Living on a Self-Sufficient Sailboat for 10 Years + FULL TOUR

What we really enjoy about sailing is being able to take our house and all its amenities and go to an extremely desolate place where we can have the entire beach to ourselves and live off the grid, so we have the setup that once we have provisioned and With

full

fuel, we can be off the grid for three to six months. You know, we generate our own energy with solar and wind energy. We produce our own water with a desalination plant we have on board and have enough food storage to sustain us for a long time. time and just so you know that we can have a very low impact on the environment, we can move the boat with the power of the wind and the weather and it is an incredibly sustainable and fulfilling way to travel and live for the entire ten year journey.

We have sailed at Dulles for 83,000 miles, which is equivalent to circling the Earth at the equator just over three times. We have visited six of the seven continents and sailed in all of the world's major oceans. My name is Karen Chapman and I was born. and I grew up in Sweden my name is Brian Chapman and I grew up in Flagstaff Arizona this is a little Sierra Abbott Troutman she's six months old and she's a little sea baby she loves the ocean and she loves

sailboat

s uh Sierra yeah I'm originally I'm a software engineer , but now I'm a

full

-time sailor and YouTube video creator.

I didn't know anything about sailing, but I read a lot of books, I read a lot of blogs, and I came up with a four-year plan basically at the end of that period. plan I Sold everything I had Sold my house Bought a

sailboat

called Ellis and embarked on what was supposed to be an 18-month sailing trip to New Zealand I was studying Landscape Architecture in Australia and went backpacking in New Zealand, where I met Brian and he asked me if I wanted to go sailing for the weekend and that was nine

years

ago. Wow, yeah, I never left.

I had never sailed before and it completely changed my life. I fell in love immediately. and of course I fell in love with Brian Sue, welcome to our house Dulles, she is a 53 foot sloop rigged ketch which means she has two and 1/4 masts and right now we are in the Dulles cabin , which is like The Brain of the Ship is how I like to think of it. This is our navigation and steering station. What I like about this is that the helm is super protected, so we can sit here. We can drive here. We have an excellent view and you can rest assured.

You can stay dry, you can be very comfortable even when the conditions are wet and fully manage all the sails and drive the boat back here. We have more sail controls in the cockpit so to sail Delos we never have to leave this area which makes it a very safe boat when sailing with a small crew and when the weather is bad or you are sailing at night you don't want to leave the cabin. cabin and risk falling overboard, so it's a very cool area when we're away. Browsing, this is also where we spend most of our time, so it turns out that this is actually our outside porch, our

living

room and all in one, so it's so cozy for our kitchen that it's actually a kitchen for a single man or a 1/1 Lane. the kitchen is not big enough for two people and is a bit narrow which makes it very good for anyone in the ocean passage and it is very difficult for you to hold on, you also have this so you can hold on in case of make it really rough, you're not going well in the whole boat.

We have everything you would find in a normal kitchen. I would say we have, you know, pool sinks. We have an induction stove that is very, very nice, so we don't have to do that. Worrying about propane and stuff, we just have a regular little oven and everything is connected to a gimbal system, so when we're recovering, this stove can swing pretty hard and we won't lose dinner on the floor. We have a toaster here, which is a luxury and we have some fresh potatoes, onions and things like that that don't need to be refrigerated, it's like a puzzle so everything, like the pots and pans, has its place and if you put it in the wrong place things don't fit in there we also have a cabinet here that's a bunch of random things and it kind of just extends down you never really know what to find down there it's a bit of a surprise here that we have you know our bowls, our plates and our sauces, you know we don't stop at three, this is our refrigerator, yes, being a bowl, I would say it's a very nice refrigerator, most refrigerators on ships are top-loading and I haven't heard nothing good about it. a top loading refrigerator, so it's very nice when it has a door and you can have everything organized there, well there's nothing that makes me very happy, it's our washing machine, it's just one of the smallest ones you can find on the market basically. but we run it every other day to diaper Sierra because we use cloth diapers to save a lot of waste and I wouldn't want to wash them by hand, so I'm very happy with this feature.

