Salty Podcast #82 ⛵ Experience Offshore Sailing… BEFORE Buying a Boat! 🌊 with #SailLibra

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Tonight’s episode of The Salty Podcast is tailor-made for two types of sailors:
The Dreamers—the ones scrolling YachtWorld at midnight imagining bluewater passages… and
The Salty Veterans—those who’ve owned boats, love the lifestyle, but don’t necessarily want the responsibility of ownership again.

Captain Ryan of Sail Libra joins Cap’n Tinsley live from Marathon, Florida aboard Salty Abandon to share the REAL offshore experience his voyages offer—no boat ownership required. Ryan runs one of the most respected offshore training programs in the world, giving sailors the rare chance to complete true passages, learn heavy-weather seamanship, step into night watches, cross international borders, and build confidence miles from land.

In this in-depth, nearly 2-hour conversation, Ryan opens up about:

• His childhood beginnings on Alabama lakes
• Rebuilding and operating his 1969 Bill Tripp Jr.–designed ketch, Libra
• The kinds of sailors who come aboard — and who should
• Why offshore motion surprises so many first-timers
• How he teaches real-world seamanship (not textbook theory)
• The SCS philosophy: Safety • Comfort • Sailing
• Caribbean island-hopping vs. true ocean passages
• What it’s really like facing 50+ knots and 20–foot seas
• His favorite passages, scariest surprises, and many laugh-out-loud stories
• Why Sail Libra offers an experience you simply cannot get in a bay or harbor

Stick around after the long-form interview for a fun rapid-fire round—favorite foods, real-world advice, dream destinations, pirate deterrents (yes, really!), and the one thing every new offshore sailor should pack but almost no one does.

If you’ve ever dreamed of experiencing real ocean sailing—or wondered whether you’d love it before buying your own boat—this episode is the perfect deep dive.

Sail Libra Website: https://saillibra.com

Connect with Captain Ryan: @SailLibra on social media
Watch more episodes: https://saltyabandon.com/saltypodcastplaylist

SALTY ABANDON — Cap’n Tinsley
Live every Wednesday at 6 PM Central.

Salty Abandon out. 🌊⛵

00:00 – Welcome to The Salty Podcast
Capn Tinsley introduces tonight’s theme: offshore sailing for both dreamers and salty veterans.

01:10 – Meet Captain Ryan of Sail Libra
Ryan joins the show and reacts to the intro describing who sails with him.

02:02 – Who Sails with Sail Libra?
Ryan explains the two groups he sees onboard: former boat owners and newcomers exploring the lifestyle.

03:00 – Advice for New Sailors & Buying Your First Boat
Ryan shares how he helps guests decide if cruising is

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome Aboard And Who It’s For
• 1:44 Try Offshore Sailing Without Owning
• 3:37 Ryan’s Crew, Training Style, And Outcomes
• 6:20 Buying In The Caribbean And Sailing Home
• 12:20 Island Hops, Passages, And Not Getting Lost
• 16:56 Libra’s Design, Boards, And Light-Air Setup
• 22:40 Heavy Displacement vs Modern Hulls
• 24:36 Ryan’s Path From Lakes To Passages
• 32:40 Chartering, Deliveries, And Teaching Owners
• 40:14 SCS: Safety, Comfort, Then Sailing
• 45:50 Weather, Windows, And USVI Base
• 50:20 What Surprises New Sailors Most
• 54:56 Crew Roles, Watches, And Spinnakers
• 1:00:10 Community, Licensing, And Industry Players
• 1:06:56 Costs, Value, And Booking Passages
• 1:12:20 St. Martin Logistics And Lagoonies
• 1:20:28 Vetting Guests And Setting Expectations
• 1:26:48 Real Confidence Moments Under Sail
• 1:32:48 Night Sailing, Cruise Ships, And Traffic
• 1:36:40 Participation Over Pamphlets
• 1:41:44 BVIs, Fees, And Why USVI
• 1:47:12 Rapid Fire: Weather, Food, Rules
• 1:53:20 Attitude Rules And No-Drama Boat
• 1:56:20 Closing And Future Episodes

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:05

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Salty Podcast coming to you live from Marathon, Florida, aboard Salty Abandoned. Tonight's episode is for two kinds of sailors, the dreamers and the salty veterans. First, the dreamers, not yet salty, but dreaming of the day. You will be. You picture yourself offshore, you scroll through boat listings, you watch sailing podcasts and YouTube channels. You imagine being on a sailboat, but you want to feel offshore sailing before spending your hard-earned money on a boat. This is for you. And then we have the salty veterans. You've owned boats, you know the rhythm of passages and the magic of a star-lit watch. But life changed, seasons shifted, and now you're between boats. You miss it. It's not necessarily the responsibilities of ownership. This is for you too. That's why I'm so excited to have Sail Libra here tonight. Ryan, uh, that gives both dreamers and salty veterans a chance to step into a true offshore adventure. No boat ownership required. So settle in, grab a drink, and we're going offshore tonight with Sail Libra. But first, please like, subscribe, and share. It truly helps this podcast reach more sailors just like you. I'm Captain Tinsley, aboard Salty Abandon and Island Packet 320, and this is episode 82. Please help me welcome Ryan of Sail Libra.

SPEAKER_01: 1:27

Hi Tinsley, how are you doing?

SPEAKER_02: 1:29

Welcome. Thanks for being here tonight.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_02: 1:35

So uh how did that sound? Did I give a good description?

SPEAKER_01: 1:38

Uh that was actually probably better described than even I would describe it. Uh you you kind of you you kind of nailed uh everyone that I ever take out on this vessel um from people who have already owned their own boat and they know what a pain in the ass it can be, uh, with the maintenance, the upkeep, the insurance, the slip rent, and all these things. And then maybe you don't even get to use it that much because it just sits at the dock. Um, so I get a lot of guys that sail with me, uh, you know, and gals that have already owned the boat, and then on the other spectrum there's the dreamers that are getting into the lifestyle, and they want to, you know, take a small step and say, is this really the lifestyle that I want to live? Or get into, right? Not necessarily live, because not everybody desires to go and move aboard a boat. They would just like to use a boat and uh and use it safely. So those are the things that we try to you know impress on people when they join one of our passages. And since we only take six, I kind of specialize, you know, a lot of the trips are, you know, I I've become friends with all these people. We spend a week together most of the time, um, and I understand their needs because we talk about it all week. You know, what what level they're at, you know, have they done ASA training? Those types of things. And so when those uh dreamers come aboard that have no idea about anything, at the end of the trip, they kind of know they know more so than a lot of people that have taken ASA, you know, classes that are in the bay or in a small keelboat, something like that. They have the full experience of being on a large cruising sailboat.

SPEAKER_02: 3:20

Well, that that brings uh so I saw you that you were on another podcast, and mostly you guys talked about I didn't watch the whole thing, but you were talking about buying a boat. So you must you must end up giving a lot of advice or making suggestions, especially after you get to know them.

SPEAKER_01: 3:37

I I do, and so everybody that sails with me constantly has access to to my information, right? So it's not like I'm gonna charge you extra money later on for a consultation if you want to go buy a boat. You just send me a message and I'll look at it on Yacht World for you uh and see if it's the right boat that would fit your needs. Um one thing that I recommend for a lot of people that maybe they you know they are sailors and they have done a lot of base sailing, uh they're just looking to spread their wings a little bit, is to actually buy a boat in the Caribbean. Um you can boats in the Caribbean are everywhere. So if you buy if you buy a boat, say down in Grenada, for example, uh, and we're time talking about American clients and most of this, so Grenada is a hurricane where a lot of boats go to get stored during hurricane season. Uh so all those people kind of go home back to their lives in the States while their boat is safely protected, they're hauled out of the boat yard. And then life happens. Something happens, you know, somebody dies, somebody gets sick, or they just find out that the lifestyle wasn't for them, and those boats go up for sale quite often. They're really good boats, they're outfitted for cruising, and most of the time, if you buy and you need to buy a boat if you want to do this little process that I that I teach people, you know you want to buy a boat that has a book value. So you don't want to go buy something from the 70s, you don't want to go buy something from the 80s, you want to buy something that's fairly new, um, kind of outfitted for what you want to do, and then you can just sail it all the way downwind, all the way back to Florida, and then you either like it or you don't like it. And if you don't like it, then you've already trade you've already transported it all the way to Florida, you got that wholesaling experience under your belt, and then you can just sell it because the market in Florida is a lot easier to sell a boat if you get it there, versus selling a boat in Grenada. You just have access to a larger pool of buyers.

SPEAKER_02: 5:39

So there's a lot of people that would make it so people get a better buy in in the Caribbean?

SPEAKER_01: 5:45

It's not it it's not necessarily this is a better buy, it's a way that you can experience the lifestyle kind of on your own time frame. So just say that one season, right? So you buy the boat in November, or just say you buy it in October, right? You launch in November, and then you start moving your way up through the islands, say Grenada, St. Vincent, you know, Dominica, St. Lucia, all of these places that you're gonna go up through, and you're gonna experience what cruising is really like. Um after there, you know, a lot of people don't realize that you can see every island from every island in the Caribbean. So a lot of people think it's like pirates of the Caribbean, right? You you they get on their ships and they're sailing for days before they get to the next rock. Right. No, all these all these rocks are right beside each other. I can see every you know, when you get to the north end of one island, if I'm traveling north, then I can see the south coast of the next island. And you know, some of those are 30 miles across, some of them are 40 miles across, some of them are fifteen miles across. So it's not a big it's you could do it without a GPS at all, otherwise other than just you know making sure that you have the proper depth for your vessel. Um, but there's no chance of getting lost, right? So the only places that you can't see land to your next destination are between like St. Martin and the BBI, which you will just overnight you'll see it, and then the Mona Passage between um Puerto Rico and the DR. And that's just an overnight, and then you see the DR, and then you can bounce up through the Bahamas, you can go up the north coast of Cuba and go to the Keys. So you're never really offshore more than just a few miles or more than an overnight run. And a lot of people can buy that boat. Just say, for example, if they buy a Benito and it's uh you know a 20, you know, 10, right? So that would be about a 15-year-old boat. It has a book value of X number of dollars. Someone had probably sell it across the Atlantic or however it got down there, and life happens. That boat becomes available on the market. It's a lot of people are reluctant to buy a boat out of the country. Where if it's a US flag boat, it doesn't matter where you buy it. You just sign the back of the Coast Guard documentation and give them some money, and it's your boat. It's not a hard process at all. But you can involve however many people you want to involve when you purchase a boat. And so I'm not a big boat purchaser. I I don't I don't stand, you know, I don't uh I'm not an expert at purchasing boats, but I do give a lot of advice.

SPEAKER_02: 8:26

Um and that's some boat brokers that you like to refer to?

SPEAKER_01: 8:30

I I don't. I don't have any boat brokers that I refer anybody to.

SPEAKER_02: 8:34

Okay. So I do, but if anybody needs one.

SPEAKER_01: 8:38

Yeah, and as far as not that I have anything against any boat brokers at all. I just don't have a list of them in my pocket that I would say, hey, this is the person that you should call. Uh because I just don't deal with a lot of boat brokers uh in everyday business, right? Um so after you get that boat and you've had your experience through the Caribbean, say, and it took you three months to do it. You don't you don't have to do it all in three months, you know, during the season, right? So you could go to St. Lucia, you could put it up in a marina, you can fly home for a few weeks, you can come back, take the boat, go from St. Lucia to St. Martin, enjoy that, do the Les Saints, all those islands, put it up in St. Martin for a few weeks, go back to work, do whatever you want to do, and then you work your way back to Florida. Just say it takes a whole season to do that, and you can more than likely sell the boat for what you paid for it in Grenada just by simply moving it to Florida. Um, it's not out of the ordinary that that could happen. And even if it in even if it were to cost you 30 grand, right? Say you sold it for thirty thousand dollars less than you bought it for, well, you s you had three months on a boat and a and a big experience and a huge opportunity to see a lot of things. That's right. And so, you know, is that experience worth that amount of money?

