Showing posts with label sailing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sailing. Show all posts

Saturday, August 31, 2019

The sailing lifestyle in Kansas (plus, my favorite YouTube sailing channels)



Over the last six months, I've become somewhat addicted to YouTube sailing videos. There are lots of channels created by people who gave up the rat race, bought a boat, and started the "cruising life" full time. I'm not going to abandon my own life for the Bahamas anytime soon, but I've noticed some things about the videos I admire most -- how the people live their lives -- that I can probably duplicate in Kansas.

They do a lot of yoga. There's not a lot of room on a small boat for a workout program. Lots of the video people do yoga pretty regularly. As I get older, I increasingly realize a stretching routine saves me pain, increases flexibility, and generally gets me through the day with a better attitude. No reason I can't do this on dry land.

They read a lot. If you're on a long passage, there isn't a lot to do -- most people don't have wifi in the middle of the ocean, only connecting when they get near land in a marina or while at anchor. So. Lots of shots of people reading instead of staring at screens. I've become a little too screen-dependent lately. I need some book time to feel human.

They spend a lot of time outside. Duh.

They tend to be active explorers of whatever environment they're in, on land or under water. As a freelancer, it's easy for me to get stuck at home, both working and living. It's time to get out more.

Five of my favorite sailing channels:

Sailing Soulianis: A young Midwestern couple buys a boat, pilots it from the Great Lakes down the river to the Gulf, and begins -- after much work -- cruising.

Sailing Uma: Another young couple, two architects -- one from Canada, the other from Haiti. They spent a couple of years cruising the Bahamas and environs. Now they're about to make the North Atlantic passage to Europe.

Sailing La Vagabonde: Possibly the most famous channel -- they have 1 million subscribers. I didn't get into this for awhile, because it looked like another of the million or so sailing channels that exist to show off young women in bikinis, which I don't find interesting. But then the Australian couple at the center of this channel had a baby and kept cruising. And that made them much more interesting.

The Adventures of Tarka: This one is about to end, because the young man at the center of things has a family to return to. Still. Interesting because he started out as a solo sailor in a relatively small boat. It's charming and I'll miss it.

Sailing Zatara: I have a love-hate relationship with this channel, but it was the first one I started watching with my son. A family of six abandoned their life to cruise around the world, first in a monohull and then a catamaran. There are occasional whiffs of ugly Americanism that sometimes spill over into full-blown MAGAism, so the bloom is off the rose for me, but it's the series that pulled me in.