start really pining after the boat again. So it's going to be tough the next twelve months while we wait for a new catamaran, but that's just the way it is.

Tom Rowland: Do you have a plan for that time?

Nick: No. If it wasn't for COVID we'd have all sorts of plans. The reason we're pretty calm about it is that it's temporary — if we closed the door on the boat for good, I'd get the old twitchy eye from the stress of it. We know we're going back, the complication is just a hiatus caused by COVID, and there's a gap between the boat we've sold and the boat we're going to. We hope to do a lot more sailing in the next twelve months, sail bits of Australia — we actually have a lot of friends here determined to get us fishing because we're so bad at it. They're like, honestly, how can you live on a boat and be this bad at fishing?

Terysa: You live on a boat, how is that possible?

Tom Rowland: Especially when you need it to eat.

Nick: Absolutely.

Tom Rowland: So where are you right now?

Nick: We're on the island of Rhodes, one of the Greek islands, about ten miles south of Turkey. We came here because England isn't doing particularly well with COVID — we got to fly out and can stay here relatively cheaply while we get our editing done. We were pretty lucky this season to get away from England and back to the boat. There was a whole palaver with Terysa getting the last plane out of Australia to come meet me in France, and we got stuck in The UK. It was no joke — back in February we honestly thought it would just be a small hiatus while they addressed the COVID issue. We joked about how she was on the last flight out of Australia — I think you were, weren't you?

Terysa: It was pretty close — Australia implemented a travel ban and I got out the day before it took effect. But yeah, we're currently in Greece, enjoying the novelty of being on land. We're lucky that we had the option to come here — Greece has its borders open and is allowing visitors, so we'll stay here as long as we can. Ultimately we want to get back to Australia because I have family there, but that's easier said than done at the moment.

Life in the Time of COVID

Tom Rowland: It's interesting how differently every country is handling COVID, and it's causing all kinds of issues for travelers. A lot of my friends spend time in The Bahamas, and it's constantly opening and closing — if you get in there you've got to quarantine. It's just different everywhere. You're flying back and forth to Australia — did you notice a place that's stricter than others as you researched this?

Terysa: Normally we'd follow the sun. The last few years we've been sailing around Europe, but the sailing season there is only about six months — you can live on the boat year-round but you can't really sail year-round because winter weather can be bad, particularly on the Atlantic coast. So the past three years, after sailing the Caribbean, we've spent the European winter visiting my family in Australia, and we've used that time to come to The US for the Annapolis Boat Show a few years running. This year we're kind of stuck in Europe, scrambling to work out where we can go — because we don't want to be here all winter, because we want to get back on a boat and sailing again, and because I'd like to see my family. It's hard, because the countries we'd normally go to are largely closed off to us right now.

Nick: I'm just going to interrupt before you get angry listeners sending messages — we realize this is a real first-world problem. We've got our health, we haven't lost our jobs, we're not suffering with family that are ill, touch wood, or kids that are ill, or loss of employment. Honestly, we consider ourselves pretty blessed. I'm not playing down the severity of what this is by talking about our travel plans.

Terysa: It's just the job that we do, and it's had a minor impact on our lives. We hope we're sensitive to other people's situations — just because we're talking about what we do doesn't mean we've lost perspective. All year we've been saying to each other, aren't we lucky that we were first reunited, since we were separated at the beginning of the pandemic, then got back to the boat, back to our home, and were able to sail — that was amazing. And now, even though we want to get back to Australia, if that can't happen, it can't happen, and we'll muddle through like everyone else. At the end of the day we are very, very lucky.

Nick: There's a friend of ours, Alex — he's Australian, she's French, they've been together a few years and were separated for eight months because he couldn't leave Australia. We were pretty lucky by comparison — the fact that we managed to get back together at all.

Tom Rowland: I have family in England who haven't been able to come at all — I don't think they'll even make it this Christmas. Families are apart, husbands and wives are apart. But you are lucky in a lot of ways, and in some ways you've made your own luck by creating this life that's very interesting, with an allure to a big audience. You have 130,000 or more subscribers — is that right on YouTube?

Terysa: 125,000, I think, at the moment.

An Audience of Dreamers

Tom Rowland: What you do is very attractive and interesting to a lot of people. We were connected by our mutual friend Aaron, who told me about you and what you're doing, so I did my research and watched as many videos as I could before this podcast — and I've got to say, you do a really good job on your videos, you have a great channel. One thing I liked is that it was obvious in the comments and in some of your videos that you realize not everyone watching and subscribing is a hardcore sailor or has even been on a sailboat. You've drawn an audience of sailors and boat people, sure, but also a large portion who are just dreamers — who dream of this lifestyle, whether on a boat or in an RV or just traveling or living life on their own terms. It's interesting that you've noticed that and speak directly to those people — in a couple of your videos I saw you speaking to them, like, maybe you're just a dreamer, maybe you're in that dreaming stage. So kudos to you for creating that life. When I dug into your story, Nick, you were a dentist — is that correct?

Nick: Yep, a tooth puller.

Tom Rowland: And you were a paramedic, Terysa?

Terysa: Yeah, that's correct.

How Nick and Terysa Met

Tom Rowland: Let's rewind — you met in India, which I think is interesting because you both clearly had an adventurous spirit before the boat. How did you end up in India, and what were you doing there that you'd meet?

Nick: I'll do the Romeo part, and Terysa can do the Juliet part in a minute. I've always traveled — when I had the dental practice I'd take as much time off as I could, put on a rucksack, and go somewhere I'd never been, trying to do low-impact travel. Sounds hippie-ish, but that's what I used to do. I booked an overland trip from India to Nepal, two weeks, starting in New Delhi, through Varanasi — a group of like-minded travelers, not posh hotels, pretty basic, we slept on the floor one night. But it was really beautiful. I walked into this hotel lobby, the Hotel Good Times in New Delhi — and honestly there were no good times there, it was a rat-infested airlock.

Terysa: Good times. Anyway.

Nick: I'd been in Delhi a few days, and I met the rest of the group — five other travelers, one of whom was this pretty grumpy-looking Australian girl sat in the lobby at six in the morning with not enough coffee and an upset stomach.