SPEAKER_02: 9:52

And that would be one scenario, but another scenario that everybody would love it and they would keep it.

SPEAKER_01: 9:58

Yeah, and that yeah, they could keep it, they would love it, and if they didn't, they would know exactly why.

SPEAKER_03: 10:04

And so the next world. That's right.

SPEAKER_01: 10:06

The next boat that they go to look at, they would know that I I don't like drawers that opened, you know, port port to starboard. You know, port to starboard drawers are the dumbest drawers on a boat, right? When you heal over, they open. You know, it's so uh so I like drawers that go for to ask instead of side to side. Interesting.

SPEAKER_03: 10:23

Um okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 10:25

There's all there's all kinds of little peculiar peculiar things about sailboats and sailing that people uh you know learn just by being on the water.

SPEAKER_02: 10:35

Okay, so first thing I want to do is ask you about the boat, Libra.

SPEAKER_01: 10:40

Sure. Yep.

SPEAKER_02: 10:40

So tell tell us about Libra.

SPEAKER_01: 10:43

So Libra is a 1969 uh Bill Tripp Jr. uh custom built boat. It was built for a family that was in uh Connecticut at the time. It was built by Abbe King and Rasmussen in Germany, um, which is uh you know kind of a pedigree uh boat builder that's been building yachts, and I don't know what year they started, so I'm not gonna act like I'm an expert on them. But they've been building yachts for a long time and and lately, you know, say the past 30 years, they're building a lot of mega yachts and mega sailboats. Um so Libra having that pedigree and just me working on it and remodeling it and things like that, I can see the the quality of the build uh inside the boat. Um it's a really heavy displacement boat. It's uh 44 tons. Um it has quite a lot of ballast on it. It does have a bolt on, it does have bolt-on ballast, so it has a piece of lead on the bottom of it that weighs quite a bit, probably about 15,000 pounds or so. Uh but inside of that lead is also a slot that there's a main centerboard. And the main centerboard adds uh 10 feet of draft. So normally sitting, I draft about six and a half feet, and I'm sixty feet long. So for a sixty-foot long boat with a heavy rig, because remember I have two masts, I'm a catch. Um that heavy rig will add a lot of roll because you just get your momentum going, you know, with a six and a half foot draft. So putting that board down gives me the ability to draft sixty and a half feet, and at sixteen and a half feet, the boat is very rock solid. Sail's very nice, it points to weather if you need to. However, gentlemen never sail to weather, right? You've heard that saying before, and there's a reason, there's a reason for that saying is you're gonna you're just gonna beat the crap out of everything, right? You're gonna beat the crap out of your boat, your crew, and all of your gear. So try to, you know, try to set up your trips to where you're sailing in nice, uh, nice areas. But the boards do add a lot. Um and the main board is in the middle of the boat. There's also what's what I call the baby board, which is a solid bronze board, and that one is in uh the aft, just kind of just a little forward of the rudder, and it adds a lot of stability in large seas where you would be surfing. So in a surfing situation, just like a regular surfboard that has fins on the back of it, that's exactly what this fin does. Uh so it helps the boat stay tracked and it doesn't round up at the bottom of a large sea state.

SPEAKER_02: 13:25

I was just looking for that reel to show to show people.

SPEAKER_01: 13:30

Yeah, there's uh that that one video that uh um and I have some here, some drone footage, I could drop it out there, but there's there's definitely a way that you can sail a catch in any configuration that you want to. So with with the two masts and everything being spread between those, you know uh two systems, we can uh we can fly double spinnakers, uh, you know, it's really called uh Miz and Stay Sail. Yeah, I'll let you watch this video here. So this was just last week.

SPEAKER_02: 14:05

That's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01: 14:14

And you just don't see a lot of boats like that either. You don't see boats that are set up to be able to sail like this on a normal everyday basis.

SPEAKER_02: 14:31

Oh let's play it one more time. Keep talking about the video while we're fine.

SPEAKER_01: 14:36

Yeah, so if you if you can see the setup there, uh what's called ATO, which takes the uh which is called the Miz and Space Sale. And if you notice, I don't even have the main style up. So I have I'm running the Mizin, I'm running the Mizin space sale, and that just really gives me a lot of uh off the wind. And and in the so in that condition there, I don't know if you can hear me or with the sound. I can hear it really loudly.

SPEAKER_02: 15:28

Um the uh there we go again.

SPEAKER_01: 15:35

So in the this isn't the wind setup. And there, if you notice, there's not a whole lot of white caps up there. We're this is sailing, we're sailing at about seven and a half knots in about ten knots of wind, twelve knots of wind. And you know, that light air setup is just with for for the weight of this boat, the way that it gets to sail, and being able to, you know, being able to make a boat move in light air is hard to do. So if you can sail, if you can sail your boat effectively in light air, which is gonna be most of the time, right, because most cruisers or most sailors are not gonna just head off into big wind. It's just not something that they do, right? You know, the saying all of the all of the ducklings sit on the Florida East Coast and they're waiting to go to the Bahamas, and they're not gonna leave with any wind that has an N in it. I I I've heard that since I was a teenager, right? You know, it's like, well, if it's out of the northeast, the north, the northwest, you can't go to the Bahamas. You can go to the Bahamas, even with north wind. It doesn't mean that it's gonna turn the Gulf Stream into us into a washing machine. It can, uh, you know, given that put does push the current, but you know, if you got 15 or 20 knots of wind, it's not gonna stand it up that bad. Uh it also depends on your vessel, too. Libra is built like a tank and she kind of pushes her way through the water more than going over it. So a lot of the more modern built boats that have a lot flatter bottom, you're gonna feel the motion more in those boats than you would in a heavy displacement boat.

SPEAKER_02: 17:16

All right, so let's uh let's go back to your s how your sailing journey began. What drew you to this?

SPEAKER_01: 17:24

Yeah, yeah. So as a child, I was always around the water, uh, basically on the lakes of Alabama. So I grew up on Lake Martin, which is just north of Montgomery, near Auburn, Alabama. Um, and on that lake, I just did everything that a boy would do, right? I was I was there until I was about 15 years old. So, you know, growing up kind of time story like was very, you know, and I didn't have a sailboat, not for a long time. I had a little skiff that I rode around in, but you know, my dad taught me how to operate the skiff. I was star he let me, you know, use the boat in front of the house with a trolling motor for a first few years so I could go and just fish or whatever. And then later on he let me put the 15 horsepower motor on and kind of gave me the keys, and then I don't know how many millions of miles I put on that boat. But I burned through a lot of gas. Um and I was a little guy too, and I couldn't get gas at a marina, it was too far, so I had to haul those six-gallon tanks up to the gas station down the street, fill them up, and then take them back to the boat. Uh but one day, uh, you know, these lakes uh in Alabama, they have flood control where they, you know, they drop the water in the winter to prevent flooding in the spring. Um so in that time frame things wash off the shorelines, and one of them was uh a sunfish sailboat. And the only thing that it had on it was uh just the mast kind of laid across it, and I had no idea what a sunfish sailboat was. I didn't even know at the time that it was a sunfish sailboat. I just knew what a sailboat looked like. Uh there was no internet, so we had the encyclopedias, and if you go to sailboat, it looks like a sailboat. So that's what I built it like. So, you know, a tarp for a sail, uh, you know, a piece of stick for a boom. I had no jib, and of course, if you look at a sunfish, they're not set up that way at all. But I was able to sail that little boat and uh and figure out how it worked, right? There's a slot in the middle of it for the dagger board or the centerboard. I I found that I found out why that slot was there the hard way, right? If you sail it without it, you just keep flipping over, or you just get a lot of leeway, you don't go where you want to go. And I had to build a rudder and all these things. And I was kind of crafty, and I've always been kind of McGyverish to try to put things together, and I'll boys, you know, I would take the remote control car that I got for Christmas and tear it apart just to see how it works, right? So it's been the same way with boats all along, too. And then graduating up from that, um, you know, later on I figured out what uh what cars and girls were, and so. So the boats kind of went the the boats kind of went aside for a while. I ended up uh you know getting a nice job uh later on in life um when I was around 20 at Delta Airlines and I was a computer technician and traveled quite a bit. Um and in that traveling I ended up in uh in Asia and and kind of worked over there some and ended up kind of needing a hobby and I remembered the boating part, right? I still had that draw to the water. So I ended up volunteering on a bunch of boats that were moving between Lang Kawi and um and Phuket. And it's it's an overnight sail, it's not very far, uh, it's not very treacherous waters, they're always nice trips, and I would just volunteer as a crew to just ride along. And so that was what got me into the big boat sailing world. Uh and when I say big boat sailing world, at the time a 45-foot boat was a big boat, right? A 48-foot boat was a big boat. Anything over 50 was was just massive, you know, a massive yacht. Um, you know, boats have progressively gotten longer uh as the years have gone past. You know, now a 50-foot boat's pretty normal for a lot of people to just go buy a 50-foot boat. Uh but back in the day it wasn't quite like that. So sailing there and kind of getting that sailing bug back in my system, I realized that I kind of had a passion for it. Um I moved moved back to Atlanta. I was working there with Delta again. Uh I had a few other little businesses on the side that I was able to kind of move away from Delta. I ended up buying an Irwin 37, which is which was a great boat, but a pig, right? It was a catch, center, center cop, center cockpit. I would I would not take it across an ocean at all. It wasn't built for that. It was a shallow draft, it was uh about four and a half feet. And so it was a coastal cruiser. It it was a coastal cruiser. It was built to go to the Bahamas. That's exactly why Erwin built all of those boats back in the 70s, was so they were selling people the dream of going in to the Bahamas and all that shallow water. So they they sold a lot of shoal draft boats, and and I got one of them. And then that uh boat that I bought, I think I bought it in about 2020 or I'm sorry, 2002.

SPEAKER_03: 22:22

What did you keep it?

SPEAKER_01: 22:24

Uh at first I kept it over in uh cotton bayou at Orange Beach at a friend's house.

SPEAKER_02: 22:29

So so you somehow, oh, were you living here uh in Orange Beach?

