Living OFF GRID on a BUDGET Sailboat | S04E24

I'm Desiree and this is my husband Jordan for the past five years we've been exploring the Caribbean on a budget aboard our 30-foot sailboat atticus our lifestyle isn't glamorous and our boat is far from perfect but we've been successfully turning our dream into a reality without a lot of money [Music] in this video we'll be diving into the systems of our off-grid sailboat and the highs and lows of our lifestyle [Music] previously on Project advocates after spending three years refitting or fixer-upper sailboat we left the United States with only $2,000 and the goal of working while we cruised we made it as far as Isla Mujeres Mexico before he ran out of money and had to find work for the next year needed freelance boat repair jobs until he saved up enough cash to cast the lines in sail south to explore the Western Caribbean [Music] hey guys and welcome aboard Atticus this is our 57 year old fiberglass sailboat which is keeping us afloat and letting us played a pretty adventurous life a kiss is an allied c-130 built in 1963 this model was the first fiberglass sailboat to successfully sail around the world she's a really heavy really strong but small sail though she is actually a almost purpose-built to be able to explore the far reaches of the globe and to do it relatively safely to appear at the bow we've got the tanker station so this is where we've got everything having to do with our anchor setup we've got a relatively large anchor it's a 45 pound mantas we've also got this quarter-inch high-test steel chain so to retrieve our anchor we use our manual windlass it basically makes it so that bringing all of this pain in and bringing the anchor up can be done with relatively little effort even in really strong winds so let out the chain we can just release the brake and then that lets the chain out so this is a mantas bridle it's made out of a half inch three strand nylon line that connects to the chain itself basically whenever we get you know really tight pulls on the anchor the snubber uses nylon lines so that it can stretch really good and the chain doesn't get that shock loading that could actually break some of this gear and here we've got our forward wind scoop / sunshade / rain tent this thing is amazing it's not very common you won't see a lot of things just like this on other boats but we love it because first of all it really does push a lot of air down into the forward hatch and through the rest of the boat and so it does a great job of kind of helping to maintain the temperature down below even if we're in the tropics the other thing it does is you can see it provides shade over a little bit of the fore deck but in particular over the forward hatch because if Sun is going directly in there then it can really heat up the inside of the boat and then finally it keeps the rain out of the forward hatch when it's in this mode it's you know okay keeping the rain out but when we lower it down into its second position sort of rain position there's essentially no way that rain can get into the forward hatch and we've got a couple other elements to the boat that are really important for ventilation one are these Cal vents with the door aid boxes below and they basically just funnel air down into the boat but these door aid boxes make sure that the air can get in but none of the water can get in then also our hardtop or Dodger here is actually really important for ventilation as well the hardtop serves a similar function as the forward wind scoop slash rain tent in that it allows us to always have our companionway open so if it's raining the rain doesn't get in here if it's really sunny the Sun doesn't get in here it also actually creates a negative pressure for the airflow so whereas the wind scoop forward funnels air into the boat the hardtop actually sucks air out of the boat contributing to the amount of air that actually flows through maintaining that airflow all the time is just so essential for us because in the tropics it would just get so stifling down below if we weren't able to have constant air moving we've also got these 12-volt fans and they just do an amazing job for how small they are and for how little electricity that they use and then finally we've got these opening portholes which are basically just windows that open up let a little bit of Breeze in and we have four of these around the boat so when we bought Atticus we were specifically looking for a boat that was really affordable we didn't have a lot of money and then we also really wanted a boat that we could maintain well like keep it in really good shape for very little money because our intention our goal was to work while we sailed you know I was doing fiberglass work Desiree was doing canvas work for other cruisers and so our intention was to do that kind of work for half the year and make enough money to be able to support ourselves for the entire year and if you're gonna do that kind of work and only do it for half the year you've got to really keep your expenses exceedingly low bigger boats are more expensive to maintain smaller boats are cheaper to maintain and so we kind of wanted to get a boat that would cost very little upfront and then cost very little to keep in great condition [Music] living on Atticus in the tropics we are really really vulnerable to the Sun it is super strong it gets us really hot it's really easy to get burnt the boat heats up and we've met a lot of cruisers who spent their whole life sailing to beautiful places but they always tell us the one thing that they wish that they did differently was to really protect their skin and a lot of them are struggling with skin cancers and skin problems so one thing we do to combat the Sun on Atticus is just we make sure we're always covered up and then beyond that we actually made this huge sunshade to basically just cover as much of the boat as possible it has curtains which we can drop down and that's really nice because we can have ventilation on one side of the boat and a really awesome view but on the side of the boat that's really exposed to the Sun we're protected with that additional shade from the curtains it takes us about 20 to 30 minutes to set this bad boy up so we really only set it up temporarily when we know we're gonna be at an anchorage for more than a week or so but when we're moving a lot hopping