Another feature is her. a little chair that we've tied right here so she can sit here and eat and be a part of you know, like us making dinner and things like that. This is the navigation electronics and communications station on Delos. This is our single sideband radio. So this is a ham radio and it allows us to communicate by voice and also by analog modem by email or thousands of miles away, so if all communication systems fail and Armageddon happens, we can still talk to other people, we have our VHF radio that allows us to communicate it like short distances, basically line of sight boat instruments, this gives us our speed and depth and then down here, this is maybe the craziest thing that most boats are not going to have, This is the server rack that I installed for the satellite communication system, so this is what allows us to basically beam Internet to each other from space anywhere in the world.

We have a couple of safety devices, for example a fire extinguisher and these are not radio beacons that indicate emergency position, so we always navigate. in the middle of the ocean and we have a life threatening situation the ship is on fire the ship is sinking something like that we can activate it by pulling this cable on the back it has a built in GPS and it transmits our position and the name of our ship and who we are: it's a satellite in orbit and then it's picked up by the nearest maritime authority and they'll route it like a coast guard if they're available or a container ship or a cargo ship or something like that to try to help us.

So here this is our water meter, so it's super simple. We carry a thousand liters of water in Delos right now, we have 500 liters and when we fill our van, it's enough water to last us almost a month. This water treatment plant is capable of producing. 200 liters or about 50 US gallons per hour, so this is our

living

room, this is basically where we do most of the things when we are inside the boat, you know, we eat, we work here, you know, laze around, it fits a lot of people. which is very nice and we have a lot of crew on board.

Another thing that I really love about the dolls is that we have a lot of food storage, it's all food and stuff, and if you're here inside the cell phone, we have freezers, it's a little empty right now because we haven't shopped in about a month, but it's really cool to have frosts like this because if we catch really big fish or if we stay out of the net for a long time, you know it's important to have some. good frozen food so we have two of those on each side of the couch on this side right now is Sierra's Plenty area as she grows it's been a bit challenging as she started climbing things and such so we've planted a little bit, no I don't like to call it caged, but it's a park, so we can close it.

She can still be part of the action because you can see right through it. We can leave it there if we need to do something like change the sails or something. Continue where she needs to be put in a safe place this is where we put her do you think she likes it? Yeah, so if you lift this, this canned food milks, all the floors really lift up and strengthen the depth, so all the canned foods. we name them all so you can easily see what's inside and we remove the labels to prevent the spread of roaches so that's the procedure but it works well and we don't have any roaches at the moment which is very good one of the things I had never thought about when I first moved to Delos 9

years

ago, when you go off the grid and you run out of food, that's it, there's no other way to get more, oh, you're there, there's no no store near you and I remember it. when we first sailed to the islands of Indonesia and it was very remote and we ran out of tomatoes, we ran out of eggs, we ran out of fresh vegetables and we were eating for the last month, we were actually eating cans, it was a revelation to me.

For me, we spend most of our time at anchor, about 10% is sailing and 90% is a tanker. On average we sail about 8,000 nautical miles per year and when at anchor we tend to try to stay out of real ports like places like marinas where there are lots of boats, restaurants and bars like it's cool once in a while but firstly , you spend a lot of money in places like that and secondly, we like to be in remote and desolate places, our plans for the really depend on the weather, we travel by wind and ocean currents, so look at the seasons we have around front is incredibly important for both our safety and our comfort.

We've had sixty people fail beautiful over the In the last ten years it's been a lot and it's been absolutely incredible now it's just Bryan, Sierra and I, which is amazing, it's perfect, yeah, it's very, very nice. I think it's safe to say we've never actually been anywhere we haven't been. I want to come back to you there is always something special you can find about people's place this is our room at the back of the boat in the stern the two people is quite perfect we can even stand up we have a small desk that It is really nice to sit here and work a little.

We have a pretty big bed. I would say it's not huge, but it's nice, comfortable and comfortable. If it gets really hot, we have two fans, so that's basically how we stay cool. Back here we never use the air conditioning unless or in a marina, which is not very often, we also have a separate bathroom, also called a bathroom on the boat, which is a little strange, but here we have everything you have in a I think it's a toilet, but compact, this is where you relieve your

self

and we have an electric motor so if you press it, it basically fills with soft water from the ocean and then it pumps it directly or we also have a holding tank, Depending on where we are, if we're in the ocean it just goes up and if we're somewhere where there's a lot of boats and stuff, we keep it in a holding tank, we have pretty deep sumps, which is really good because I do. a bit of hand washing so it's really nice to wash things by hand in here and it can also act as a bathroom for Sierra which was a little bit smaller we have sort of a combination so it's not a separate shower so that you had the toilet there and then here. use clothespins baby shower there well this is our closet it's not very big but it's pretty perfect for us and I actually went through a lot of our clothes and got rid of a lot of stuff and just have the necessities , so this is all of Brian's clothes on this side and all of my clothes on that side, but we have some smaller cabinets that we like.