Terysa: I'm not a morning person. But we saw something in each other for some reason. We had two weeks backpacking through Northern India and Nepal together — obviously a very special holiday. Then we went back to our respective lives — we were both on a short break from work, but it didn't take long to decide we wanted to see the relationship further, so I moved to The UK the following year. I'd barely dropped my suitcases when Nick informed me that if I wanted to spend any quality time with him, I'd have to learn to sail, because that's what he did with all his spare time.

Nick: I'll own up to that one — we live on a boat now.

Terysa: That was it, that's how we ended up here. I think Nick was worried I had a good career as a paramedic in Australia and didn't want me to give it all up, so I got a year off work — my boss kept my job open, just in case I turned out to be a psycho.

Nick: Just in case. And then we lived in London together for five years, and as she said, we both had that sense of adventure and wanted to pursue it. I don't know if she really loved sailing to begin with, because we were sailing the East Coast of The UK, which has its own special beauty, but I don't think any East Coast sailor in The UK would argue it's the easiest conditions to learn on.

Learning to Sail on England's East Coast

Nick: It's challenging sailing.

Terysa: It is, yeah.

Nick: I think what the audience — and especially you, given fishing — will get is that it's a very tidal area. Certain coasts of Britain are relatively unaffected by tides, like the South Coast, whereas the East Coast is a lot of mud, and most areas dry out. Your tidal calculations have to account for the boat sitting on the mud for ten hours out of twelve, so you get about two hours in twelve to get off your berth and go sailing — and that's fine, except when high water is at 3am, and a lot of my friends roll out of the pub at 11pm and have to be on deck at 2am, which is why boats get stuck in the mud, because people come out after one too many beers. You also get a lot of shifting sandbanks and mudbanks, so your chart shows one thing one year and something different the next. So it's challenging — but she didn't bail on me.

Terysa: No, I made it through, and now I guess I'm reaping the rewards of my perseverance in those early days.

Tom Rowland: I was watching one of your videos where you talked about thirty-foot tides in that area with all the mud — is that a thirty-foot tide, or smaller?

Terysa: It can be bigger than that.

Nick: Where we were on our coast you get a seven-meter tide — that's about twenty-one feet. Where we were sailing in France you get ten-meter tides. The reason it's so big is you're up against the Atlantic Ocean, and a whole load of water has to come in and go out every twelve hours, so with the constriction of landmasses you can get ten knots of tide, which isn't abnormal. So getting your tidal calculations right, mid-flow with ten knots of current, you've got to be pretty on the ball — and we're not always on the ball. We had the boat almost going backwards twice this year because we got our calculations wrong. It's pretty savage.

Tom Rowland: In Florida we don't have tides anywhere near that strong, but the current going through the bridges, or around a point, can be extremely strong on the big spring tides. That's really amazing. It's interesting seeing your viewers, through your channel, watch you learning all of this just like anyone else — I like that about your videos, there was one that caught my eye, called we make mistakes too, about you running aground twice without causing damage. There's a lot of emotion in that — you plan this perfect day and something goes wrong, and it has a tendency to really mess up the whole day, if you let it.

Terysa: That's so true.

Nick: You let it.

Showing the Mistakes, Not Just the Highlight Reel

Tom Rowland: You guys did a great job on that video of not painting the picture that because you have 130,000 subscribers and travel everywhere, everything always works perfectly — you could edit anything out or include anything you want. But I thought it was interesting that you purposefully included some of the mistakes, some of the things breaking, some of the things that were clearly just an error. It seems like your viewers really like that too.

Terysa: That was actually a conscious decision we made three years ago, when we started the channel. We wanted to be as authentic as possible — we didn't want to portray a side of our life that was just the good stuff without showing a complete picture. We wanted to create content that's authentic, that shows everything. Obviously we edit some things out, but largely we want to show the negatives, because that kind of lifestyle isn't always as glamorous and easy as some creators make it out to be. We're not throwing shade — that's obviously their brand — but our mission statement from the beginning was to show a complete picture.

Nick: To add to that — when I bought my first boat, which cost about $5,000 and was falling apart, I went to a marina where most of the friends I made were older sailors, at the pub on a Friday night or during weekends down at the boat. A lot of what I learned came from those friendships, being taught by older, more experienced people. Community is such a big part of sailing, I'm sure it's the same in fishing.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, for sure.

Nick: Sailing and life on the water is like life on land with the color turned up — you meet better friends, richer experiences, and a lot of that comes from teaching each other how to fix an outboard or bleed a fuel system. If we cut that out of our videos we'd be cutting out the best bit — like cutting the eye out of a lamb chop, you're throwing away the best part.

Terysa: Exactly. I think the best bit can be when we make mistakes — not to be cynical, but people enjoy watching things go wrong as well as right, it makes for good entertainment. It might not be fun for us at the time, but later, putting the story together, it makes for a better story when there were challenges to overcome. So there's no advantage to cutting the negative stuff out. Actually, mistake probably isn't the best word — it's about learning, without sounding too twee.

Nick: Accelerated learning.

Terysa: It is — everything is a learning experience, and we're constantly learning. I've been sailing ten years, Nick something closer to fifteen, and we'll keep learning how to sail and handle a boat probably for the rest of our sailing lives. So we don't shy away from the times we make bad decisions, because it's just part of learning.

Tom Rowland: As you go to different places, every new port is a completely new experience — there's a way you have to navigate in, maybe a marker's missing. In the Florida Keys some markers are just PVC pipes someone put in — maybe it's there one day, gone the next. You have to learn how to get into these new places no matter how long you've been sailing or fishing. One of the things I like about your communication with your audience is that you show these things are going to happen if this is the life you choose — you can try to avoid them, but some things will happen, and it's how you deal with them. Do you let morale drop, do you stay positive, can you fix it and move on, or does it ruin your whole day or trip? A lot of people are scared of that as they think about a life like this — what happens if I run aground, is that the worst thing that could happen? Then they see it happen and it seems like people do okay with it. Obviously there are different levels of running aground — you can put a hole in your boat, or just bump the bottom and move on.