from Anchorage to Anchorage or under sail this has to come down I know a really important system for living off-grid is managing our freshwater on Atticus we can store 30 gallons of freshwater in our internal tanks down below and then we've also got three 5-gallon Gerry jugs and one five gallon inflatable shower on deck so that's a total of 50 gallons of freshwater that we can stow on Atticus so if we're being conservative we could stay off-grid for about two weeks but if it rains enough we can use our water collection to kind of extend that indefinitely generally to get fresh water what we do is well load up our jerrycans into our dinghy and then we'll head to the closest town and kind of look for a spigot that's on the water whether it be a marina or a fishing dock or a fuel dock or a restaurant so we go in ask for fresh water sometimes they charge for it sometimes they give it to us for free but either way we always make sure that we filter our water with this filtering system so to filter out the kind of big nasty particles we use a string filter here and then we've got a point five micron carbon filter here to hopefully get rid of most of the bacteria and smaller particles now this filtration system isn't completely bulletproof so when we get back to the boat we'll go ahead and put in a small amount of bleach into each of these containers before adding the water back into our internal storage tanks sometimes though we get to a town where the water is not suitable for drinking so in that case we just buy five gallon water jugs which most of the locals use also and in that case we'll use the municipal water for doing dishes and showering the old reserve our drinking water for that purified water only one of my favorite systems on atticus is our water collection system so this is just a little through-hole basically a hole that we cut through our canvas and a little fitting to attach a hose there's a little bit of tensioning here so that the water pools right here and so we're able to collect water directly into our jerry jugs or our primary water tanks and basically in about a twenty minute rain shower we can collect about five gallons of water which is pretty awesome for people like us who can really extend five gallons for a couple of days between the two of us and then if we get like a full-on downpour for a whole day that means we're resetting the clock and we can have up to two extra weeks out here enjoying being off-grid and as far as laundry we've found that doing it by hand on atticus just takes way too much time and water and a lot of the places that we've been cruising in it's really affordable to just take our laundry ashore drop it off and get it picked up a couple of days later so that's what we do with our laundry we actually don't have an indoor shower on atticus so we take all of our showers out here and at first moving aboard it felt a little bit weird but now I kind of like the view and it's an excuse to cool off and hop in the water a lot this right here is our shower and it holds I think five gallons of water and I'm actually not going to use very much of it so what I do instead is use all this water that we have around us to kind of supplement my cleaning process so the first thing I do is hop in feels really good then I use my one of my favorite things on board which is this collapsible bucket get some extra salt water and just do you like you doing a normal shower except I'm sitting and I get to watch the world kind of pass by say hello to neighbors wardrobe malfunction last step it's finally using our fresh water and our helios shower when we're super super remote and we need to really monitor how much water we're using every single day we can switch to actual liter bottles of water with like a little squirt top and we each get one liter of water per person per day showering on a small boat using this system is pretty inconvenient but it does feel amazing and the view is awesome and it kind of wakes me up it makes me realize where we are a lot of the time in the end it is an enjoyable process but it does take time [Music] one way that we can serve freshwater on board is by using salt water when we do the dishes this faucet is for salt water and this one is for freshwater and we use these manual foot pumps to control the flow so I'll basically just rinse off the plate with salt water soap it up with salt water then I'll rinse with salt water and then I'll do one final pass with fresh water now if we're really trying to conserve our fresh water I'll either use this squirt bottle to rinse off the salt on the dishes or we'll actually not use fresh water at all wash and rinse everything with salt water and then leave them on deck to dry and then bring them back in and with a cloth we'll just kind of wipe off the salt and surprisingly they see pretty clean the biggest thing we have to worry about is the rag which gets kind of nasty after about a week we just replace it and save a lot of water [Music] obviously it'd be a lot more comfortable to cruise on a bigger boat with fully fleshed-out systems where we could stay off-grid for months at a time this is our way of having that off-grid experience on a very small scale on a boat that we can afford at the end of the day we're having the same core experiences that we're walking on those same deserted beaches we're getting to do those same hikes we're snorkeling and spearfishing in the same places and getting to meet the same kind of cultures and people it's sort of like the perfect is the enemy of the good if we were to wait until we had enough money to buy a bigger boat with more expensive systems it might just never happen you know we might get caught up with life and I think that happens with a lot of people and so we kind of made that choice to do have this experience now while we knew we could [Music] the only thing we have to think about while we're off-grid is where to put over food this right here is our 12-volt angle fridge and it is super efficient it draws about two amps and it's only running about half the day which is awesome we also like that it's a drop-down fridge so it might look really small and it is but you can actually fit way more than you might think in here just because we pile in all the food right on top of each other and there's not a single inch of space in here that isn't used and the drop down style is also