Here I have my clothes, so to further maximize the storage, the things that we don't like that are often under this bed, so Under here is all our type of storage for long term storage, so we have some extra sheets, some cold weather stuff, cold weather clothes and there's a good amount of storage down here so I'll have plenty of people. on the ship it's also very nice to work here and then you pull out this little chair and you can sit here and do things on your computer, which is not very nice. This is a very, very good security feature on Delos and this door is actually a watertight bulkhead, so if we made a hole in our house on the ship back here we could close this door and this whole area back here would be separated from the front of the boat so we can fill it with water and they still float so we have a few of these on Delos and it's crucial if you make a hole in the boat so you don't sink we basically have the bow cabin you can sleep three people here if they are very, very good friends, otherwise it's good to have one or two people sleep on one side and then you have this other area next to it that is a small sofa or where you can put your things and right now, since it's just Brian and Iboard, we have this As our kind of work room we sew here, this is also our diaper drying station right now because the wind flow here is incredible so it blows them very fast and up here we also have a second bathroom which is very, very nice to have. board in case one of them fails, which happens quite often actually, so this one is the same as the one on the back and works pretty much the same.

We make money by making YouTube videos. If that is all. We have a project and it is called. the Delos project and is 100% supported by what we call the Delos tribe, which are the people who watch our videos and we make some money from things like YouTube ad revenue and affiliate links, but by far the most of the support comes from crowdfunding. on patreon, where people who like the videos and get something out of them support them by giving us a few dollars every time we produce a video, yeah, it wasn't always like that, although for the first four years, almost five years of the journey , we were stopping working and then we were selling and then we were running out of money and then we were stopping working wherever we are, we do random things like I would do remote softwareconsulting we would make burritos we would make hamburgers we would work in hospitality whatever it took to continue browsing for one more season how much It's hard to live on a boat I've known people sailing around the world a family of five spending about $1,000 a year a month, which is probably the lower end of the budget, Karen, Sierra and I to live and sail on Delos we spend around about $2,500 a month and that includes our food, our provisions, fuel for the boat insurance, visa fees, some things like that, which is not included in the actual price of the boat, so if you don't have enough money to buy a boat directly, you will have a mortgage or owe money and that will add up.

Yes, Brian spent a lot of time working on the boat. Yes, it is too, imagine taking your house, shaking it and putting it in a corrosive environment of wet salt water and then moving it thousands of miles from the nearest hardware store or anyone who can help you fix anything, and that's a little what it means to navigate. It's like it is all over the world and that's why I spent a lot of time maintaining the boat. In fact, I needed to become an electrician. I needed to become a plumber, diesel mechanic, toilet repairman, air conditioning and refrigeration specialists, and everything in between, it's pretty common.

For me, spending at least a few full days a month just working to keep the book in shape can be incredibly expensive if you don't do your own work, so I estimate our maintenance budget at Delos to be about $700 a month on average . all year round and if we weren't doing the work ourselves, I think you could easily triple that amount just by paying a repairman to come out and fix things. Now let's take a look at the engine room, which is really the heart. from Delos and it lives in this cool little door, this waterproof door at the bottom of our cabin, so we just want to set it up like this and then we have a ladder when you come down here and once you come down here it has everything.

It's what really runs the boat, so on this side we have a fuel tank, it's 600 liters of fuel and that's enough to last us three to four months. This is our engine, so when there is no wind, this is the main diesel engine that we use to propel ourselves. the boat, this is our generator, so it's an 8 kilowatt AC generator that runs on diesel fuel and when we need to charge the batteries or if we don't have enough solar power or we need to do something that requires a lot of energy, we can flip this guy This is our water heater, so we have hot showers on the boat, which is actually quite a luxury.