SPEAKER_01: 22:33

So so I I I was back and forth between Atlanta for a while, right? So my grandparents always lived in Gulf Shores when I was growing up. So that's how I was familiar familiar with the Orange Beach Gulf Shores area, right? So I've been vacationing there as a child, spring break with a family, you know, go to the beach, just like a lot of people would vacation, you know, the nicest beach to the middle of the country. It kind of starts in Gulf Shores. Anything to the west gets a little dirty, and then anything, anything to the east gets a lot more populated. So, you know, that area was a really nice area. I liked it. Uh, so when I bought my boat, I had it transported on a truck uh from Charleston, South Carolina, uh, and had it taken to the Pensacola shipyard, and then they kind of put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and I ended up taking it over to Cotton Bayou and tying it up at a friend's dock. And she was nice enough to let me keep it there for several years, and you know, but you but but you know, this was the dream that a lot of people have. I've bought my boat, I have my job. How do I do both, right? So I lived in Atlanta, my boat is six hours away, so that you know, now I'm burning the highway up almost every weekend because I want to go play with my boat, and it wasn't even necessarily that I wanted to go jump on the boat and untie the lines and go sailing. I, you know, boats are always full of projects, right? So I I wanted to just go do projects on the boat, you know. I would spend all week at work deciding what I was gonna do, would you know, haul tail down to the beach, work on the boat for the weekend, maybe take it out for a sale. Uh and one lucky thing that I didn't didn't even really check before I bought the boat was the mast height, uh, because that boat was also a catch. Um, the Orange Beach bridge there, the height limit is fifty-five feet. And that and that boat was about fifty-three. So just by the grace of God, I was able to buy a boat that fit under the bridge, so I could actually take the boat out into the gulf right there, just a mile from the dock, uh, which a lot of people that's why kind of Orange Beach in that area, most of the boats that you see are on the bayside, right? This the larger sailboats. Uh because they can sail in the bay back there and they can transit the intercoastal waterway to get to Pensacola. Yeah, yeah, they can go out Pensacola Pass, or if for some odd reason anybody would ever want to go west, they could go out, they could go out Mobile Bay or over into Mississippi either way. Um so having that boat and doing those little projects, uh I was able to move out of Delta, uh, was able to buy a house at Orange Beach um in about 2006, five or six. So I lived there, I had the boat, and then the economy happened as it always does, and I decided that I probably needed to start doing uh charters. And so I had had plenty of sea time. You know, your C time counts from the time that you're 15 years old. Uh, you can go back and document all your C time from 15 years old. So I got my master's license, uh, which I didn't even have to have because I wasn't planning on running an inspected vessel, right? You only need a master's license if you're gonna run an inspected vessel. Um, and in that area, a six-pack would have been just fine. But I went ahead and got the master's license because it's just another, I don't know, weekend or 10-day class or something like that. It wasn't much added on. Um got my license, and then I opened up uh Orange Beach Sailing Adventures uh called Sail OB, and that business is still in operation to this day. I actually sold it back in uh 2020, um, kind of late late 2019, right before COVID hit, which would have been a which was which was a great business. The business really took off when COVID hit because I always sold private trips, right? So I never put families together. The boat was your boat for your time, right? So people would show up and they would take a two-hour trip. This is on your Irwin. This is this is on the Irwin. This this is the yeah, this is way back. Um, so I did day sales, and I don't even know how many miles I ran, but during that time, and this is seasonal, right? You and I know that you're from that area, so you know that in the summertime we get vacationers that show up by the hordes, right? And so you put your telephone number on your sail and you kind of run up and down the beach to do a beach run, the phone rings, people book a trip and you take them sailing. So it's kind of perpetual motion, right? So if you're out sailing, then the phone's probably gonna ring. And this was kind of before the a lot of the internet also. Um I remember I even remember telling people on our sunset cruises when we would be out in the Gulf, uh, there was just nobody, there was no sailboats. The only sailboat was was in the bay. Um where did you keep your boat?

SPEAKER_02: 27:41

Was this still at your friend's house?

SPEAKER_01: 27:43

Yeah. Uh no, I ran out of uh at Hudson Marina. So just if you know where Orange Beach Elementary School is, it's just south of that. And that's on Wilson Boulevard. And that marina grew over time. When I first started there, they just had a couple of deep sea fishing boats that would take people, you know, take tourists out fishing and things like that. You know, Orange Beach is known for the fishing. So we started doing the sailing there. Uh the guy that owned the property there was very nice to me, um, let me just run my business and enjoyed watching me do my boat projects. And you know, I would learn, I I would learn from them with them maintaining all their huge, massive fishing boats, and then I'd be over there working on my little sailboat. Uh, but I ran that business for close to uh 10 and a half, 12 years, something like that. Um, and it became it became an activity that people came back every year for. So I built a clientele, and you know, so much that there was one season that it never rained because it's either gonna rain all season or it's not, and it there's it there's a hard middle ground there. So I I ran about 70 sunset cruises in a row.

SPEAKER_00: 28:57

Wow.

SPEAKER_01: 28:57

Every like so so there is no weekends, right? I I don't get uh time off, you know. It's a it's a summertime job, and you just work seven days a week. Yeah, and so there was a lot of days that we would start at eight in the morning and I would end after sunset, you know, nine in the morning.

SPEAKER_02: 29:13

Did you have a crew?

SPEAKER_01: 29:14

No, so all of those trips I just ran solo. The boat was was very easily set up to run just by myself. And then I would, you know, obviously a lot of these trips are for kids, right? They were for children, people were getting an activity to do for um for their family. So I'm taking mom, dad, you know, some 12-year-olds, maybe an eight-year-old, you know, and then after a while that that kind of started to eat on me a little bit toward the end. I felt more like Santa Claus, right? Where you know, I'm kind of part of the show, and they kind of, you know, they want to sit in your lap and hold the wheel and take the picture with the captain, those types of things, right? So so so now in the in the that and that was in the summer, and then the entire time that I ran that business, I also did uh deliveries in the winter. So when that when that business shut down, then I would just go move boats, right? So anybody that needed a boat moved, I would, I would try to get jobs uh, you know, here and there, and then finally my name got out a little bit more to where I was moving some of the same boats around, either to the either either to the Caribbean or over to you know just to Florida, South Florida, just repositioning boats basically because people wanted to have their boat in the sun in the winter. Uh New England boats, everybody wants to move. You were you're either going to pack your boat up in New England and put a cover on it to keep the snow the snow off of it, uh, or you're gonna take it somewhere south. And so that was where I came in, right? Was just moving the boats. And sometimes the owners would come along, uh, and that's where I got, you know, because I had already been with so many people before instructing people how to sail. And and this is not something that I'm an ASA certified sailor, I'm not an instructor, I've just got the miles, and I've seen a lot of people on boats and how they act and how they respond when certain things happen. So having that already under my belt and then doing the deliveries, especially with especially with an owner-assisted delivery, which I which should have always been charged more for. Um, you know, there's there's there's always that thing when you when you would when you deliver a boat for somebody and they're like, hey, I'd I'd like to come along, you're like, Well, you can, but it's just gonna be more money because then I have to deal with you. Yeah, because because then it turns into a training session, right?

SPEAKER_02: 31:35

You you're and do you have rules like you can't get drunk or you can't yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 31:41

So well anyway, any any kind of uh any kind of uh offshore passage, especially, um, there's no alcohol or anything like that on the boat that you know that we're consuming underway. Uh and on my current vessel on Libra, there's no drinking underway at all. I mean we do if we if we're at anchor or we're at a bar in town, or if it's before we before our trips, we always have a crew dinner, and I tell everybody like, look, you're on vacation, you know, let loose, have a good time, uh, but it's not spring break 1985 in Daytona Beach, right? So let's let's keep it a little a little sane. Um, but you know, a lot of these guys come from say they're coming from uh Minnesota or Wisconsin, and they're coming to the Caribbean in January and February. They're coming from zero degree weather to 85 degree weather, so it's it's a huge difference for them in climate. It's interesting to see how they deal with it too. I also have a a very long captain's letter of everything that I've uh dealt with over the years, and one of them is thou shalt not take their shirt off ever in the cockpit.

SPEAKER_02: 32:55

What guys and girls?

SPEAKER_01: 32:59

Well, yeah, let's just keep it as guys and girls. Because what happens when you live in a windy environment? Everybody's little chest hairs jump off and start flying in people's food. It's just Are you serious? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 33:16

I didn't know that. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 33:17

So like you know, when you're so when you share so on so on Libra, there's always typically eight of us, uh, myself, a mate, and then uh six guest crew members that are along to do training. And that's just part of my message. So one of them is you gotta get a pedicure. Everybody has to have a pedicure. If if you've never had a pedicure and it's your first time, you're gonna love it and you're gonna go back and get more of them because there was a specific time that I had a guy, so I had so Libra, you can't see it now, but you can you can see kind of the walkthrough uh on uh some of the Facebook videos that I've done here recently. I had a guy step over into the cockpit because it's kind of a deeper cockpit, and his he actually stabbed another guy right in his thigh with his toenail. And it was hard to get it to stop bleeding. And talk about disgusting and gross, right?

SPEAKER_02: 34:10

That couldn't have happened very much though.

SPEAKER_01: 34:12

I mean it only it only needed to happen once for me to for me to create a rule that says if you want to join the boat, then you need to get it pedicure. And I've actually I actually listed three times in a row and it says something like uh not just clip your toenails and just Well, it's like if you you know, if your feet look like a creature off of a Harry Potter movie because you've been hiding them under a desk for the last 30 years, then you probably need to get them done.

unknown: 34:41

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 34:41

So okay, so so you saw we talked about, you know, when we were texting yesterday or whenever you saw a gap that you could fill, right?

SPEAKER_01: 34:54

Yeah, I did. So one of my inspirations um was uh John Kreshmer. So John Kreshmer writes sailing books. Yep. John Kreshman writes sailing books, wonderful sailing books. Uh, if you haven't heard of them, look him up, buy all of his books, they're really great. And John Kreshmer has been is kind of the grandfather of this industry. Um and we have become friends over the years. I actually met him um right when COVID started. Uh, because in this industry we travel internationally almost every trip, right? We're typically changing countries uh as part of the process, you know. So part of my training is changing countries and teaching you how to check into another country. What do you do? How do you do it? You know, what are the do's, what are the don'ts. So and John runs very similar trips. We we almost run exactly the same trips. Uh it's and but he's been doing it for I don't know, early 90s. It it's been a really, really long time that he's been doing it. And he started, I believe, I believe that he started when he was doing it originally, he was doing deliveries. Uh where is he out of?

SPEAKER_02: 36:02

He may have said it. I I missed it.

SPEAKER_01: 36:04

So so right, so currently he's in the South Pacific right now, um, running passages there. So so he kind of he works just really all over the place. He has a place in Florida, um, and his uh his wife has a place in Paris that they go to quite a bit. But for the most part, John's boat is always on the move, just like Libra. So we're always going somewhere. If if we're not moving, then we're not making money. And I have I got two kids. I got a I have a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old. So this is by no means a way for me to round on my yacht, because that's what that is exactly what a lot of people think that uh happens out here on the water. It it couldn't be any further from the truth. Um, but back to my inspiration. So John does these trips and does training passages, and since I had done a bunch of deliveries and I had had lots of offshore experience uh just on my own, and also have had the people experience, which is a huge part of running an offshore passage. Um, you know, all of the day sales that I ran for that 10 or 12 year period, I learned how to read people, how to understand how to understand if they're comfortable, if they're not comfortable, if they're turning green, if they're about to puke on somebody, if I need to hold their hair back, if I need to go get a wet paper towel, if I need to get them a ginger rail. You learn all of these things just by being there in that situation, and you get to see how people react in different conditions. And so all of the first trips that I was taking, that those day sale trips with just families, those were little trips, right? I I never went more than you know five or ten miles offshore because it was not an offshore sale. This was mainly let's go show these people what a sailboat looks like, take them to see some dolphins. It was just a tour boat. And it run that way, and everybody had a great time. You know, Ray reviews, you could go look at Sail OB on TripAdvisor, and they're still running five-star reviews. It's one of the uh still still one of the top rated things to do in Orange Beach. But just having the just having the ability to kind of read the room is more than the sailing part. Because I can take anybody sailing, but I make sure that they come out the other end with whatever expectations that they wanted to get out of the trip, and I want to make sure that I put them in the right situation. Uh there was a you know, we can get into some of the weather things that I've been through, but in some circumstances sailing into the wind offshore doesn't work. We're not all in Volvo ocean racing boats, right? We're in heavy displacement boats, we are in cruising boats, we're in lighter boats that just take a pounding. So if you get into an ocean condition where you have and you need to go somewhere, but the wind is 20 knots on your nose, just say you're running true wind speeds, well now you're up, you know, now you're trying to point into this stuff, and the ocean is not like the bay. The ocean will have waves, so the waves just keep pushing you back. So no matter how many times that you think that you're gonna go upwind and you're just gonna tack to your location, that's fine in the bay where it's nice and smooth. But that doesn't always translate the bay is not always smooth. Yeah, yeah, and the bay is not always smooth, too. But yeah, you're you're not gonna you're not going to tack up through you're just not gonna go and tack in the six to eight foot sea state and not beat the crap out of everybody on board. It's gonna be scary for them. Them, right? It's gonna be they're not gonna be able to go to the head, they they're gonna have to sit on the floor and scoot to wherever they need to go, and it's just not worth it. So I always teach uh my my saying is SCS over SOS, and the SCS stands for safety, comfort, and then sailing. And so as long as you keep everything in that SCS order, then you should be able to prevent an SOS, right? So safety first, always, which should be everybody, right? That no matter what you're doing in life, you know, safety should be first. There's always an element of risk in everything that we do, but let's be as safe as we can. Comfort, there's no reason to be out there if you're not going to be comfortable, right? So bashing into 10 foot seas, trying to go upwind between islands in the Caribbean, it's just not fun. It's gonna be fun for about the first four minutes, yeah. And then and then the the next 12 to 18 hours across that channel are just gonna suck. And when you get to the other side, you've probably broke something. The entire boat's gonna look like it had a tornado that run through it, things are gonna be flying open. So that's why that sailing, you know, gentlemen never sail to weather. That's why. Because it doesn't really work, not in cruising boats. Like I said, these Volvo Ocean Racing guys that are 20 years old, 30 years old, go for it. If you want to go and be in an exposed cockpit and just take it in the face, and by all means, do it. But the guys that I take.