nice because when we do open it not a lot of that cold air actually escapes from the rest of the refrigerator this whole area stays really nice and cool and that's actually where we keep all of our meats the most annoying thing about it is if I need something at the bottom of the refrigerator I basically have to unpack everything and then put everything back in so it's kind of like playing Tetris every day and as for our dry good storage this is where I kind of keep most of our greens and rice and beans that we use on a daily basis and how to kiss has these really kind of weird-looking storage mix they look really small but you can actually fit a lot back there so we've got pasta right s'more beans moving over here is where we keep our canned goods when we first moved aboard I was really kind of hesitant and nervous about cooking with canned goods but I've gotten better at integrating them into our meals while we're off-grid to make it still taste fresh and light and tasty and then finally we've got our unrefrigerated fruits and vegetables and when I first moved on atticus I had to learn a lot about what absolutely needs to be refrigerated and what doesn't and I've been really pleasantly surprised about some some things that last for a long time like cabbage for example can last up to a month it gets a little wilty but you can still eat it and this is a really cool spot because I get a lot of ventilation so that's really great for keeping these onions for example it makes them last a long time our last little nook where I keep our fresh fruits vegetables is over here and this is a really cool spot because I get a decent amount of ventilation with these compartments but I also use this piece of Sunbrella to protect these fruits from the Sun because I really want to keep the Sun off of these fruits and vegetables and I also like to make sure that I sanitize all of my fruits and vegetables the day that I get them as well as Reese Anna ties all of my compartments every single time I go and get new provisions and this way you're not getting any kind of bacterial growth back there and they last a really long time so we found that some vegetables last you know a couple of weeks or so but then there are others that lasts a lot longer like onions and potatoes and so when we're off-grid we'll kind of eat the vegetables that go quickly first and then we'll slowly transition into eating those vegetables that lasts longer and trying to mix those with their canned goods to keep it fresh I should mention that we do a lot of spearfishing when we're off-grid so that we can supplement all the food that we have on board this is our two burner propane stove and as you can see it's gimballed which is really nice we've got a stainless steel kettle which we use with our French press to make coffee in the morning we've also got about five pots and pans that we use for all of our cooking needs starting with our cast iron which we really love because we don't have room on board for a barbecue but the cast iron gets that nice kind of barbecue blackened flavor which I really like is our two stainless steel nesting pans and then just put the handle on either one of those pots and there we go also got this omneya stovetop oven it's a little bit worse for wear got a couple holes in it and it's kind of falling apart but this is what we use to make brownies or any baked goods where and just have a little bit of a sweet tooth the last pot that we use which is one of my favorites is our pressure cooker and it's a stovetop pressure cooker which is really nice so it doesn't take any electricity and yeah between all of these pots and pans we can eat like royalty on Atticus [Music] we generate all of the electricity that we use on Atticus we have 400 watts of solar for 100 watt panels two of which are semi flexible panels and are located on top of our Sun Shade and those can be moved to the top of our heart top when we are sailing and don't have the Sun shada we also have two rigid solar panels and those extend off either side of the cockpit we also have a wind generator which really comes in handy on cloudy but windy days and then finally we have a 40 amp alternator on our primary diesel engine the solar panels by themselves pretty much generate all the electricity that we need and whenever they don't the wind generator typically picks up the bill we've also got a battery monitor so that we can keep tabs on how topped up the batteries are now the whole system runs on 12 volts DC but we do have an inverter which pumps that up to 110 AC and we use that mostly to charge our laptops as well as to run some low draw power tools now the key to being able to sustainably generate all of the electricity that we need is keeping our electricity consumption low and we're able to do that with things like using foot pumps for our pressure water system by having all LED lights throughout the boat and foregoing some luxuries like air conditioning and hot water now the largest demands on our electrical system are the refrigerator as well as charging our laptops through the inverter and then just charging various devices and camera batteries with power USB charging stations now one really cool thing about modern technology is we're able to watch movies on our tablet listen to music on Bluetooth speakers all with a very small amount of electrical usage [Music] moving on to Atticus has really taught me a lot about what it truly means to be self-sufficient I recognize that in the past I've really taken civilization for granted and just the access to groceries water for pain all these things that you don't think about maybe when you're on land when you're on a boat floating in the middle of nowhere and you've just got it and your partner to rely on you really start to appreciate the gravity of planning out all those systems you just don't have any other options beyond resolve the situation yourself your hands and your brain yeah it's no matter what the situation is I mean you could be dragging anchor towards a reef in the middle of a 50 knot squall you know if your sink stops working it seems really silly but you either need to fix that sink or do without any form of running water you could have your engine die on you and out in the middle of nowhere you know you could have a medical situation that you have to handle and there's absolutely no help on the way we've