Nick: From our point of view, the adage is that if you make one moderate mistake every time you take the boat out, you're doing well. There's no point pretending you won't make mistakes — you always make small ones, a calculation, knocking something, breaking something, it always happens. Does it get us down? We've had a handful of times, even recently, where we've damaged the boat — sometimes our own fault, more often not, but as skipper it's always my fault. About five years ago Terysa and I damaged the boat really badly — we were pushed onto a pontoon with no fender, no protection, galvanized steel, and it took a gouge out of the side of the boat. If you're not damaging a boat, you're not using it. We spend a lot of time in marinas, sometimes pretty expensive ones where we feel out of place, but you can tell how good a sailor is by how shiny the anchor isn't. You see these super-expensive boats with amazing anchors that have never been used, an anchor chain still pristine, and you think, well, you've just bought something to show off to your friends. But you'll see a boat come screaming in, sails well-stepped and old, chips out of the hull, some bloke with a beard who knows what he's doing, and you think, you are getting such enjoyment out of that boat. Honestly, those are the people I want to have a drink with in the bar afterwards, because that's where you learn.

Terysa: And to pick up on that — we're taking delivery of a catamaran next year, a big step up from what we've been sailing the last eight years or so. We've lived aboard for five of those years. We're definitely going to make a huge number of errors, particularly at the beginning — the learning curve is going to be really steep for both of us. We'll be transparent about that, but we have to be realistic — it's going to happen, we're going to make big mistakes handling and sailing the new boat. We've sailed catamarans before but never lived on one, so there's going to be a steep learning curve, and we're looking forward to it.

Tom Rowland: I wanted to talk about that new boat — it's a big part of your story. Where are you taking delivery of it?

Nick: Initially Vietnam. The company we're partnering with — I'll talk more about that partnership later, because we haven't just bought a boat — is Seawind Catamarans, an Australian company that builds in Vietnam. So initially we'll sail around Vietnamese and Asian waters, Thailand, Malaysia, and at some point we may ship the boat to Europe, because there are things we want to do there — an Atlantic crossing among them — but it's not set in stone.

Terysa: It's not set in stone. We may have to think about the European boat shows and whether our boat will be involved in those — that's one consideration. We're still not one hundred percent sure what the sailing plan is, but we'll definitely take delivery in Vietnam and do a shakedown cruise in those waters.

Tom Rowland: That's what I was going to ask — the shakedown. Even a new seventeen-foot bonefish skiff needs a shakedown, making sure everything is the way you want it or making improvements, getting used to the new boat. How long a period do you expect before you really get your bearings? This is a boat you're living on, so it's like moving into a new home and learning to sail a different craft at the same time.

Nick: I think within a year we'll have the boat exactly where we want it, which is probably a good timeframe to be comfortable doing major passages. That doesn't mean we won't sort most of the initial problems within the first month or two. If there are issues during the build, the company is very diligent — that's why we worked with them, they're engineers who build boats, not people who hand you a drawing and build something that just looks like the drawing. I have a lot of confidence in the design. For the first month we'd look for major issues — a mainsail not cut correctly, a loose connection in the electronics — though I have no doubt about our sailmakers. After that we'd look for smaller problems, like a cockpit drain that doesn't drain properly because of an elbow in the run that worked fine on a CAD design but not in real terms. You can design a boat on a computer, use float tanks, do everything, but until you actually live on it you can't know what the problems are. Then there'll be minor issues, like if we go over a hump and the kettle falls off the counter — that's where tweaking a boat comes in, and with any watercraft you have to tweak it. For people who don't sail or fish, the analogy is buying a car — there may be teething problems, but a Ford has a production run of tens of thousands of units with design teams of thousands of people, so the problems tend to be smaller. Boats have far smaller production runs and are inherently more complicated than cars.

Tom Rowland: And custom — if you sail a certain way, or in fishing, you reach for what would normally be there on your old boat and it's not there, and you think, didn't think about that when building this one — now I need the trim tabs right here where I've always had them, I'm going to have to relearn how to drive the boat with them somewhere else. You think you can plan for all of it, but there's always a few things you end up moving or changing because of the new boat.

Nick: Absolutely. And we look forward to it.

Making the Jump: Quitting Dentistry and Paramedicine

Tom Rowland: I want to get back to the new boat, but one thing we talk about often on this podcast, because of my fishing background, is that a lot of people want to do something different with their life — be a fishing guide, a hunting guide, get into the outdoor industry somehow. When I watch your videos, even though you show some of the mistakes, you're clearly documenting a wonderful life you've created, and it makes other people want to do the same thing. It can seem easy, like you just drop out and do this, but I know it's not. Back in 2015 you were thinking about quitting your job as a dentist, and Terysa about not being a paramedic anymore. I want to talk about how you approached that point in your life, because there are a ton of people out there unhappy with what they're doing, who want to live on a boat, take an RV across the country, become a fishing or hunting guide, or do something different. How did you decide, okay, there's going to be a date, I'm going to quit my job, this is what we're doing?

Nick: Sure. It's probably the question we get asked most, across all spectrums, and you're right that it tends to be people who don't own boats who want a lifestyle change. The answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer is you have to break it into manageable bits — you don't go to a boat show and buy a fifty-foot catamaran that costs a million dollars. If you're lucky enough to have that kind of money and sail off into the sunset, you'll terrify yourself, put yourself in danger, and probably be miserable. There are people who've done that.

Terysa: Absolutely, we've met many of them.