SPEAKER_02: 41:45

Well, so what would you say? What would you say of that you uh are trying to offer your clients just in a nutshell?

SPEAKER_01: 41:53

I'm trying to offer them a realistic experience, which I I can't express any more than once you join a trip on Libra, it is the real deal, right? We're gonna get there one way or the other, and I'm gonna teach you how to get there using that SCS system, right? That way, if we need to motor from point A to point B because we're gonna tear, you know, we're gonna just gonna beat everybody up, there's no reason to beat everybody up. It's not worth it. So if it's five miles and we're and we need to tack up wind in a 60-foot boat and we have a sea state coming at us, let's just get there in about 45 minutes instead of taking all day tacking back and forth into it into a sea state, right? So, and that's what most cruisers should do. Most cruisers either are going to wait until the weather window is so good that they're gonna motor anyway in very flat seas, or it's gonna be rough and they're not gonna go anyway. So on Libra, our trips are scheduled out you know, a year or two years in advance. We always sail in areas of the planet that are typically nice for the season. And and so, like right now.

SPEAKER_02: 43:15

Do you ever delay and say we get we need to wait until tomorrow or the next yeah?

SPEAKER_01: 43:19

So I so I always have at least two days built in for weather just in case there is some type of little system or uh just say a uh you know a really squally day or something like that, or it's blowing really hard. You know, down here in the Caribbean, we get Christmas winds, they can blow 30, 35 knots all day long, which is lately.

SPEAKER_02: 43:38

Let's say where you where you are, where are you right now?

SPEAKER_01: 43:41

I am in uh Christmas Cove in uh St. Thomas in the US VI, right off of uh Epstein's Islands, which is which is Little St. James and Great St. James. It's actually a beautiful anchorage here, and uh when I am when I uh frequent St. Thomas, I'm usually either here in Christmas Cove or in Water Island. The prevailing winds are out of the east and the Caribbean. We always have the trade winds out of the east, and so you're gonna want to be on the west side of something. Um, and so there's a nice little cove here on the west side of little St. James.

SPEAKER_02: 44:16

Oh, okay. So um what do you think surprises most people about offshore sailing once they step on board? Or the newbies, the dreamers?

SPEAKER_01: 44:26

The motion.

SPEAKER_02: 44:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 44:28

The mo the motion never stops. Right. So if you if you join a trip, there's so I run really two types of trips. Uh half it's about half and half, and most and my Caribbean trips all have an aspect of offshore sailing to them. But remember, we can see every island from every island, right? So it's not like we're out of sight of land going across the horizon. You just can't get far enough far enough away from something down there to make it disappear. Um, so those trips we always add night sails, so we sail at night uh you know along the coast of the islands. Um, and then the offshore aspect, like just so just the trip that you just showed the video of where we were in light air. So that trip was from Bermuda to St. Thomas, which is where I'm at now. That was about 900 miles. So I mean that's a that's a proper ocean passage, right? And we did that in super light air. Uh we we didn't have any wind over 15 knots the entire time of that trip, which was which the previous trip where we had you know winds up to 60 knots, this was a break. It was I I deserve to have a light air sail for 900 miles. It was really nice. And you know, some of the days there's no wind. So what do you do? Are you just gonna sit there and bob around? No, you're gonna crank the motor up, charge your batteries, and drive on south.

SPEAKER_02: 45:52

So did people enjoy that trip?

SPEAKER_01: 45:55

Yes, yeah, it's extremely.

SPEAKER_02: 45:57

That trip was uh You'd get spoiled in something like that.

SPEAKER_01: 46:01

That that was a that whole trip was a champagne trip. Um the boat was never healed, there was never any galley, you know, food came flying out of the galley, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, everything was prepared and cooked. Nothing had nothing had to be pre-made.

SPEAKER_03: 46:18

Who's making it?

SPEAKER_01: 46:18

So I have uh so right now, currently I have a a Brooke uh name uh mate named Brooke. Um she works on tall ships in New York City, and she tumps she comes on probably I'd say 80% of the passages right now. And then I have another guy named Gio that does some of the other passages with me, just depends on how their schedules work out because it's it's hard for me to keep somebody full time on the boat. Um, you know, I you know I live here, right? This is kind of my dwelling and my home.

SPEAKER_02: 46:49

Um you want it to go away once all the cut claims.

SPEAKER_01: 46:52

Well, yeah, you know, once everything's with, everybody kind of goes their separate ways, and then I kind of get my house back. Which then I'm usually like tearing something apart just to fix it, you know, just from the previous trips. So so yeah, it's uh so it's a real experience.

SPEAKER_02: 47:07

I mean, they're getting they're getting three meals and and they're working too, like the the people, this is a working trip, right?

SPEAKER_01: 47:15

This is yeah, this is a working trip. They they learn by either observing or doing uh, especially like this light air trip. So this light air trip where we're flying these spinnakers way out and trimming these things, um, and when I say spinnakers, nobody really flies a symmetrical spinnaker much anymore unless you're on a catamaran. I'm talking about an asymmetrical spinnaker, uh, which is just like a big code zero or or or however you want to define your sails on your boat. So getting those up in the air with a kind of a green crew, everybody has a job, right? So I don't use a sock. Uh if you are a cruiser and you will fly your asymmetrical, I recommend getting a sock. It's an easy way to to hoist and douse your spinnaker, and it makes things very easy when you're short-handed because if you're cruising, there's normally just a couple of you, maybe two or three. Uh but on my boat, yeah, or yeah, or like you just one, right? So a sock is is a great tool. Um and but we don't use one, and I'll and the reason that I don't use a sock is so people can understand the physics of actually deploying a sail, using the main sail to block the wind off of it, right? So you can hoist it, and then you know, some sometimes I blow people's minds because I say, remember, we're not really on a sailboat. There is a motor here, too. So if we need to get the sail up, we don't have to be, you know, we're not out there to prove anything, right? We know how to we know how to sail, right? So if I want to get the spinnaker up in the air and it's blowing a little bit, you know, obviously if we're gonna be flying these things, that the air is gonna be kind of light. So why not use the motor just a little bit, right? To speed the boat up, put the spinnaker behind the main, hoist it and in very little to no wind because you're kind of matching it with the motor RPM, and then back off and then come up into the wind and let it fill full of air that way, instead of trying to go out there and fight things and winch and handles and all these other things. So I teach people how to operate their boat, operate their vessel safely, um, and you use all the tools that you have. If somebody falls overboard and you're in the middle of the ocean, you don't go do a figure eight. You're in a motorboat at that point. That's it this is another ASA thing. But they teach that on kill boats, and I understand that there are no motors and in the bay. But there's a lot of people that think that if you have a man overboard, that you're that you're gonna take this 60-foot boat and start doing figure eights out there. Man, if if you if I if I fell off the boat and you started doing figure eights out there, if I got back on the boat safely, I'm just gonna beat the shit out of somebody. You're not there sailing around doing figure eights. Look, man, heave to right immediately. If somebody goes overboard, heave to immediately, turn your bow through the wind. You should never be more than like 30 yards from your from your victim. Uh heaving to is the way of doing.

SPEAKER_02: 50:30

All right. So tell me about you've seen you've taken a lot of people out, a lot of type different types of people, different levels of skills and everything. Tell me about a transformation you've seen in somebody that is like, oh, this guy or this this girl, this couple, they're gonna they're gonna be into it.

SPEAKER_01: 50:48

So the so one of the so one of the best feel goods that I ever have is because I'm in the Caribbean every year.

SPEAKER_02: 50:57

Um and you spend the winters there and then you go up north, right?

SPEAKER_01: 51:01

For yeah, so so I'll either go to New England or we'll go to the med. So one of the two. Since COVID, since COVID happened, I haven't been back over to the med.

unknown: 51:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 51:09

Um I started running out of New England because it was US, I'm U.S. flagged, it was easy to easy to operate there. Um, and the best thing about having people on on board my vessel that I teach how to cruise is seeing them anchored beside me on their boat. Right. So yeah, yeah. So they they have come through my program, which is when when I say program, I mean they have they have come with a sale with myself or maybe multiple sales, just depending on, you know, I have a lot of guys that don't sell Caribbean sales, to be clear, you're it's not a it's not an official school, they're not gonna get a certification. Nope.

SPEAKER_02: 51:52

Um, but they're gonna they're gonna have the skills.

SPEAKER_01: 51:55

Right. And most there there are so there's only two people that do this. So myself and John Kreshman.

SPEAKER_02: 52:02

They're in Ireland Spirit who's watching, he says um you and John are unique captains, so I think that yeah, he must have heard of John.

SPEAKER_01: 52:11

Yeah, and when I when I say that we're the only two, that that's not a hundred percent accurate, right? I mean we're the only two no no U.S. flag vessels. Okay. So in the industry itself in the States, it's very hard to kind of get an offshore sailing program going. And it's and it has to do with licensing and the Coast Guard and all these other things. And that's a whole nother hour-long conversation about STCWs and the licensing that you have to have to be able to take a paid trip from point A to point B across international waters and more than 200 miles offshore because a hundred, you know, a regular captain has a hundred-ton master captain, it's near coastal, they're all near coastal, they're all 200 miles from shore, and it doesn't mean 200 miles from Taiwan, it means 200 miles from a U.S. Coast Guard district. Uh, so it doesn't mean 200 miles out in the ocean, it just means coastal America. Uh, so that's what all those licenses are for. To get an oceans endorsement, which you can, uh, you can get an ocean endorsement on your license, you just have to take a few more tests. It's no different than getting a ship's license. The only difference is tonnage. And so those things are not for most people, it's expensive. It's expensive to do. I probably have somewhere upwards of about$30 something, thousand dollars in my license, uh, you know, over a period of time, too. Um, so there so there's other companies that are all foreign flagged, and the reason that they flag foreign is because they don't really have anyone that they report to. Um, and I say that loosely because they do. So they use Yachtmaster's MCA commercially endorsed to carry paying passengers, but there's not a whole lot of oversight, uh, and they run all over the world with these licenses. And it's more of a I don't want to insult anybody that has any of these things, but the Yachtmaster program is a group for a great program, um, and it is very comparable to an ASA type training program where you have tests, schools, practical experience, you have to go out on a boat, you have to show people all these other things. The only problem is ASA is not a commercially endorsed license, right? You can't go get your ASA license and then take paying passengers. But with an MCA or yachtmasters, you can. And so as the the boats are flagged internationally, like the Cayman Islands, any kind of UK area, right? Um you're not limited to six, which is the biggest hurdle. I wouldn't say hurdle, but that's the biggest limitation to being US flagged, is I'm limited to six. And I wouldn't want to take more than six anyway. So all the European operators can take up to 12. So there are boats. Yeah, there are boats no bigger than Libra that have 14 people.