I don't know if you can see down here. This is our scuba compressor, so we run it off the generator and it's. which fills our scuba tanks so we are totally

self

sufficient

for diving which is totally cool we have the desalinator which converts salt water into fresh drinking water which allows us to basically stay in the sea indefinitely without that we would have to go to port like every few weeks for water and battery chargers and electronic devices and all kinds of cool stuff, but this is really my office so having a baby on the boat is absolutely amazing and extremely challenging at the same time, yeah, yeah can you imagine you know maintaining and sailing a boat is a full time job and then having a child is also a full time job so basically we have two full time jobs well I think someone Wow, this is where Ciara sleeps, she has a little tent on the beach as a safe place to sleep here and right next door we change diapers right here above Sierra we have all our medical supplies everything you can think of about antibiotics if you have a really bad sprain if you need it so we have something to finish pretty much all EpiPens, so under here we have eight 100 amp hour batteries, it's a 24 volt system, so I guess you could call this our back porch.

We really have a nice big terrace area where we can kick back and relax. here we have some solar panels, we actually have 1400 watts of solar energy on Delos, which allows us to power the entire boat, freezers, refrigerators, all the electronics, everything with solar energy and also wind energy, so we have two wind generators here, each of which produces 400 watts. of power, so when the wind blows, those guys are spinning and they're pumping power, this giant dish here is our Internet, so this is a satellite dome with a gimbal and it allows us to get broadband Internet to anywhere we go.

Let's go, what given our line of work. it's absolutely fantastic now let's go look at the deck deck of Delos so this is the mainmast of Delos and where the mizzen is 52 feet high the main mast is 66 feet high and it sits on a six building stories, so it's quite tall, this is our mainsail, it's on a furler and these are electric motors with gearboxes that actually control how the sail comes out and how it deploys from the mast, that's what's controlled with those buttons in the cockpit, so we never have to leave the cockpit to come to the front and hoist. sails or put them on or off, so it's a cool system, you can't really be afraid of heights when you live on a boat, otherwise go up to the top of the mast and you'll be in trouble, you know when you're in a house and a storm comes and the wind starts and the rain starts it can be a very cozy experience on a boat sometimes it can be a very heartbreaking experience because you know that your ears are in danger, you know that the other night we were here and we woke up in the middle of the night because we felt a sudden thud and the wind had changed enough to push Delos into shallow water, so instead of floating happily on its anchor, it was now bouncing on the ocean floor, which is a terrible scenario. be inside so here we are at midnight in the middle of the night winds are blowing it's raining and we have to get dressed we have to go out and we have to raise the anchor and we have to move the boat to deeper water and that's that's that's that's a challenge, you're always on guard and on edge in situations like that, so since we live on a boat things are a little different than a house, in this locker we have survival supplies for worst case scenarios, so here we have a gigantic hand pump , so if we start filling water, we start pumping to save our lives, literally here we have a life raft, so this is a life raft for six people, it's Otto who inflates it.

If something were to happen, we would take the life raft off the boat. we throw it in, we tie it up and it has enough supplies for I think seven days for six people, we have spare water so we have 40 liters of fresh drinking water in case something happens to our main water supply and we also have a kit of trench, so a trench kit contains all the supplies that you will want to take with you if you abandon ship, so we have spare VHF radio, we have flashlights, we have food, we have even more water here we have fishing equipment, we have mirrors signal If the worst case scenario happened, we would take all this stuff out and then abandon ship with it and hopefully it would allow us to be rescued and survive long enough for someone to find us.

I love living on a boat, it is extremely special. and I think one of the things I like the most is that you are so connected to the weather and nature that you literally live outside all the time. We have sailed in the tropics for quite a few years and are looking forward to returning. exploring some places that are different for us, so we'll sail to Greenland and up to the Arctic and play a little on the ice this summer, it feels a little scary, in fact, when I think about it, it's like that. that knot in my stomach and throughout this journey over the years, every time we make a decision that puts that knot in our stomach, it turned out to be an incredible experience, so let's put a heater on Delos.

Let's prepare the boat for the cold weather. We'll head north and see what it's like. Share this video if you liked it. Also be sure to subscribe to explore alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this. Thank you. to see