Nick: But statistically, if you take things slowly, you have a greater chance of succeeding. I'll break the story into a few bits — the first is the first boat I bought. I'd never sailed before in my life, and I thought, I'll buy a boat with as little money as possible, so if I sink it, damage it, or don't get on with it, I can sell it without bankrupting myself. Bear in mind that a broker will charge you ten percent to buy and sell a boat — it's not like a house where the margins are smaller. Sell a million-dollar boat and you've lost $100,000 just in brokerage fees. So I bought a boat for about $5,000 — scraped all the pennies together. It was what we call in England a shed — an absolute horrible thing, but it worked, it basically worked as a boat. I went to the marina manager and said, look, I need a berth, and she said, well, I'm not sure I can give you that. I said, I've never been on a boat before, so it's going to have to be conditional that you let me have the berth, because I can't move it anywhere. She said, alright, fool. So I read books, learned the craft, learned things like engine maintenance because the oil leaked and the fuel lines were shot, so I learned to bleed air out of a fuel line. I learned to trim sails, learned basic varnishing because the varnish inside was tarnished — my mother helped me reupholster the two little settees. I learned basic navigation, started taking the actual RYA courses, The UK equivalent of ASA courses, so I understood what I was meant to be doing. I made mistakes on a boat that didn't cost much, and my parents probably thought it was just one of my fads, that I'd get bored and sell it — but I never did. So when it came time to buy a bigger boat, I'd already cut my teeth on something smaller and easier to use. You can do a lot less damage in a twenty-five-foot boat than a fifty-foot one — it's not just about damaging yourself or your boat, it's the damage you can do to other boats. You see unqualified people causing all sorts of chaos in big boats. I bought another boat after that, and that's when I met Terysa. I said to her — let's say ninety percent seriously — when she moved to The UK to be with me, that in five years we'd be gone. What we advise people is that normally there are obstacles to getting over the line, to dropping the lines and sailing free. Health, family, and finances are obstacles you can't control — if you don't have the health, if family needs you, if you don't have the money, that's limiting. But after that, the biggest obstacle you'll find is you. Even with seven or eight years of experience by that point, I'd be awake at night thinking, what are we doing, are we really going to do this, are we leaving in three or four years? We got over the line when we invested the money we had into the boat that was going to do the trip — we put the deposit down, took out a loan. At that point I thought, well, we've sunk everything into this boat, I can't back out now.

Terysa: And I'd add — if you're part of a couple looking for a similar lifestyle change, you both have to be equally committed. If you're doing it alone you only have yourself to worry about, but as a couple you both have to be all in. We've met a lot of couples where it was one person's dream and the other was less enthusiastic, sometimes not enthusiastic at all, and I don't know of any of those couples that lasted — they invariably end up selling the boat and moving back to land. It's just not tenable to have one side not invested in the change — it's never going to work. You both have to somehow get to the point where you're equally embracing it. Luckily for us, I was very enthusiastic — I wasn't a particularly keen sailor, but I got along with it okay. Sailing was really Nick's passion from the beginning, and I saw it as a conduit to adventure, so I was on board from that perspective. Now that we live on the boat, things have changed significantly, but it's very important that you both want to take the step together.

Nick: We get asked this a lot by men — how do I get my wife into this? My answer is, if your wife hates it, she'll always hate it. But if she's ambivalent, try to charter a boat that gives her the holiday she wants — and I do mean holiday. I've got countless friends at the yacht club on a Friday night with big beards and big beer bellies, telling yarns about how gnarly the sailing was, how big the waves were, how they almost died. But the flip side is, if you're going to invest a sizable amount in a boat, and you're already losing ten percent to the broker, spend the money on a really nice boat, maybe a catamaran, which is more stable, somewhere beautiful — the BVIs are amazing sailing, so is The Bahamas — and go on a nice gentle cruise where the weather's good, the food's good, the swimming's amazing, where you show the plus points of the lifestyle. My best friend from university told me, when I got with Terysa, if the first week you show her is a good week, she'll love it — if it's a bad week, she'll hate it, and that will never change. You've got to make a good first impression.

Terysa: Unfortunately it didn't work like that for us.

Nick: That was the plan, to give her a good first week, but it didn't happen. Nonetheless, it's challenging, and it depends what age you leave at, whether you've got kids going to college, young kids you want to bring, elderly parents, grandchildren — it all comes into the mix. That's part of why we're keen to get back to Australia — the concession we made is that if we sail off into the sunset, we both still have sets of parents, and we can't just leave them, so we need the money to get back every year to see both.

Tom Rowland: That's good advice, because it's so similar to fishing. If you have a partner where one person likes to fish and the other doesn't, so much depends on that first trip — even with a kid. If the first thing you do is go swordfishing way out where you get one bite a day and somebody gets seasick, it's a terrible trip and they'll never like it. But if you stay close to shore where there's plenty of action, everybody has a good time, the boat's full of snacks, it's a special occasion, the kid thinks fishing is amazing — and then they want to do more, it's a stair-step process instead of throwing them straight into the hardcore version. I'd imagine sailing is the same — a week of being seasick, cold, and raining sounds terrible even to someone who likes sailing, versus island-hopping the BVIs eating great seafood and having a drink at sunset.

Nick: It is, and it's easy sailing too — sailing can be challenging with wind, tide, and weather, but for us the BVIs from November through June are pretty stable and settled. We meet lots of tourists, there are loads of charter companies, people come out for a week, some of them don't even sail. If you want an even smaller step, you can charter with a skipper on board, so you're not responsible for the navigation — it costs more, but a good skipper will let you help and teach you things, so it becomes part of a learning experience. I once decided to get the equivalent of a Yacht Master qualification and thought, I can do this in The UK in November, which would be miserable, or go somewhere else — so I went to The Caribbean, and it ended up being essentially a pretty decent holiday. It was a learning holiday, but the experience was so positive I didn't see it as work — I saw it as being on a boat and getting a qualification. So you can make things easier for yourself in how you go about convincing a partner.

Tom Rowland: Or maybe you don't even have to convince them — what if you just introduce them and they're into it too, so it's not one side of the relationship strong-arming the other, it's an equal embrace of the adventure. Sounds like Terysa wasn't into sailing so much as adventure, and this was the conduit. There's a similar dynamic with somebody wanting to be a fishing guide — dropping out of a big city, moving to a small coastal town, and the non-fishing-guide partner needs to be as into it as the one who's going, otherwise it doesn't work. I've been lucky with my wife — she's always been supportive, though it's not always easy. Quitting your job as a dentist — what age were you, Nick, when you had your last day?

Nick: Forty-two.

Tom Rowland: So you were really just hitting your stride in dentistry.