SPEAKER_02: 55:21

Six is a lot. Yeah, 14 people are responsible for six lives. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 55:25

Yeah, it is. And so and some of them are out there right now across the Atlantic in the Ark. Uh, there's uh, let's see, there's a Pangea Exploration. Uh they're out of California, but they're flagged Cayman Island. Um Andy Shell, which used to be stateside, he's now you know moved to uh Sweden and has his boats all English registered, as far as I know, and just from you know browsing around. Uh and then there's Rubicon 3, which has two old race boats that they run. Um and these are all, like I said, these are all foreign operators. So in total, uh there's like Skip Novak, if you want to do some really hardcore sailing and some really remote places, then you can join Skip Novak. Um and Skip Novak's a very similar person to like John Kreshmer. He's been in it for a long time. Uh he knows what boats need. He's a great resource. Uh, so if you haven't heard of Skip Novak, look him up. Um, and I've had guys that come with me that have sailed with a majority of a majority of all of these operators. Um and because that's what they do.

SPEAKER_02: 56:30

It's it's that's that's all they want to do, is just they don't want to own a boat or anything.

SPEAKER_01: 56:34

They don't want to own a boat. They they've already owned their boat. It's uh so to give you an example, if you were in New England and you wanted a typical 40 foot, 45, 42 foot cruiser, so you're you have a season there, which is about five or six months max, and you have a slip and you store it. You're in without any boat projects for just your slip and your insurance, you're in fifteen, eighteen grand a year on the low end.

SPEAKER_02: 57:12

And you can't use it for all those months.

SPEAKER_01: 57:15

Yeah, and it's and half of it it's covered, right? Yeah, so to own a boat just to own it, that doesn't this is no maintenance, this is no fuel, this is no taking it out and putting new sails on it. To just own the boat, you're gonna spend at least fifteen thousand dollars a year in the New England area to have a boat. That's before you even take it out of the slip and go sail. And so a lot of people look at that amount, and so most of my trips are around you know, anywhere from 3,500 to up, right? I mean, our Atlantic crossings are somewhere around 135, I think, or 14.

SPEAKER_02: 57:50

But you know, yeah, give me give me some time frames on that. Like um this is the and you said you've got a couple of uh places that to be filled on your Caribbean, on your next Caribbean trip.

SPEAKER_01: 58:04

Yeah, I have if you if you pull up celllibra.com, um, I have the on the passages page, it gives the amount of bunks that I have available. Some of them are uh waitlisted, uh, which just which just means that they're booked and people are waitlisted, you know. Right. Um and usually what happens is the closer the time to the trip, they get filled up by people booking last minute. But for the Caribbean trips, those are the ones that people think are hard logistically, but they couldn't really be any more easy. You fly into one location and you fly out of another location, and so I base these trips on going to populated areas and populated airports, uh, and then so like Grenada is the most southern island in the eastern chain besides Trinidad and Tobago. Um, so that's where we kind of start there, and then we go to St. Martin. So these Caribbean trips are around 500 miles a trip. We stop, you know, at least three times up and down the island chain. It just depends on which island I want to stop at at the time. It could either be Dominica, it could be Martinique, it could be anything. Um, and then we're in St. Martin, so I so I kind of do St. Martin to Grenada about six times the season because you can see the entire Eastern Caribbean in one week. And currently with and currently we're the operator that I know of that that does that, right? There's a lot of other sailing schools in the Caribbean, and you're gonna and you're gonna fly into Antigua and you're gonna go sail around Antigua and maybe go over to Montserrat or maybe go down to Guadalupe, and then you're gonna go back to Antigua and fly out. So being able to take a a destination trip, right? So your destination trip is I fly into Grenada and I don't once I leave Grenada I'm not coming back. I get to I I really get to sail off over the horizon. And and then we get to St. Martin and then it's a whole you know it's a whole nother experience. So it's it's kind of like when I did my day sale business where I was in and out of the dock, same dock, same place all the time. And it's just like a lot of of bay sailors that are on the Chesapeake that are in New England they're going to go and they're going to sail in an area but they're typically always going to end up going back to where they started from. And that's what one thing that sets us apart is we're going to pick you up in one spot and then take you to a completely different one. And most and my shortest trips are my little seminars that I do here in the Virgin Islands which these are not really I would say an offshore trip. This is just like an intro to cruising in the Virgin Islands. I have one of those starting next week and then I have a New Year's trip which is typically my New Year's trips are typically full of uh alumni that have been on sales with me in the past and they just want to get away from the cold and come be on the boat for a week uh just around the Virgin Islands. And then after that things get a little bit distance. Yeah and then we go to Grenada and and now we have warships and we have uh aircraft carriers and all kinds of stuff south of us here to hang out with.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:29

Okay so um Island Spirit wants to know in St. Martin do you check in Dutch or French side?

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:36

So we we have done both um I prefer the Dutch side it's uh it is a little bit more expensive on the Dutch side the French side I typically stay at uh at a marina um you there is a mooring field out there that you can stay in you can anchor uh but things have been a little bit more restrictive over the past few years so St. Martin in the Caribbean is probably one in my opinion is probably one of the best places to get shit done on your boat.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:09

That's what they say that's what that's what um Island Spirit says because there you can buy things there they've got people there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:15

There's people there to do things there's material there there and it's all reasonably priced it's not you know it's not extravagantly expensive or anything. And then if you wanted to go for a day sale or something you could go to St. Bart's St. Bart's is only like 20 miles away you can go there. So the Dutch side I I go to a place so the cruisers that frequent St. Martin typically always end up at Lagoonies and Lagoonies is a restaurant slash marina and if you if you pull up uh if you're able to pull up Lagoonies on your Google Earth there I can show you when you zoom in how many boat uh supply places there are and and think of think of a West Bream but it's not West Marine we have island water world we have budget marine we have electro we have there's a Yanmar there's a North sales distributor there's FKG rigging since I already have this pulled up I want to go ahead and show your your um anchorage so this is where this is where you are right now yep right there yeah and so that little uh that little orange dot is the pizza boat that's pizza pie yeah that that that's something that Island Spirit just mentioned yep pizza pie is I actually had some uh pizza for them yesterday I'm just out of here I mean honestly I'm out here by myself on the boat uh just enjoying the the weather um a little downtime before I have my next crew that comes in uh next on the 11th okay and that's just a long weekend trip so we're going to St. Martin here yeah so go to St. Martin and then I'll I'll show you kind of where to zoom in there so you can see those borders so that border one's the French side the north is the French side the south is the Dutch side so that bay that's right in the middle that you see there that little cove that's cut out that's the entrance so move your mouse down just a tad and this is the lagoon. Yeah that that in there is the lagoon and then out north of that outside is a mooring field you can moor in the lagoon also yep and then up to the right of that screen there's a marina and that's usually where I um keep dragging a little bit more and you'll see it there. So that little round marina there. Yep yeah so I stay I stay in there quite often it's a beautiful place. They haven't had power there they haven't had power there in quite a while because of the hurricane they're redoing it all but they got it sorted up by now. So this is the French side it's and it's it's very French.

SPEAKER_02: 1:05:03

You can go down get your baguettes and pastries and but don't you get your stuff in the Dutch side don't you buy your stuff down here?

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:12

Yeah there is an yeah there's an island water world there so on the Dutch side if you just keep going down a little bit I'll show you where Lagoonies is. If you type in Lagoonies it'll just take you right to it's bistro and bar yep is that it okay yeah that's it and so Lagoonies is the cruiser hangout so if you zoom in kind of right there you can see it all of these little bubbles will start popping up around there and they're all marine related services there's rigging shops custom welding there's a North sales uh dealer there you know land and and they have like swap meets on Saturdays where cruisers bring in you know all of the stuff that they've dug out of their boat that they've been hauling around for the last 10 years that they finally decided they didn't need so they have kind of like a little swap meet there. And so I'll stay at that marina and uh and I try to if you if you see the pier that goes out there there's a T dock on the end. So scroll you you kind of lost it it's back no no it's the back uh right no right there yeah so that T dock right there is this you right here that yeah that's yeah it probably could be so this is a concrete that's a concrete dock and I actually like the slip that's on the inside of that T right there. And so when I say yeah so when I say uh St. Martin is a great place to get shit done if you needed to have some dock time boat at a place where people could access it either to fix rigging fix your engine uh you know anything this kind of maintenance oriented you know they're not gonna let you sand the deck of your boat there and paint it right it's not it's not that type of place but it is a great place to work on stuff and have access to all of those buildings that you see over there are all marine later marine related buildings and they all cater to uh cruisers mostly cool and then Lagoonies is a great restaurant so not only are you at a good spot there's 24 hour security and they have a good restaurant on site and there's other there's a market walking distance there's a huge ace hardware that was basically like a Home Depot uh but it's probably one of the largest ACE hardware that I've ever seen and that's within walking distance everything's kind of within walking distance if you like to walk uh if you're gonna be hauling a table saw back to the dock then you might rent a car and renting and renting cars in St. Martin is very easy and it's not very expensive at all. I think when I when I rent a car my kids come for spring break so I always try to line up my schedule to where when my kids are off for their spring break and everybody goes to Orange Beach they leave and they come to St. Martin um your kids are in Orange Beach? Yeah my kids uh yeah my kids still live in Orange Beach. Like I said they're 15 and 17 and uh my daughter is a senior in high school this year and so they're actually going to come to St. Thomas for Christmas which has been kind of a tradition for about the past five years. And my son likes to dive so my brother has a dive shop here in St. Thomas divers and so so he's here uh you know riding around I'm I'm here anchored in the cove and he's out here almost every day bringing his uh tour groups out to you know either do dive instruction or uh snorkeling or something like that.

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:46

Well it's good that you've got family there. Yeah it islands for it says Lagoonie stuff is French that's why it's so good. It is it is good okay so tell me about when you get new people on the boat how do you um you said you're really good at at reading people which is a good trait to have in this situation. So do you ever um how do you instill confidence in people?

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:12

You must be really interested to begin with but then you probably get people like wow this is not really what I expected right and usually the ones that are that think that it's not what they expected because I am either the creator or the destroyer of dreams it's one it's one of the it's one of the two right so so I so you're either going to come along and have the bug already and enjoy the trip or you're probably gonna be drug along with your spouse thinking that I'm gonna force this into them and it's just not going to be what I need right so and and I try to vet those types of people out even before it happens. Oh how do you do that? I always have a phone call so so I always so anytime somebody signs up for a treat so remember I only take about a hundred and twenty people a year um total right if I'm if I have if my schedule's just wall to wall trips then that's about 120 people a year. So I most I mean half of the people that come with me have already sailed with me so I know them so I'm not really that worried about them.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:21

You have that many repeats?

