Whilst in lockdown in Santa Marta we finally got the time to sit down and reflect on where we are financially and how we can keep our sailing dream alive. We’ve had many setback which have really eaten into our cruising budget, and although a 2.5 month marina fee was one of them it allowed us to set in motion all the ideas we have, which may allow us to start bringing in an income.

Time to get our YouTube Channel up and running

We wanted to start this channel as it’s a great way to document our trip to look back on in the future as well as share our experiences with friends and family and others who we may inspire to do the same and follow their dreams. We never realised how much work goes into video editing and production as well as story planning and construction. To say we have learnt heaps is an understatement! We spent weeks (seriously) learning video editing software, trawling for music, recording voice overs, watching and learning from our favourite channels and generally discussing how we wanted our videos to turn out.

Content

We want to show the good, bad and ugly of our journey. Throughout making these videos we’ve been saying “I wish we had recorded the time we got caught in a fishing net”, or “we really should have had the camera running when we were sailing through that massive storm”. These are all instances when your first thoughts are not to grab the camera, for a number or reasons! But they are all part of our story. We don’t want to just show you the beautiful views, and places, we want you to have the full experience, be it fun, scary or frustrating.

Equipment

This is another area we have fallen short. When we were budgeting for this trip, camera equipment was at the bottom of our list as “nice to haves” and sadly as many who own boats know, we are still working our way down the “nice to have list”. In fact I can’t guarantee we will ever get there! There is always something that crops up that needs replacing or fixing before we can splash out for “nice to haves”. At the moment our main cameras are our GoPro and iPhones. With equipment comes quality. There are been so many great clips which we have had to discard as the lighting wasn’t quiet right or the sound was terrible. Being on a boat we are almost always in the wind, which creates its own problems when trying to speak into the camera, or trying to edit.

Music

We have spent hours trawling for good music. Music really does bring a video to life and gives it a personality. YouTube is so fussy these days that even when you purchase music you need to be 100% sure you can use it on YouTube. We’ve learnt this the hard way and have often completed a video only to have to go back to the drawing board as YouTube didn’t like our music choice! We’ve also noticed that in order to have a choice of good, YouTube acceptable music you need to subscribe to music library sites. Which when you are on a very tight cruising budget like ours is not something we took into consideration.

Internet

Living on a boat, comes with many ups, but one of the main downs, besides not being able to take a long soaking bath is the lack and cost of internet. We sometimes feel like we are on a permanent quest for internet connection, whether it’s to transfer money to pay bills or just to find out where our next anchorage will be, internet has become very important no matter where you live. We obviously can’t buy an unlimited, super speedy, hard wired connection plan like you do when you live on land. So we have to rely on pay as you go mobile contracts, or coffee shops with WiFi. Finding a pay as you go SIM contract in a country where you don’t speak the language is sometimes challenging! So we try to upload from cafes, or local SIM cards which sometimes have very little data for rather large price tags. Hopefully someday the mobile phone companies will all realise how difficult it is to travel and get good WiFi and come up with an affordable solution. For now we will keep hunting, and perhaps paying when we can’t find free Wifi, but we will stay connected to get these videos uploaded.

The point of all of this is to assure you we are working really hard to improve. We are very proud of what we have managed to put together in such a short space of time.

Time to set up our ocean themed online shop

We want the Sailing Mokara brand to stand for more than just our trip. We want our travels to highlight how beautiful our planet is and why we need to keep it that way. Being a graphic designer I want to try and use my skills to build the brand and build awareness of the plastics in our oceans. Our ocean themed merchandise not only sends out a great message but it also helps the oceans. With every purchase we will make a donation to 5 Gyres, a charity which helps put policies in place to try and stop plastics reaching the oceans. The COVID-19 lockdown gave me time to focus on the designs and on launching the shop. Something I would never have got done whilst at anchor on slow internet.

Launching The Trashy Tuesday Community

This idea follows on from our shop, where we want to try and make a difference! Shawn and I spend hours collecting trash from beautiful beaches. Sometimes when we arrive in a place where there is a lot of plastic we feel very disheartened, and can’t see past the plastic at the beauty of the place. We want to try and build a community of people who’s goal is to remove 2020kg of plastic from our oceans and waterways by the end of the year. Why 2020kgs? We want the year 2020 to stand for something good. If we get people all over the world joining the community and helping reach the target – we can at least make a small difference, and hopefully bring people together by doing it. Why a Tuesday? It’s just the day we did marina cleanups whilst in Lockdown, so the name stuck. At the end of the day trash should be collected everyday of the week. If you would like to join, please have a look at our community page, and send through a picture so that we can inspire others to join.

Setting up our Patreon Page

This is another thing we have been putting off for ages, which COVID gave us time to sit down and plan. The truth is we need to somehow start bringing in an income in order to keep sailing. Our budget has been hit hard by unexpected expenses, so in order to keep our dream alive we need to start bringing in an income of sorts. We’ve had a great response to our YouTube channel, but YouTube’s goals in order to monetize your video’s are HUGE, and chatting to other channels who have thousands of followers, it sounds like only the really big channels make money from YouTube.

Which leads us to Patreon. A platform that allows those people who really enjoy our adventures and videos to make a small contribution. In return they will receive a host of benefits, from behind the scenes footage, to cost sheets, to funny clips and merchandise. There is also a free week aboard Mokara, living with us and experiencing our life up for grabs as one of our Patreons.

Please consider becoming one of our Patreons. From as little as £5 per month you could really help us hone our skills, invest in better equipment, create exciting content, find faster internet connections, produce better videos more often, and ultimately keep us afloat…

We also have Patreon tiers for our Trashy Tuesday initiative, if thats something you’d like to support.

https://www.patreon.com/sailingmokara

Thank you so much for following us and we hope you enjoy the rest of the ride.