Nick: I hadn't even started the stride yet, I was ramping up to it. So there were a few other things — as I said, Terysa moved to The UK and I set out the five-year plan. A few years down the line, I was a runner, used to run everywhere, and I ruptured a disc in my back. I was lying in bed one morning, coughed or sneezed, and thought, that really hurts, more than it should for a sneeze.

Terysa: Sneezes are normally good.

Nick: I'm getting to that age. But no, I'd always had a slightly weak back. That was Saturday morning, and by Monday morning I couldn't feel my lower right leg — gone beyond pins and needles. The doctor said, you've ruptured a disc, we need to operate, you need a discectomy. I said, look, I own my own business — if I come in Thursday, can I go back to work Monday? He said, you can go back to work three months on Monday. I said, that's not happening, I'll lose my business. So it was basically three months in bed, and I said, I'm not doing this. I asked myself, why, what's behind this refusal? He'd said two things — one, you're getting old, about to hit forty, and as you age your spine dehydrates; and two, the thing that's actually killing you is dentistry, hunched over people all day, in people's mouths, for twelve years — it's your job causing the injury. That was a wake-up call. I never had the surgery — I spent a lot of time in the gym, a lot of time on non-addictive painkillers, ibuprofen and paracetamol, for about a year. Eventually it started to get better, and then at a follow-up scan he said, well, it's getting worse. That, to me, was one of those forks in the road everyone gets presented with in life. At that point I thought, we need to speed up the process of getting out — once I could see I'd get better if I looked after myself, everything changed. We'd already committed in our minds to leaving, but now it became, two years and we're gone. We started saving everything — not going out for that dinner, it goes in the kitty, not buying that pair of jeans, into the kitty, the pushbike we hadn't used in a year went on eBay. The snowball got to the point where we knew it wasn't going to stop, that we were going to leave. One of my best friends — he's going to be my best man — told Terysa a year ago that after we'd been gone four years, he never thought we'd actually do it, he always figured something would get in the way. There were a lot of obstacles, and you can look at the signs and take them, or go, no, I won't do that.

Tom Rowland: That's the place so many people get to — that place your friend thought you'd get to. Well-meaning, saying, I just can't believe you did it. There were a lot of things that could have stopped you, and it's that one point, the jump. That's what I refer to as the jump — you burn the boats, you're not going back. That's what they used to say about old battles, that they'd burn the boats so there'd be no retreat, no surrender — this is what you're doing, you've committed. In all these stories I hear, that's really the one ingredient that stays the same — a deep commitment that we're doing it. Putting the deposit down on the boat, quitting your job — those are major life-altering decisions.

Nick: They're terrifying, absolutely terrifying, none of it's easy. It's pretty rewarding though. We've lived around marinas all over the world — The UK, France, Spain, six months in South Carolina — and one thing that's common in all of them is you'll meet people who've bought a boat and tell you they're going to do it, and it becomes obvious who will and who won't. There's the guy who says, in a few years I just need to get the solar sorted, get this done, that done, a bit of work on the paint, then I'll probably go do it — and you can tell he's never going to do it. And then there's the couple who say, we're leaving in twenty-four months, everything's being sold, we're taking the kids out of school, we've made plans to keep our jobs open.

Terysa: It comes down to commitment at the end of the day — there's nothing really stopping anyone from doing this. Obviously Nick highlighted a few real obstacles — health, and so on — but if you're committed, you'll find a way, and you'll work through the moments where you're second-guessing yourself. As I said, both sides of the couple being committed is very important.

Turning a Hobby Into a Business

Tom Rowland: Congratulations — it's amazing, and I love seeing people actually do it and create a life like yours. When you sailed off into the sunset, what was the plan for being sustainable? Now it's YouTube and Patreon, but that wasn't always the case. Did you have a plan for making money, or enough saved up, plus any retirement from dentistry or paramedic work, to go for a while? Or did it always have to be, sooner or later we're going to have to figure out how to make money to keep this going?

Nick: The big plan was to have enough money in a kitty for a year, maybe eighteen months.

Terysa: We weren't even sure how much it would cost.

Nick: We had no idea — there was no information at the time about what it actually costs. We rented out our house, paid off the mortgage, and had a little monthly income, and what we thought would last about a year, a year and a half. We set off with that in mind. Honestly, one of the best bits of advice I ever got, from an old sailor in a bar where we kept the boat, was never tell anyone you're sailing around the world, because it sets the bar really high — come back after five years having done three-quarters of it, and someone will say, well, you didn't quite sail around the world.

Terysa: Especially in England.

Nick: He said, just tell people you're going sailing. Such good advice, and the fact I still remember it after about six or eight pints that night says something. So we set off thinking we'd go for a year and see how it went. We always set ourselves goals — we left in May 2015, our departure date from The UK, and booked an Atlantic crossing with a rally for November 2015, so we knew we had six months to get from England down through Spain, the Portuguese coast, Morocco, the Canaries, and across the Atlantic. We had something we had to do.

Terysa: From our sailing plans perspective we had a two-year plan — we knew we wanted to get to The Caribbean, spend at least one or two seasons there, and then wait and see how it went. But the YouTube channel didn't start as a money-making exercise at all — I don't think we even realized we could make money from YouTube, we didn't monetize it for a year. We set a couple of goals — we wouldn't monetize until 10,000 subscribers because we wanted to focus on content over money, and we wouldn't start Patreon until 20,000, though in the end we didn't start it until 40,000, again to focus on quality content first. The income side evolved quite slowly — it took about two years before we had what I'd consider an actual income. Before that we'd get a little pocket money, and I do mean a little.

Nick: It wouldn't cover the tab at a tiki bar in The Bahamas — not that we drink excessively, but it was pennies. Terysa's right — one of my friends in the same UK pub told us we'd get bored sailing around the world, and we didn't. The first year everything was so new, fun, exciting, stressful — everything was a first. I think we were still a little shocked we'd actually managed to leave. We weren't the couple who'd say, oh, it was easy — we actually did it. I remember the morning we set off from our home port never to return, it was just a strange blur. Everyone came to wave us off, and then we were gone — and it's strange, you think you're going to be on deck screaming, I'm free, like Maria in The Sound of Music, twirling on the foredeck, but it's more like, suddenly going, blimey, we did it.