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:23

Wow yeah it's probably somewhere in the 30 30 to 40% at least range. At least almost every trip I have two guys that have sailed with me. And and that says something there. I mean I at least they're coming back you know that's that's one good thing. But the people that it's not really for are the people that typically get they're on a trip that's shorter like the passage the trip may be a week long but the Caribbean trips may be where it's rough between the islands right because you're gonna sail in the lee of the island and it's gonna be smooth water. And then between the islands you get the full force of the trade winds and the current and the waves and everything else and then maybe they're sick during that time. So I can't really control people's motion sickness although we do recommend lots of uh remedies for it that they can either take or not but the you know the the spouses are probably the ones that they it either creates a spark where they're totally engaged because they've been watching YouTube videos they're wanting to really give it a try they're getting close to retirement maybe and they want to say okay before we go drop I mean nowadays before we go drop a half a million dollars or more on a boat let's go see what it's like you know and maybe ASA classes. I I have a ton of people that have gone through ASA um but you know there's limitations to all the ASA schools so you can only do so much and most of the ASA schools that do their I forget the number of the class but just the offshore part it's an overnight sail right yeah it they the offshore part of the ASA is we leave the dock we go out sail overnight and then we come back to the dock the next day that's most of what the ASA training is for the offshore offshore part and so when you get put on a boat that's going to leave from one location and end up at another destination you're going to get different weather you're gonna get squalls you're gonna get things that aren't controlled because we sail on a schedule but we do sail on a schedule during the times of the year where it's you know nice um so we wouldn't be in the Caribbean in the summertime sailing around during hurricane season we're gonna go somewhere where the hurricanes don't go which is like New England or Europe to the med or something like that. But these people that come along most of the time leave with that was a very spectacular opportunity to be able to experience this point A to point B destination they feel like they've conquered something inside them right because even the normal sailors that sail every weekend they're still going back to the same spot they start and stop at the same dock. Right. And so taking that leap to where you're going from one location to another flying out of a different airport checking into another country and doing all of the things that you would do as a cruiser doing all of those things in a week for the first time is either awe inspiring or way too much. You know so and also tell people you know because we do cover a lot of miles I mean we cover anywhere from 15 to 1800 miles a year mostly and out of that time you know this boat is just constantly in motion and the people that get sick are the ones that have the roughest time. And it's not it's not that it's like 20 foot seas either right it's just the rhythm of the boat. So every sailboat rides a little differently no matter what boat it is it could be the sail plan it could be the sail shape or the hull shape but if you're if you don't get sick on your bay boat even in three or four foot seas in the Chesapeake and three or four foot seas on Libra maybe you get sick because it's just a different feel. So they come with the expectation that it's going to be similar to what they've been doing and in some circumstances it is but sometimes it's not and so that's that's the ones that they step back and they go wow you know I was just sick for three days and then I'm always I always tell them I'm saying well it doesn't matter if you got sick for three days the fourth day is going to be the day that gets better because most people take at least two days to get into the rhythm of a passage right we do a we do a three on six off 24 hours a day so every day you're you're on watch for three hours and then you're off for six hours and we do it in pairs. And so you have a watch partner and that's your watch partner for the trip. On long passages where for doing Atlantic crossings or like a Bermuda to St. Thomas you know after everybody's familiar with the instruments the gauges the autopilots the sail plan and how the boat operates then maybe we do individual watches where we do three on eighteen off I mean you know so you're really you can really stretch it out when you have a large off wow yeah when you when you when you double the amount of people it it's uh 12 off but yeah we we've done the Atlantic uh where we did four hour watches and then we had like 24 hours off it was what gets what gets you excited like I mean you've been doing this a while now so you you obviously are are happy with it what is what's what excites you when you're teaching these people what when so when what makes you happy what makes me happy is when I can see a spark ignite in somebody and it's very for me it's very noticeable because I've seen it so many times so I'll put them behind the wheel um and turn the engine off yeah the the engine the engine's off and then that first good puff of wind especially down here in the Caribbean where we're sailing in 20 knot trades all the time and the boat heals over just a little bit and they get that little that that little jolt of nervousness because of the heel and I say look that's just how right the this the boat is shaped to ride that way you know Libra has kind of a a shear up bow and a shear stern right so when it heals over the water line's longer right that was the way that Bill Tripp Jr. was able to kind of cheat the rules back there in the CCA rules um was by using the heel to you know because to make a vessel go to make a displacement vessel go faster you have to have a longer water line and that's a way to cheat the rules right so when the when the boat heals over it instantly gets longer so as it sits flat in the water maybe you have a this boat has a 42 foot water line but when it heals over then I can get 57 foot of water line.

SPEAKER_02: 1:17:40

Well when you you were talking about that moment I remember I remember that moment well I was uh I was taking uh 101 and 103 in Pensacola right and we turned off the engine and uh was that was that with Lanier no I didn't do um but it it and then it caught the wind and I was at the the helm and I was like oh my gosh yep I know I know exactly what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:07

Yeah so it's like we are moving and the it's wind it the the wind moving it there's something about that the power of mother nature is amazing and uh and and being able to kind of an independent feeling it was kind of yeah empowering and a lot of times I just stand back and shut up and let people enjoy it which sometimes it's hard for me to do but um you know that first big puff thank you Jessica just wanted to comment on somebody yeah that that first big puff of wind that somebody feels especially when they're behind the wheel and they and they feel you know Libra is a large vessel but we don't have hydraulic steering we have cable steering so you can feel the rudder and the the rudder is the size of a barn door. So did some do you ever see anybody go what's the big deal no not not really I've never I've never really seen I've never really had that I have a lot of people that you know hand steering is the devil right you know like who who in their right mind would want to hand steer anything when you have an autopilot yeah of course we have an autopilot and we use it all the time because hand steering is fun and it's great but it's not great to do your whole watch because then you just get wore out and I always feel like a rested crew is a more responsive crew. Sure. So you can hand steer all you want on Libra. You can come on a trip if you want to hand steer your whole watch go for it. I'm not gonna hold you back but if you want to use the autopilot I'm not the one that's gonna go no no no no we're learning you got to hand steer see I'm not teaching I'm not teaching you how to sail right I'm teaching you how to navigate your boat safely from point A to point B using All of the available tools that a normal cruising boat should have. One of those, which most people forget about, is an engine. Right? Just like if you have a man overboard situation, heave to start the engine.

SPEAKER_03: 1:20:14

Save the person's life.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:16

Yeah, save the person's life. Don't go shooting off, start doing figure eights because you think that that's what you're supposed to do. Right. And and in a lot of times those things have just been beat into people's heads for so long that they they really do forget that cruising boats are motorboats. You really are on a motorboat. We're not all out here to prove anything. Um it's just like, yeah, so yes, we do celestial navigation, we can I can teach you how to do a sun sighting, and we can get really close to where we're at. But it's 2025. So if I get hit by lightning, right, and every piece of electronic device on this boat gets fried, then I probably have a phone in my pocket. You probably have a phone in your pocket. The other seven people probably have a phone in their pocket. And it's a few. So I'm not saying that you don't need to know how to navigate. Right. And guess what happens? You're not gonna run over an island in the middle of the night. Because there's people on there's people everywhere now, and there's streetlights and cars and all kinds of things traveling up and down the road. So it's not like it's master and commander, right? You're not just gonna happen up onto something in the middle of the night that's not really Mark. You're always gonna kind of know generally where you're at. And just if I had to do say I was in if I was transiting between Bermuda and the Caribbean, Bermuda's a really small island to hit. Uh just say I was halfway, so I'm about 400 miles. I just know that if I just drove west, that in about three days I should see some lights of the Turks and Caicos.

SPEAKER_02: 1:22:13

Sound like Captain Ron.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:14

Nassau. Yeah. Pull over and ask for directions. You don't know how to get there, just pull over and ask for directions. You're not ever going to get lost. I did have a guy that was really worried about getting lost, and he was on the Caribbean trip, and and we would get to the end of the island, and I would point and I would say, Look, the next island after Guadeloupe is Montserrat. And you can see Montserrat from Guadeloupe, right? I've I'm eating my French baguette that I got from De Gea, which is the most northern anchorage there. So we're pulling out, and I can see Montserrat, and there's you know, a little smokestack coming out of the volcano. And then to the right, just a little bit. Yeah, is Antigua. And Antigua is a little a little uh shore of an island, but you can still see it off in the distance. And when you're sailing through all these areas at night, because we do do a lot of night passages and a lot of night sailing, because that's something that people want to experience that they don't get to experience. Night sailing is mystical to a lot of people, and the Caribbean You see the stars. You you do get to see the stars, but you also see the lights of all the islands, and then you see every cruise ship on the planet does circles all night long. All the cruise ships do circles.

SPEAKER_02: 1:23:26

Circles?

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:27

Because yeah, because going from St. Martin to just just say that you're going from St. Thomas to St. Martin, it's 75 miles.

SPEAKER_02: 1:23:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:40

Everything is so like if you're going to St. Thomas to St. Croix, right? It's 40 miles. So you have to sit there and run that casino all night long. And so to do that, they just literally do circles. And so you'll be in the Caribbean sailing around, and you'd be like, okay, now, you know, we're navigating in this area where we have these cruise ships, and and they're just changing they constantly are changing course, not necessarily going anywhere, they're just running the clock because they want to give the people on those cruise ships the perception that they've been on a long voyage, and now they have arrived at a new destination in the morning where they get up and they go do their yeah. I don't I don't know what people do on cruises, but apparently they get on buses and get on.

SPEAKER_02: 1:24:26

I've never been on one.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:27

Yeah, they've been able to.

SPEAKER_02: 1:24:28

Okay, so Sail Libra has a reputation for creating a tight community. And you've just talked about some of the things like you have your trips where everybody comes back and and you stay in touch, they they they continue to ask for advice and everything. So what do you think? You might you're doing something right to do this. So w what do you think makes the crew uh of the guests connect so deeply offshore?

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:56

So I'm not a uh so you're not ever gonna see me with a pen and a piece of paper, you know, uh telling you, giving you notes on what to do. Right? I I teach by doing or by showing you how things are done. So there's a lot of people out there that once you're shoved, you know, once a book gets shoved in your face, you just lose interest. Right. Yeah, yeah, you you you just lose interest and you're like, you know what? I I mean I I I learned how to read when I was five, but how many books have I really picked up? Now technical manuals, I'm all in, right? But like stories and you know, this, that, and the other. I never wanted to create a program that was based on me handing you a pamphlet to start the trip, right? I have a captain's letter that tells you to get a pedicure. That's really the extent, right? And that you know, and then it says that in there, and it says the reasons why. So there's there's that aspect of I teach by doing and putting you in uncomfortable situations. So if you call or you contact me and you say, Look, I want to get this type of experience, then I have a trip that will probably fulfill that, right? Given the right weather conditions and everything else.

SPEAKER_02: 1:26:17

So you you might tell someone that trip doesn't sound like it's good for you. So I think each other exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:23

Yeah, like so so the two trips that are coming up. So I have a weekend seminar starting on the 11th, and then I have a New Year's trip. Those two trips are strictly around the U.S. Virgin Islands. We don't go to the BVI, and then we choose our destinations, and I can see every US Virgin Island from where I'm sitting, right here in Christmas.

