“What is your advice for people who are thinking of buying a boat in a different country?”
“Don’t do what we did!”
Recently we were interviewed by Annika Rautiola from the Liveaboard Sailing Podcast. She is sharing tips with her listeners who are searching for ways to make their dreams of living onboard a sailboat a reality. While we don’t have much advice to offer, we do have a dramatic story of all the things that can go wrong – a cautionary tale, if you will – that we were happy to share.
Our story is a unique one. We moved halfway round the world during a global pandemic to buy a boat from someone we had only met on Facebook. When at first we couldn’t find either the person or the boat we thought we had been scammed but we ended up living on a 47’ catamaran…for 2 months…for free!
During this time we had some incredible experiences – snorkelling with turtles, sailing to another country, meeting all sorts of wonderful people – but unfortunately it all fell to pieces at the last second and we ended up with nothing.
Since then, we have been sailing full time in the Caribbean and volunteering whenever possible. In the podcast you can hear about our time spent with Watts on Water, delivering solar lights to those living without power in the aftermath of St Vincent’s volcanic eruptions in May 2021. If you’d like to read more about that, check out our blog post.
And if you’re thinking about pursuing this lifestyle but you want to get a taste of life onboard before you make the leap, we’d love to invite you onboard with our Cruiser Experience. You can come and live alongside us on our boat for a week, take a turn at helming the boat and sailing to far flung places as well as getting down and dirty in the engine bay or learning what it means to provision in more remote places. For more info, check out our Cruiser Experience.
You can listen to our interview on the Liveaboard Sailing Podcast and watch our first six episodes below. More episodes will be coming to you shortly with the next part of the story – it definitely isn’t over just yet!