Tom Rowland: Or maybe it's like, oh shit, we did it — can't believe we actually did it.

Terysa: That's right, it was definitely a blur the first year or so. I had a blog, my creative outlet, though I don't think anyone read it — it just stayed in my little bubble. It was strange, because after we crossed the Atlantic, which was very stressful to build up to since we'd never done anything like it, we had this huge sigh of relief once we reached the Caribbean. But we didn't realize how much pressure we'd put on ourselves to be at a certain place by a certain date over the first six months, because we'd booked that rally, as Nick said — and in hindsight that was a mistake. We should have let things unfold more organically, depending on how we felt. Even once we got to the Caribbean, we had to be in Antigua to meet family flying in, then decided we had to go up to The US for hurricane season — huge distances to cover for what were really arbitrary reasons. Once we worked out we needed to slow down, it was a major reassessment of our priorities. We also realized something else was missing — not just a creative outlet, but a project to work on, another focus in our lives beyond sailing and living on a boat, something to intellectually and creatively stimulate us. That's ultimately why we started the YouTube channel — a lot of things fell into place at that time. Three years later, it was a hobby then, and it's a business now.

Tom Rowland: It's going very well, I really like it. Doing this podcast, I talk to a lot of interesting people with YouTube channels — some I identify with, some maybe not as much, some are just really super cool. Watching your videos, there's this feeling — my wife doesn't want to sail around the world, but she might want to get in an RV and see every national park in The United States — this romantic sense of just doing it, dropping out and living how you want. I got to see places you've been — that island you visited recently is amazing, I didn't even know it existed. And another place I do know, Hopetown on Elbow Cay, one of my favorite places in the entire world — I'm pretty sure in one of your videos you walked right by a house we stayed in. It's a life of finding these cool little places where sometimes a hundred people live, living completely differently from the rest of the world, and you're just dropping in for a week, a couple of days, or a month if you like it. That is the allure of the channel — I can see why you're gaining subscribers, why people enjoy your videos — the music, everything you choose, it just feels free, like you are.

Nick: Thank you.

Tom Rowland: I don't mean to compliment you out of nowhere, it's just how your channel feels — and I think that's one of the reasons you're drawing people who aren't necessarily interested in sailing so much as this lifestyle you've created, one of freedom, contrary to the rest of the world right now. So congratulations.

Nick: I just love hearing that.

Terysa: Thank you.

Designing a New Catamaran with Seawind

Tom Rowland: One more thing — I want to get into this new boat and how you're acquiring it. Aaron told me a little bit about it, but I want to hear it from you so I don't get the arrangement wrong. Tell me about the new boat and how this is happening.

Nick: It started in Charleston, actually — we were there in 2018 with a decision to make: continue through to Cuba and the Panama Canal into the Pacific, or go home. One factor was realizing that the boat we had, while it was our dream boat when we bought it, no longer matched who we'd become — the boat hadn't changed, but our needs had. So we made the difficult decision to sail back across the Atlantic and see what we could with the boat we had. Our boat had a lifting keel, which let us take it through the middle of France — two years ago we took the mast off and went through the French canal system. At that point we knew we were going to sell the boat and started looking for a new one. We knew we wanted a catamaran — the monohull-versus-catamaran argument goes on forever. The best advice we got, knowing the kind of cruising we do — staying in places long enough to experience the culture, four or five months at a time rather than turning up for a day — was that as a liveaboard cruiser you spend ninety percent of your time at anchor and ten percent sailing. That rang true for us, so we wanted a stable platform, and started researching what our next boat would be. We went to boat shows, and it was almost a throwaway comment between us — should we video what we're doing, maybe people would be interested?

Tom Rowland: Did you already have the YouTube channel by then?

Terysa: Yes — we'd focused until then on our sailing vlogs, and we thought we'd do this research privately. We didn't realize we'd end up bringing our audience along with us. We were doing what everyone does when boat shopping — researching online, watching YouTube boat tours and walkthroughs thinking, maybe we like that one, maybe we want this one. And we realized there was a niche we could fill, looking more comprehensively at the catamaran market and which blue-water cruising cats were best suited to a couple doing what we were doing. So we realized we should fill that niche ourselves, which is ultimately what led to us filming reviews as a structured series on our channel.

Nick: And the other thing, something you mentioned earlier — we don't just show the glossy lifestyle where nothing goes wrong. We took that same approach into the catamaran reviews — we ended up reviewing nineteen catamarans, and if something wasn't right, we'd say so.

Nick: And it caused an uproar.

Terysa: We're very straightforward, we don't mince words, it's just part of our nature. A lot of the boat tours on YouTube were done by brokers trying to sell the boats, and that wasn't our approach — we wanted to be honest, but made clear from the beginning it was just our opinion. We weren't saying, this is wrong, we were saying, this is how we feel about it, it's not our priority to have this feature or that one, so we're approaching it from a different perspective.

Nick: And I think people at that time knew we'd sailed something like fifteen to twenty thousand miles, so we had real sea miles and experience behind us. If I walked onto a boat, or Terysa went to the helm, and there was a sharp corner where the designer hadn't considered someone being thrown across the cabin, or that Terysa is five foot two—

Terysa: Five foot two, definitely.

Nick: —and the helm seat was designed for a six-foot man so she couldn't see properly, that needed to be pointed out — how does your wife get the experience she needs if she's constantly uncomfortable? So we took that feedback to the catamaran manufacturers and said, make a helm seat that can raise, understand it's not just a male thing, people come in different sizes and abilities, you can't keep churning out the same cookie-cutter boats. It gained so much traction because everyone was like, actually, you're right — and obviously the dealers got their noses put out. We had some pretty nasty comments. One boat manufacturer, who'll remain nameless, told us off the record that they believed we'd been sent by a rival company to cause problems — that this was an act of industrial espionage.

Terysa: He gave us way too much credit.