SPEAKER_02: 1:26:42

More pleasurable. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:44

Yeah, the longest trip that we could do would be to St. Croix, which is about 45 miles, which is a lovely sail, right? 45 miles, you know, your six hours, right? You know, this boat goes seven to ten nights, you know, depending on the seven to ten, really, yeah. And then and then and then that way you can get a good feel for what ocean sailing's like, because between here and St. Croix is the proper Caribbean Sea. I mean, there's not a whole lot protecting you out there. So you do get those, but it's still close. So in that week, during the seminar, I probably won't go more than 150 miles, which is still about four times as much as most of the boats that are around here go. So, so I don't if if you've never really been in the Virgin Islands, it's like a litter box, right? There's cats everywhere. There are very few monoholes that do anything anymore in the Caribbean. The whole place is a giant litter box. The BBI is nothing but a litter box. There's cats everywhere. And so you pull into a cove, and it's gonna be all cats on mooring balls. And those those those are called term charters, and term charters are you get a captain and a mate, and they peak, you know, you get your little umbrella and your drink, and you know, they're kind of wooing you for the whole week and showing you all the sights and things, but you're typically going from one bar to the next or one restaurant to the next. You know, that that's your week. And it's not very far. Most people go less than 50 miles uh in their Virgin Island trips. And Anagata, for a lot of people, especially first timers that have come that come to like the BBI, um, that's a big trip. So Anagata is about, I think it's about 25 miles or so north of Tortola, north of Virgin Gorda. And so it's just and it's kind of flat, so it's just out of sight of land, or just out of sight until you get you know most of the way there. Um, and that's a big deal for people to to do that. Um, but those trips are very different than what I do. So what sets me apart from those trips is you're participating on my boat, you're gonna be the one pulling up the sail, you're gonna be the one trimming the sail. And when I say trim the sail, you know, uh I mean adjust the sail, whether it needs to come in or out, and we'll talk through those things. So if we're in a certain C state, so there's so there are telltales on sails, right? And they tell you how the wind's flowing across your sail. And most people don't know that they don't always have to be right, right? Because if you're sailing and you're heeled over and everything's perfect, except for you're heeled over, and it's a little uncomfortable, just ease off, ease off the seats a little bit. Yeah, ease off the main, ease off the jib, stand your boat up a little bit more upright. Maybe you lose a half of speed, but we're not in a race, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:29:48

The BBIs are okay. I I don't know if you can see at the bottom of your screen. The BBIs are wrecked by charter cuts.

SPEAKER_01: 1:29:54

Yeah, yeah, not to not to mention we are we arrested the uh one of the heads of government there a couple of years ago, and they sent in a whole nother interim government. The uh the BBIs are are a totally different topic. They've they've raised their rates this just this past year for as the Bahamas too. For yeah, it's very similar to what the Bahamas have done. Uh I think it's a little bit more. So for me to take my group to uh the BBI on this boat, with it being 60 feet, with eight of us total, I would have to pay somewhere close to about$1,500 for that week for just that one trip. If I leave and then come back with another group, I have to pay that all over again. So it's not like you get six months, right? I'm I'm not a cruiser, I'm not coming in on my own boat, I'm a commercial operation as far as their computer. So, and there's a lot of operators that were in the USVI uh because the airport is in the USVI, and now they've moved their operation over to the BBI strictly because once you're there, you don't pay the fee.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:02

Right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:03

So they're just they're basing out of the BBI now.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:05

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:06

Uh the only bad thing about the BBI is there's no airport. I mean, there is a little airport, but it doesn't take the amount of traffic that St. Thomas does. So people fly into St. Thomas, they take a taxi over to the ferry terminal, they get the ferry terminal, and then they go to the BBI on a ferry. It takes two hours and you're done.

SPEAKER_02: 1:31:23

Okay. All right, so we have been on here now for an hour and a half. So I'm gonna before we wrap it up, I could we could sit here and talk forever.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:33

But yeah, I think I got a whole list. We hadn't even we hadn't even we hadn't gotten to Cuba, we hadn't got the to the Guadalupe seasickness uh thing. We'll do another one. Yeah, we'll do another one.

SPEAKER_02: 1:31:46

Yeah, yeah. So I want to do a little just a short rapid fire round. Some quick, simple, simple answers. Um favorite passage you've ever sailed.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:58

Uh favorite passage I've ever sailed. So there's that's a two-part question. And I think that they just happened. So my new port to Bermuda, that document that I had that you were reading, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:32:12

It's not it's not a quick answer, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:14

So that so that passage was a heavy weather passage, and it sold as a heavy weather passage, and the people that signed up knew it was a heavy weather passage, and and we were able to sail in fifty nights of wind, and um we had seas, we had seas over twenty feet, such and which is a lot of people would sail their whole life and never find themselves in that experience. And it just happened to be that I had the exact right combination of crew members that were able to take everything in stride, keep a very positive attitude, no matter what was happening around us.

SPEAKER_02: 1:32:51

Um these were probably experienced sailors that were on on board, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:55

Not at all. So, you know, they they're one of the guys is a one of the guys is a repeat. Now, some of them have, you know, they're lake sailors, right? They're they're bay sailors, lake sailors. They're not uh some of them have smaller boats in the 20 to 30 feet range, but not anything that they that they've ever taken over the horizon. So these are all you know coastal and bay sailors. So these guys got their money's worth. I mean, they really got their money's worth.

SPEAKER_02: 1:33:22

So being able to sail and yeah, you said the winds were up to 70 knots.

SPEAKER_01: 1:33:27

So when we left, uh our highest ghost, our highest gust was 74 knots. Um, but that was we were on a mooring ball in Black Island, uh, waiting for this.

SPEAKER_02: 1:33:38

Isn't that Rhode Island? That's off of Rhode Island?

SPEAKER_01: 1:33:41

Yeah, yeah, Black Island's off of Rhode Island. Yeah. Um, just directly across from Montauk, which is uh the tip of Long Island, New York, there. So we were actually planned and stationed up there waiting for this weather system to pass, and then we rode that that front down to Bermuda, and then there was a lull between, and then we got another front. We were totally expanded. Uh we just straight line, you know, we just had more winds for a long same period than we were going to. And so that built the sea state well over 20 feet. And so, and so during that storm, that's the one that uh, you know, there was a cat that sank, um, that they were all life flighted off. The Coast Guard came and picked them up. But they were I don't know, they were hundreds of miles away from us, uh, kind of coming down the coast uh when that happened. But it was the same system. So we so we had you know 400, 500 miles of fetch for that sea state to build on us. We'd already crossed the Gulf Stream, we'd already passed that, and that's a great article. I'll I'll put that on the website for people to uh read. There's actually a Facebook post about it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:34:46

So seeing all who you wrote that article for?

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:49

Uh well I've I wrote it for my followers, so I don't do a whole lot of writing, um, but I do have a lot of experiences, and so later in life, I mean, I don't even know where I left my toothbrush, probably in the bathroom somewhere, but I'm not sure, right? So later in life, I'm forgetting all of these experiences that I've there's so many, yeah. And so, and so I've I've started to keep what's called a story log. So instead of just, you know, the wind's blowing 15 knots in this direction, instead of your normal log, which I do a digital log anyway, if you ever if you ever see six new sailors trying to fill a log book out in a C state, it doesn't work. They just puke. That's all they do. Give them a pen and a piece of paper and tell them to write something in a six-foot C-state. So I'm comfortable. So we so we do digital log keeping. Uh so anyway, that that story was was fantastic. Everybody came together in the end. We had very little damage to the boat. I had a paddle board that went overboard of the same tank that went overboard um by choice just to save it uh from rattling around on the deck. And then immediately after that trip, now there are slews of boats coming in after us that are just wrecked. There was a catamaran that was dismasted, there was a guy that his anchor got loose uh during the sea state that he was in, and it just damn near cut the front of his boat off. So, you know, you see all of this carnage come into Bermuda, and Bermuda is just a really just a little rock in the middle of the ocean, but they do a great job there of taking care of everybody that transits through. And so that crew happened, they survived, uh, they're gonna be best friends for the rest of their lives. They had a huge experience together, and then the next trip that came in was a 900-mile spinnaker run, which is almost unfortunate.

SPEAKER_02: 1:36:45

So did your boat get damaged at all in these 20 season?

SPEAKER_01: 1:36:50

Yeah, so so the one thing that I had that I don't normally have was I have a buddy that's moving to a Grenada uh on his boat, and he had a uh he had a nice paddleboard. So he had a nice paddle board. We'll stress that part. So he went and I said, Hey, go buy those little racks that go on the stanchions, right? And you know, where your paddleboard kind of hangs off the side. And so he did that, he installed it. Uh we go to leave. I never thought about it, it's just ride around back there. And we kind of went down one of the waves and rounded up a little bit, and that paddleboard just grabbed half of it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:37:29

Wait, you were you're breaking out. Oh, I'm just saying.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:32

Yeah, so we we we kind of surfed down a very large wave, and the boat heeled over and listed, and that paddle board acted like a giant shovel and scooped up half of the ocean and uh snapped it in half. It looked like jaws bit it in two, and I watched it took a gunshot. So when I turned around and looked back, I could see like the pieces of the board, you know, just disappearing into the ocean. Um, but so Libra is purpose built for what I do, so I don't have stanchions like a sailboat does, right? I have hard railing all the way around the boat for safety. I'm almost six foot four on most sailboats. The stanchions are gonna hit me right above my knees. They're death traps, right? Lifelines to me are just death traps. Yacht designers put them on there because they keep the line of the boat, right? They they don't get in the way, they don't mess things up. But if you look at pictures of Libra, you'll see her hard rail system. Um so it bent that rail a little bit, popped one of the stanchions out of the deck, and so all we did was take a come along in Bermuda and bend everything back into place and bolt it back down. Uh, we didn't really take any damage on that. Yeah, and then we had a propane bottle that got loose uh during that same process, and I made a quick executive decision that said I I carry uh two 40-pound bottles, so I have plenty of propane for six months, and so one of them was donated to the sea because it got knocked out of the wreck and it was rolling around on the deck, and I'm you know back there and off the you know, off the side it went, and somebody's gonna find it, and my tackle box. I I have a cooler that's uh has all of my fishing gear in it, and it rides around on the boat perfectly fine and for years and years and years, and then it just put it off the boat. Yep, it went with it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39:23

Donated it to the sea.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:24

Yep. But on that trip right before Bermuda, we caught three Mahi, and so we had uh ceviche, then we had fried mahi, broiled mahi, all to that last night dinner when we arrived, it was great.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39:37

All right, so these are the kind of soft questions, but um what's the one food item that you won't leave the dock without?

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:48

I mean, besides chocolate bars and things like that.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39:52

It could be that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:53

All right, so let's see. So one of my favorite things is that they have A so Walmart sells this indulgent trail mix, but you gotta keep it in the refrigerator because it has chocolate chips on it. So that's because that's my favorite like hand snack. Um mayonnaise, uh, Duke's mayonnaise. I'm not gonna I'm not going anywhere without Duke's mayonnaise on the boat. If I have to if I have to stock up Duke's mayonnaise for the entire Caribbean season because you can't buy it down here, I'll do it. You can get it in St. Thomas, but I I like Duke's mayonnaise.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:31

You know, if you if you get a good tomato sandwich, that's well someone just commented that about Duke's. So that that brought this person out of the out of silence when you talk about Duke's mayonnaise. Yeah, must really be good.

SPEAKER_01: 1:40:46

They have they have a following. Go to their websites, you can buy all kinds of t-shirts and everything. Um so yeah, so Dukes mayonnaise, and then I'm I'm a hot sauce contour, uh, just adds a little spice. I like to pick up hot sauces in different spaces.

SPEAKER_02: 1:41:00

Um but food wise, uh pretty much you can you can eat the same thing over and over. I can.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:09

I mean, if I have to, I can, but the way that we operate, we we have you've got guests, so you can't Yeah, we we have our galley, so I have three you can't see it, but I'm doing another tour one day. I so I have three full-size uh well full size under-the-counter refrigerators, and then also a large deep freezer. So we can carry a ton of fresh produce. Uh I have a pantry that I if I was if I was just by myself, I could live on the boat for a year and never go to the dock.

SPEAKER_03: 1:41:40

Wow.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:41

Um and we have a water maker. We have everything that a proper cruising boat should have, and we try to keep it all in working order. But but yeah, food-wise, I have had MREs on here, you know, like the little military ones that they hand out during hurricanes. So I I've had those on here too. But yeah, I mean, just about anything I'll eat, but yeah, my intention is.

SPEAKER_02: 1:42:02

When you're worrying about guests, you have to that's a different thing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:42:04

Yeah. So um these are salads and fresh stuff is what we usually try to try to do. And we do eat meat. There's a lot of boats in this in this industry that are all vegetarian, but we uh we do steaks.

