Our favourite sailing videos on YouTube

I think it’s time to confess to our newish, secret addiction. Since Toby entered our lives just over a year ago, our movie-watching habit has gone from “oh, another rainy evening, let’s just cuddle up under the blankets with your laptop” (bear in mind that it rains ALL the time in Vancouver) to “wow, I got through almost thirty minutes of that before Toby woke up, that’s a total miracle, but unfortunately I can’t remember what happened because I’m so tired that my brain doesn’t work anymore”. I can’t remember when I last watched a full movie in one go, and watching them in twenty minute chunks just isn’t the same. Even watching episodes of series became tricky. So we’ve pretty much given up for now.

But Doug, on his many long walks to get the little lad to sleep, has listened to numerous podcasts. One of those is The Sailing Podcast (another good one to check out is Sail Loot) and one episode featured an interview with Riley and Elayna from Sailing La Vagabonde, who talked about their videos.

Enter YouTube! We had a quick look out of curiosity, and wham, just like that we got hooked. It was only a click or two to discover a few more channels, and we’ve discovered that watching little sailing videos at the end of the day is the perfect way to relax. We get to armchair sail, checking out their adventures while reminiscing about or planning our own. We get to think through their choices compared to our choices (about boat equipment and repairs, routes, food, etc.) and get ideas. Doug gives me little lessons along the way, related to anchoring or weather or systems or whatever comes up. We get to watch beautiful scenery and wildlife and see places we might never go to or get tempted to visit places sometime in the future. And best of all, they’re all pretty short and sweet so even if we binge-watch one evening, we perhaps only spend thirty to forty minutes gawping at a screen, rather than hours on end. It’s a win-win situation, I reckon.

Doug even got all inspired so has been trying out some filming and editing. We’re not sure whether to make videos or not (I’m about to write a blog post about why/why not), but it’s fun trying it out and we put up a couple of things on YouTube. Maybe we’ll do some more.

My top three:

1. We love the La Vagabonde team. They make us laugh all the time and don’t take themselves too seriously. It’s a fun peek into a live-aboard relationship and there’s lots of lovely underwater footage as they’re both into free diving and fishing.
2. Sailing Delos has become another firm favourite. With a changing crew of visiting friends there are various people to get to know, and the steady presence of captain Brian and his partner Karin hold it together. Great for seeing places we’ll likely never visit and trying to work out how many drinks and meals they’ll manage in an episode!
3. I think my very favourite (currently at least) is the brilliant team of Nike and Karl in ‘Untie the lines’ from White Spot Pirates. Nike’s the captain, Karl’s the boat and each episode is just a few minutes long, but crammed with the blood, sweat and tears of trying to get a boat ready to ‘go’ and learning how to captain it. There’s something really engaging about the honesty and emotion as Nike, often alone, faces the challenges and joys of boat life. It’s fascinating, too, watching her learn how to go about the various boat projects and see her gaining in experience.

It’s great to see other people’s experiences and share in their adventures – we’ve enjoyed reading sailing blogs when we get the chance and these videos are a lively extension of that. A perfect way to get our sailing fix when we’re not able to be on Illusion. There are a bunch of others to check out – we’ve also watched and enjoyed episodes from Sailing Uma, Monday Never, Sailing Baby Blue and SV Prism. What have we missed? Let me know if you have a favourite that I haven’t mentioned so I can continue to feed my addiction!

Update:  Johny Enyedy from Adventures on Boats left a comment telling us about this link where there’s a list of sailing videos on YouTube. Yay! Thanks! Looks like we won’t be running out of things to watch any time soon…