Nick: Do we seem that organized? Around the same time we started running polls, and thought, we need to actually score these things objectively, to get at value for money — the way a car magazine scores a Chrysler for performance or handling. No one was doing that for boats. So we put a score together, and then everyone said our score wasn't worth anything, why give this a six out of ten and that an eight? So we developed an app where people could put in their own scores, and it went to another level — we'd publish our review with our scores, and then ask viewers, whether you own the boat, have viewed it, or just have an opinion, put your scores in out of ten. There were five categories, chosen by our viewers, not us — we asked what five categories mattered most to them in a boat. So our viewers chose the categories and scored the boats themselves; it wasn't our system or our score at all. We ended up with about 5,000 people voting for the best catamaran, and to the best of my knowledge it's still the biggest collective scoring of boats anywhere on the market. About a year into doing these reviews—

Terysa: Yeah, about that.

Nick: —two or three manufacturers reached out and said they'd like to talk to us about getting us into one of their boats. Some offers were pretty attractive, and we declined some, because we wanted to keep the ability to be objective, to be able to say, this isn't right — we didn't want to be muzzled. Then the manufacturer Seawind, who we ended up working with, told us they were designing a boat literally from the ground up, and since we clearly knew what we were talking about — we'd identified all these features we liked, we'd been sailing five years — they asked us to tell them what we wanted and help design the boat with them. That, to me, was a dream come true — I was so into boat design that a manufacturer giving us that level of confidence meant a lot.

Terysa: It's important to say too that the two existing Seawind catamarans we'd looked at, we absolutely loved — we pursued this because we wanted to be in a Seawind ourselves, but one was too small for our needs and the other too big. So when they said they were designing something in the middle and wanted us to collaborate, it really was, as Nick said, our dreams coming true.

Terysa: And that's where we—

Nick: —are now. We've been working on this boat for about twelve months, and we took them fifty-seven or fifty-eight design features we wanted to see — it's huge. We haven't had anything to do with designing the speed, the performance, the hulls — that's a naval architect's job, they wouldn't want hulls designed by us. There's a high-end design team handling the hydrodynamics. But the things we insisted on ourselves are things like decent renewable energy — we want to be at anchor without relying on a generator that pollutes and creates noise. We know we still need diesel, because electric propulsion technology isn't where it needs to be yet.

Terysa: Not for our purposes.

Nick: Getting in and out of a marina is one thing, and electric motors work brilliantly for that — our friends at Sailing Uma do it — but if you want a thousand-mile range because you need to outrun a storm and you're stuck in a wind hole, you need diesel. So we wanted renewables, and worked hard with them on decent battery systems to store the charge. That was one part — the other was things like a properly functional galley, since we're pretty into cooking and eating; a waste chute for organic matter that goes straight to the sea when you're offshore; and a separate chute to a dedicated recycling bin, since you can't put plastic in the sea offshore, so you need to keep it separate. Small things, but important to us.

Terysa: There were about fifty or so.

Nick: Fifty-eight points we came to.

Terysa: And some of them were really minor — we said we needed cup holders at the helm, so when you're on watch you can have your coffee or cold drink sitting there without it sliding around when you're going over waves. We wanted three-sixty visibility from the helm but still wanted it enclosed. We wanted places to store dive gear, fishing rods, paddleboards, a barbecue — a lot of little things we'd picked up from all the catamarans we'd reviewed. Things like a water-collection facility around the Bimini, so when it rains you have a built-in rain-catchment system — sounds obvious, but most sailors have to rig something up themselves because the boat doesn't support it. So when you get a tropical downpour, which you always do, you can at least fill up your tanks.

Tom Rowland: A lot of those little things come from living on a boat in all conditions, in austere environments with no fresh water available — if you sleep through a rainstorm and haven't set your system up right, you miss out on catching water, and that's something that could easily be overlooked by someone who—

Terysa: It isn't thought of.

Tom Rowland: —goes to the marina every day and tops off with a garden hose. All of that is really interesting, I see the value. One of my sponsors is Yellowfin Boats, and it's always the same — they make a wonderful boat that I'm very proud of, but they always want to know how it's performing in the real world, out fishing thirty days in a row.

Tom Rowland: I don't think you can ever not have that — you need input from somebody actually using the boat in a different way. So is this a sponsorship, or how would you describe the relationship?

Nick: It's a partnership, because it's ongoing — the boat splashes in about twelve months, and once the design features are built in, they're already integrated for future buyers. Some of them are so obvious you wonder why nobody's done it before — catamarans have two hulls, and if you've ever tried getting a dinghy onto the back of one, you end up chipping the fiberglass because the V of the dinghy hits it. So we told them, just put a rubber strip around the back so you don't have that weak point, and they agreed — now it's being integrated across their whole line, something that's never existed on another boat. We went back to them about five months ago, before the boat was announced publicly, and asked how many of the fifty-seven or fifty-eight features they'd managed to include — and they said all but one. When we take delivery we'll keep testing it, it'll need tweaking, and the people who get the boat after us will benefit — we're hull number two, we were offered hull number one, but I wanted to see a physical version first, in case the digital visualization didn't match reality, so we could say, that cup holder needs to be a bit wider, that plug point needs to be a bit higher. Later versions of this boat are going to be that much more honed, and we're pretty proud of what we've done.

Nick: We're proud of the boat, and the Ruby Rose edition is pretty special. I'm pretty proud of what we've managed to achieve, considering that four years ago we were just bobbing around The Bahamas—

Nick: —drinking rum punch.

What's Next

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. As you're planning this boat out, are you continuing to hone in on things, maybe waking up in the middle of the night thinking, what if we did this? I've done the same thing building my own boats — once I get this boat, these are the things I'm going to do with it. Do you have plans for what you want to do with this boat — is it going to allow you to do things you couldn't do before?

Terysa: Absolutely — that's the whole reason we started looking for an alternative boat, because the one we had, though perfect for a lot of conditions, wasn't perfect for what we ultimately wanted, which was to go through the Panama Canal and cross the Pacific. As Nick said, we're careful about making grandiose statements like, we're going to circumnavigate — but we know we love ocean crossings, cruising to remote areas, and living off the anchor, so we want a boat that's actually built for that purpose, rather than one we tried to turn into something it wasn't. The catamaran we're getting next year, we think, will suit that purpose perfectly — a great ocean-crossing vessel, and fantastic at anchor, because she's spacious and comfortable, and because we'll be able to rely purely on renewables for energy. We'll have conveniences we couldn't fit on our smaller monohulls — a powerful water maker. Our old one made, what—

Nick: Three gallons an hour.