SPEAKER_02: 1:42:17

Yeah. I mean, there's nothing like a steak on the uh grill. Yeah. Um, so one piece of offshore advice, five words or less.

SPEAKER_01: 1:42:27

Man overboard, heave to.

SPEAKER_02: 1:42:30

Okay. No figure eights. Dream destination you haven't sailed to yet.

SPEAKER_01: 1:42:36

Uh Dream destination that I have not sailed to yet. Um Diego Garcia.

SPEAKER_02: 1:42:49

Where's that?

SPEAKER_01: 1:42:51

The middle of the Indian Ocean. You gotta have kind of special permission to go there, but is it in the northern part or the it's almost dead in the middle. It's more northern than it is, than it is uh center. But if you typed up Diego Garcia, you would you would see it. It's a it's a military base, but there are a few other islands around it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:16

Pirates, sir?

SPEAKER_01: 1:43:18

No, no pirates.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 1:43:20

So my pirate, so so here's the pirate story. If you want to get rid of pirates, there's no there's no pirate stories, right? So I'm usually I'm usually have it's it's usually myself and a mate and you know four, four or five guys, maybe a gal. Anyway, pirates start coming near the boat, all the guys get on the rail, strip down naked, hold hands, and just wave them on over, right? You just say, We need more, come on over. Just just get naked and wave them over.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:52

So the Somali pilot will discuss to you later.

SPEAKER_01: 1:43:55

Yeah, exactly. So in most of those situations, they're gonna think, man, those people are nuts. We're not gonna board that boat. So that's my pirate deterrent there. It's just everybody strip down naked and hold hands and wave.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:08

Okay, last question. One thing all sailors should pack, but hardly anyone does.

SPEAKER_01: 1:44:15

Earplugs. They don't bring that sailing is not quiet at all.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:23

Oh, you mean like uh I thought I was thinking earbuds, but no you're talking earplugs. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 1:44:30

Earplugs, yeah, because if you're now right now in anchor, of course, it's it's nice and quiet, but if you're on passage, yeah, it's it's loud. You know, things are banging around, sails are banging, gears banging, and if you're on a watch rotation to where you're doing your three on six off, during that six-off, you really need to get some good sleep. And most people never think about earplugs.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:57

So um heave two sailing says earplugs go right in my pack, my pack first. Love it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:45:03

Yeah, yeah, because you can get on this boat, so it's not like everybody has their own cabin either. So I have guys tap machines, I have guys that you know, there's all kinds of guys. I get I take just about damn near everybody. It's loud. I mean, you're living with strangers, they're snoring around you, and I have I have some really good recordings of some really, really loud snoring people. And what I'll do is I'll take that recording and then I'll put it on the stereo, and then I'll just wake them up with it. So I record them snoring with my phone over their nose, and then I Bluetooth to the stereo and just crank it up until until they wake up and go, What the hell is going on? I was like, That was you, that's what you sound like.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45:51

That is hilarious. So is it I gotta have a good time? Is it mostly guys?

SPEAKER_01: 1:45:58

It's mostly guys.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45:59

I'd say in your pictures, you know, I saw it.

unknown: 1:46:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:46:04

Oh really?

SPEAKER_01: 1:46:05

Okay, yeah, 80, 80% guys, maybe 70% guys. I'd say on every trip that I that I have uh that I have a woman, at least one. Um on that trip that we had the heavy weather on from Newport to Bermuda, there was a a lady on, and it was a couple, and uh, and she was just fantastic. I mean, it was everything about her was uh exceptional um from just from just the way that she handled herself and the situation and the positive attitude that you have to keep when you're in a mixed environment like this with other people. And we have so I I have this whole Catherine's letter, we could just do another one about that, but uh we don't do politics, we don't do religion, and I have a whole list of things. I'm like, if I hear the words so cool. If I hear the words Trump, Biden, Kamala, Jesus, Muhammad, if I hear any of these words, then you get put in timeout. If I hear them twice, you get to walk the plank.

SPEAKER_02: 1:47:06

Because it's just gonna start something.

SPEAKER_01: 1:47:08

Because we're out we're out here to go sailing, right? So we're not out here to talk about current events. If you want to talk about current events, go home and talk about current events.

SPEAKER_03: 1:47:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:47:16

If you want to talk about your kids and your family and your sailboat and those types of things and boat projects and navigation, that's all perfectly fine.

SPEAKER_02: 1:47:25

And that's the way that's my podcast, too. I've had people when I because I go and I farm, I I you know, I find people on social media, so I see what they're posting, and so um, but that stuff never comes up.

SPEAKER_03: 1:47:38

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:47:39

And it shouldn't teach their own. This is about sailing. Nobody knows my opinions.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47:45

That's right, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:47:46

That's the way it should be.

SPEAKER_01: 1:47:47

That's that's exactly right. And aboard the and aboard Libra, that's exactly the way it is. It's uh it's actually in written.

SPEAKER_02: 1:47:56

That's a great advertisement for your boat trips.

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:00

Let me uh I know that I know that we're running tight on on uh time here, but let me there is this one little uh thing that I can pull up real quick.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:09

This is my longest podcast ever. I love it. It's gonna take a long time to upgrade to upload the audio. That's all right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:48:18

Let's see.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:19

So this is the captain's letter.

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:21

Do you get can you share the captain's letter? Yeah, I'll send it, I'll send it to you. I usually send it to the group a couple of weeks before their trip. Um, because you know, some things may be a little different between trips, but uh that's such a good idea. So so so here's so here's one that is should should be on just about everybody's list uh if they're gonna take people on their boat, no matter whether it's their friends, their family, or strangers. It says the most important thing is attitude. No one wants to be stuck on a boat for a week with a Karen or a Chad type personality. And uh no offense to anybody named Karen or Chad, but that's but that's the best way to describe that type of personality, right? So asshole, no at alls, and busybodies, right? We don't need those on the boat. I do reserve the right to boot assholes off the boat. It's just my rule. Everyone gets along all the time. So to do this, we eliminate a few conversation topics like religion, politics, COVID, and vaccines. Those push people's buttons. So it's a rule on most boats. We are here to sail, let's keep the week on topic. And then it goes the big red words say if I hear the words Trump, Biden, Harris, Bernie, the Pope, Jesus, Muhammad, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, or basically anything on the news other than your normal life, like kids, family, and sailing talk, you'll be put into time out or will have to walk the plank. We are in mixed company. Don't think that your political humor will outweigh this. And then it moves on to if you are sexful, an asshole, a sexist, misogynist, or just a plain old dickhead, have a full refund, so please don't come if you fit the above description. Really, don't come, and that's kind of underlined. Uh, this is your out for a full refund. If you fit that description, don't ask yourself. If you do, ask your friends. If you don't have friends, then talk with a little voice in your head and ask why you don't have any friends.

SPEAKER_02: 1:50:29

Am I an asshole? Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 1:50:31

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:50:33

And then uh tell me about the tell me about the drinking, your rules about that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:50:39

Um, so so that was so we touched on that, right? So I said don't, you know, it's you know, we get to uh we get to drink and port all we want. We just don't act like it's uh 1985 spring break and Daytona Beach. Um you know I have people bring their own cup so we're not washing dishes all the time. This letter is uh if you printed it out, it's probably six pages, but it's just things that I've learned throughout you know, throughout every trip, just like the guy that got stabbed by somebody's big toenail. So I have a 3A, a 3B, and a 3C section, and all of them have get a pedicure in it. Um it's do people follow these rules? Yes. Yeah, and and what and another one is I haven't had to put anybody in time out now. Um I've just said, you know, everybody's like-minded that joins these trips. Everybody is here for some type of common purpose. We're not all different, right? Most sailors or people that are looking to get into this lifestyle are like-minded. And so I've never had a trip where everybody didn't really get along. There's been some weird people here and there, and that's fine. Everybody has their own personality, but we just work through it, right? We've never I've never had anybody for this. You're yeah, I've never yeah, I've never had anybody where I said, Look, man, I'm kicking you off at the next port because you're just a dick.

SPEAKER_02: 1:52:06

Are you like Captain Lee? Like, I'm gonna give you a plane ticket home or Captain Lee on below deck.

SPEAKER_01: 1:52:13

Yeah, well, they could, yeah, they could. I only had I did I did have a medical emergency one time and uh and he did get a ticket home, but uh, but that was for a medical evaluation. That's a whole nother story. Um, but yeah, you know, like I said, like-minded people when people sign up for these trips, even brand new people never sailed, never stepped foot on a sailboat, they come with me because they have the dream, and then I can show them the reality of their dream.

SPEAKER_02: 1:52:39

Yeah, yeah, and that's smart. I mean, all those that that is such a good idea because if you wait till they're there, then they're like, What are you talking about? I want to talk about the current events, I want to talk about Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:52:55

And you know, these weekline charters, we do have a lot of downtime, right? When the autopilot's running and we're sailing in nice weather, it'd be hours and hours and hours and hours. But but we talk about all kinds of other things too. We talk we you can't always talk about sailing, that would just get you know, but we have we have games we play. I always tell people, I'm like, you know, that there's whales everywhere, but if you're not looking at the water, you're not ever going to see them. Because most of the time we're in the cockpit under the shade, you know, how people sail around in open cockpits with no top, have no idea. They would just get crispy burnt. But so we spend a lot of time in the cockpit. The cockpit on Libra is kind of like a living room. You know, we have upholstery, we have pillows, we have things that are comfortable, unlike a lot of other operators that have maybe some form of little fiberglass seat with a little throw cushion on it or something. So we try to make it very comfortable because especially with the demographic that's going on with me, I get a lot of older guys, older ladies that are getting close to retirement age. Let's keep it. I'm not out here, I'm not out here to uh to make anybody suffer.

SPEAKER_02: 1:54:02

Sure. All right, we should probably we should probably end it there. Let's see. One hour 54 minutes. So I I love it. Okay, so we're gonna have you back, okay? Okay, because yeah, a lot of this stuff on the whole list of things.

SPEAKER_01: 1:54:19

Yeah, we got Cuba that I do uh almost two days.

unknown: 1:54:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:54:27

Yeah, we could come here with it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:54:29

I've got several that would probably really enjoy it talking with you.

SPEAKER_02: 1:54:33

Yeah, so we we could have you and uh one or two of your clients, and they could give both you could give both sides of the story.

SPEAKER_01: 1:54:41

It is, it it is. I've I've had a couple that have done podcasts with them with uh like ones, and and that their stories are always great from a different hearing their story from their perspective about my operation is always you know eye-opening to me a lot of times, right? With the things the things that people that that I don't get to hear with their right, but when they're asked the questions and they say, Well, how did how did you feel during these moments? And then I get very, you know, sometimes very heartfelt comments. I bet and it it it mean and it means a lot. There was so that the paper that I sent you, that short uh story log that I wrote, uh, one of the guys that was on there has sale with me extensively over the past two or three years, probably more than eight times. And uh and so h his wife handles all of his stuff for him. And so I sent the I sent the article to him and uh and she sent me she sent me this, and now he was on this trip, right? So the heavy weather trip that we went through. And so he's she told me that by the time he was finished reading the thing that he was in tears. And so, you know, for him to relive that experience, even though it had only been a week, you know, it was very heartfelt. It was uh, you know, hearing things like that, you know, keep me in the business. That th those are the things that excite me.

SPEAKER_02: 1:56:07

Well, you pick out a couple people that you'd like to come back with and we'll put them on. How about that?

SPEAKER_01: 1:56:12

All right, I'll find them.

SPEAKER_02: 1:56:13

Okay. So Port Tac Approach says, Thanks, Ryan. Thanks, Tinsley. Thank you, Port Tac Approach, for watching. All right, let's do it. We're gonna we're gonna end it now. We're at 156. And I'd like to end these podcasts by saying Assaulty Abandon. Ow.