Lately, while I limit my Covid-19 exposure by going out in public, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos. Being a kind of old salt, having raced sailboats on San Francisco Bay in my halcyon days, I have discovered there is a whole community of Americans (and not a few foreigners) who have sort of dropped out of living in the States and decided to just get a boat and sail the Seven Seas. Almost all of these are couples, some with children, and have decided it’s a great way to live a life. I’ve been watching several of these sailors’ weekly installments on their travels on YouTube. They film everything from sailing in heavy seas to jerry rigging a water pump repair for an auxiliary engine to hauling out and scraping barnacles off the bottom; and of course even watching gorgeous sunsets shot on some remote island off of Panama, it’s all there for the viewer to see each week in the comfort of their sofa, noshing on some brie and crackers.
For me it’s a kind of a Walter Mitty-like exercise, imagining myself aboard my own boat, sailing somewhere in the South Pacific or the Caribbean. What fun! Nonetheless, being of solidly advanced age and comfortably ensconced ashore in my 2-acre “ranch” in the Cascade Mountains, watching those videos is as close as I’ll ever get to Stirling Hayden’s epic drop-out book, “Wanderer.”
Apparently, YouTube pays them money to film their travels, the earnings from which vary according to the number of clicks their You Tube channels get. In exchange, of course, You Tube stuffs endless advertisements into each installment—a kind a sharing of the advertising revenue YouTube gets from the ads. But even more fascinating to me is that they invite ordinary landlubbers like myself to—how other way to say it?—send them money to go yachting around the world.
Some of these folks seem to be doing quite well! I’ve watched more than a few couples start out with buying a small boat for cheap (and in need to extensive repair and maintenance to be sea worthy), go out for a few months or even years only to “upgrade” to some shiny 45-footer, presumably paid for with earnings from donations and advertising earnings. Clearly, these people have chucked their jobs, their homes, their cars...their lives “on the beach” in order to just, well, sail. They have no income—it appears—other than the earnings from their filmed adventures.
For me, even the word yacht connotes wealth. You owned a “big boat” if you had plenty of loose cash floating around the house. And in large measure it’s still that way. Most people who own big motor yachts (aka “stink pots”) with their limited range and cost of operation, are independently wealthy. Even a big sailboat, with its endless need of maintenance is not a cheap investment. A good mid-40 footer will run well into 200-300 thousand bucks.
At the end of the day, though, it’s still yachting, and that this growing community of (let’s call it what it is) marine drop-outs is able to convince people to give them money to do these things absolutely fascinates me. I have no idea of what they’re earning from their gigs but none of them seem to be short of money to “upgrade” to a larger and more deluxe bottom. It certainly cannot be insignificant.
Thanks to YouTube, people are discovering that they can monetize even the most unlikely activities. People will give you money to have a good time! People will pay you to buy a big yacht and go sailing. How does that work, I ask myself.
Are some peoples’ lives so mundane in this Age of Pandemic as to prompt them to send total strangers money to hang out in the tropics and suck down Mai Tais? In the good old days if you wanted to drop out, you had a backpack and a thumb to get around with. No more. Just get a good I-phone camera, an internet connection, and soon you’ll be moving into a shiny new Airstream trailer. I suppose.
In the meantime, I will yearn for that beautiful Farrallon Clipper I always wanted, while watching some guy’s girlfriend dive into crystalline waters in a skimpy bikini as a come-on to click on their channel.
Someone please pass the crackers.
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