probably got the same amount of tools as a medium-sized workshop and they're just all stowed away and hidden in random places on the boat and this is just one example of an area where I stowaway as many tools as I possibly can another thing we have to manage while living off-grid is waste so this is our toilet or our head as sailors call it you can't really see the actual toilet because it's a really small little bathroom and we've got stuff everywhere again living on a 30-foot boat we really have to take advantage of all surfaces so it's a really simple manual pump toilet and it takes saltwater so you can use that to flush everything out and then we don't put anything except organic material in our head the toilet paper we just put in our trash can and then we try to empty that as often as possible so with our system we're able to pump our waste into a holding tank which is located in that room underneath the V berth or directly overboard and as far as our trash will go ashore and try to find a place where we can throw away our trash depending on where we are it can be a little bit challenging but for the most part we can find a restaurant or a public dumpster somewhere the real trick is managing our trash when we're gonna be really far away from civilization for long stretches of time and in those situations we actually throw our organic waste overboard and then we make sure that everything that goes into the trash is really clean so we'll rinse out our cans and bottles with saltwater and then try to use our zip locks and plastics over and over again as much as possible [Music] now let's talk about how we handle communications and staying connected while we are off-grid primarily what we do is anymore we use our smart phones our cell phones we've been blown away by how prolific accesses to 3G and 4G throughout the Western and Southern Caribbean so most of the time we're actually so most of the time were actually and in fact the Internet's generally pretty fast so that's become our primary mode of uploading videos for YouTube is using our cellular data now there's times when we're pretty darn far away from a town so our phones are just getting maybe one bar of signal if that's the case then we've started using a cellular booster we've been using the weboost drive and this thing is awesome if we've got one bar and just barely any signal whatsoever this thing will basically give us full signal now there's also times where we're so remote that we don't even get a cellular signal using our booster and in those situations we use satellite communication what we've done in the past is used a Delorme in reach and this thing is pretty cool it allows us to send text messages to phones or through email and we can also get very rudimentary weather information with it but more recently we have upgraded to the iridium GO and this allows us to download very very high quality weather information through predict wind as well as make phone calls over the satellite network and actually just access the Internet more generally using our smart phone we've also got an SSB radio receiver which we can use to receive weather fax images as well as to listen to distant broadcasts of weather information and we've got a VHF radio which we mostly use for nearby boat to boat communication as well as for talking to officials ashore when checking in or checking out of a country so now let's talk about how we get around how move the boat obviously Atticus is a sailboat so we sail to get places we also have an inboard diesel engine it's a 25 horsepower beta marine and we have a 40 gallon fuel tank as well as a 5 gallon jerrican full of diesel so total we have 45 gallons of diesel which theoretically can get us 450 miles if we needed to but we really don't motor long distances we prefer to sail long distances so we basically use the motor for short hops and for motoring when there just isn't any wind now once we anchor somewhere we mostly just use Atticus as a home base and then we zip around and explore using our dinghy which we affectionately call little [ __ ] now the little [ __ ] is an 8 foot zodiac rib and we also have a 8 horsepower Tohatsu outboard what we love about going off grid is getting to explore getting to go spearfishing getting to snorkel and most of those things involve moving quickly with gear in a dinghy but we also use our dinghy as a workhorse so it's how we transfer materials to the boat when we're doing a project or that's how we ferry water to the boat or how we bring groceries back from town now everywhere in the world outboard engines are vulnerable to theft so what we do every single night before we go to bed is we raise the outboard onto the boat and then we suspend the dinghy off the water just to make sure that we don't get growth accruing on the bottom [Music] for all the difficulties of living on a sailboat off-grid there's so much to love about sometimes I just have to pinch myself when I walk up on deck early in the morning as the sun's rising it's almost like I wake up in a national park you know just smack dab in the middle of it but instead of popping my head out of a tent or you know out of some sort of expensive hotel it's our home so that experience of being a part of nature being in a situation that so few people get the opportunity to experience and then you meld that with sort of the the self-sufficient nature of what it takes to be there and you you get into this sort of mindset of being a part of the world you know and taking your life into your own hands and reaping these huge rewards on a daily basis and scaring the living heck out of yourself regularly and so you definitely feel very alive [Music] all right oh hey guys hope you enjoyed this week's episode if you haven't yet make sure you subscribe to our channel by clicking here and if you're already a huge fan of project Atticus consider becoming a patron right there see you next week

Channel: Sailing Project Atticus

Views: 2,367,645

Rating: 4.9299741 out of 5

Keywords: “sailboat”, sailing around the w meorld, Sailing around the world on a budget, Project Atticus, atticus project, Allied seawind, budget sailboat, small sailboat, off grid sailboat, living off grid, off grid, sailing offgrid, self sufficient, self sufficient sailboat, sailboat

Id: hRHskbdRFFs

Length: 30min 5sec (1805 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020