Terysa: And on the new one?

Nick: Sixty, I think.

Terysa: So we'll be able to fill our tanks super fast, and we'll have a washing machine and air conditioning, which is going to be a massive luxury — that was an insistence on my part.

Tom Rowland: Can you run the air conditioning on renewables?

Nick: We think so — the boat's designed to carry 2,000 watts of solar, basically the whole top of it is solar panels. People laugh about the washing machine, and even I wonder, at what point do you need one—

Terysa: —a bucket's fine.

Nick: But for the last five years our washing machine was essentially a fancy bucket — a big bucket with a motor in it, cost about $40, Chinese made, the motor died after a year, but we kept using the bucket. Doing laundry took half a day, literally three hours.

Nick: Time that would be better spent—

Terysa: —doing other things. And then it would take us days to replenish the water we'd used. We've done it the hard way already, and we wanted a boat that would let us do things a lot more easily and conveniently. Ultimately we'd love to sail back to Europe and the Mediterranean, since we didn't get to explore as much of it as we'd have liked, and go back to The Caribbean, but our main goal is to make the Pacific our cruising ground — so we have to get the boat there. Unfortunately it's being built in Vietnam, which sounds close to the Pacific on a map, but if you know the trade winds, you can't get much further from it than Vietnam. So we have to get the boat all the way around the world first. It's very exciting.

Tom Rowland: That's a big undertaking. And in this time between boats — you sold the boat you'd been on for a long time, the one you built your YouTube channel on. I hope it went to a good home — is there a story to where that boat is going, is another couple taking it on?

Terysa: We hoped the new owners would continue to take her sailing and maybe do something similar to what we did on her, and that is the ambition of the new owners. Ruby Rose is back on the South Coast of England now, and with winter coming she'll sit for a few months, but their plan is to take the boat down to Southern Europe and into the Med and live aboard, so I'm really hoping that's what happens.

Nick: I think they're going to do exactly that — they're pretty cool, and he's signing up for a rally to get down to Portugal from The UK. It's like what I said earlier — you can tell when people are actually going to do it. These two are going to do it, you can tell from the way they talk, they've got timelines, a plan in place.

Nick: We told them we'll see them in Portugal, we'll buy them a beer.

Tom Rowland: It's not unlike running your first marathon — you were a runner before all this. One of the big steps to running a marathon is signing up for the race, that's the jump — I'm going to find a race, sign up, pay the money, get the time off work, start training. It all starts with signing up. When you sign up for a rally or a crossing, suddenly there's a timeline, a date. That's a big part of anything, really.

Nick: It's commitment. Whether you're committing to a tackle in a rugby game that takes a split second, or committing to a lifestyle change, which is hard, and gives you a lot of time to question your decision. I'd lie in bed even now at two in the morning wondering, are we doing the right thing? But before we left, the sleepless nights I had questioning the commitment we'd made weren't just about my own commitment—

Tom Rowland: —it's the people around you, often well-meaning, like your best friends or family, saying, are you sure you want to stop being a dentist?

Terysa: We're very lucky — our families were bewildered and confused, I think, but never really verbalized the more negative feelings, they were fairly supportive faces, even if they had a few conversations between themselves wondering what we were doing.

Nick: I talked to my mother not that long ago, within the last couple of months, and she asked how the t-shirt sales were going. I said, what? She said, you sell t-shirts. I said, no, we do a YouTube channel, and we happen to sell t-shirts as well.

Terysa: There's sometimes a disconnect between what people think you're doing and what you're actually doing, and that's actually one of the reasons the YouTube channel excited us — at least this way we can explain and show people what we're doing, because I think a lot of people struggle to visualize our lifestyle since it's so outside the norm.

Tom Rowland: It's super cool, and again, congratulations on doing it. Thanks so much for sitting down and telling me the story — I find it fascinating, and I know the audience I've built does too. There are so many amazing stories from people in all different walks of life, whether sailing, fishing, mountain climbing, being a hunting guide, or one of my favorite guests, a professional backpacker who built her lifestyle through YouTube and Patreon in a very similar way — quit her job, lives life on her own terms. Those are some of our most popular episodes, so I'm sure this will be too. I wish you all the best — if you make it to the Florida Keys in your new boat, give me a call, we'll—

Terysa: —do it.

Nick: We'll definitely see you there. Please teach us how to fish, we really do need to learn at some point.

Tom Rowland: We can definitely teach you how to fish. Alright, well, thanks so much. Tell everybody how they can follow you, support you, and see what you're doing.

Terysa: Just pop into your favorite search engine, search Sailing Ruby Rose, and our YouTube channel will come up. We've got a lot of videos on different things — our catamaran review series that a lot of people are interested in, our sailing vlogs which are more lifestyle-based, and a lot of technical videos teaching people how to do things on boats. We're also on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and if you love what we do, we're on Patreon too, where people can become a patron and get access to perks and exclusive content. We're all over the place, but easy to find.

Tom Rowland: They can find you on Patreon as Sailing Ruby Rose too?

Terysa: Yep, Sailing Ruby Rose.

Nick: But dip into the YouTube channel first, to see if you like what we're doing — we're not trying to push people into Patreon.

Tom Rowland: Alright, I think they're going to like it — go check it out. You guys are just an inspiring couple and fun to watch, so good luck in the next twelve months, and when you get that new boat, have a good time. I know you will.

Terysa: Thank you.

Tom Rowland: That was Sailing Ruby Rose, Nick and Terysa — they are awesome people, and I really enjoyed their story. You should go check out their YouTube channel, and I think you're going to like it too, whether you're into sailing or you just want a lifestyle of being free — they have great videos. As I had anticipated, choosing to live an alternative lifestyle is certainly not impossible. Anybody can do it. But there are some places where you've got to make that jump, and that choice isn't always easy. They managed to do it. You can do it too.