Living on a Self-Sufficient Sailboat for 10 Years

Brian and Karin Trautman have been living on a sailboat for 10 years, and their boat is set up so they can be off the grid in remote places for months at a time with solar and wind power providing electricity, a water maker that turns salt water into fresh water, multiple freezers and loads of storage space for food, and even a small washing machine on board!

They've sailed SV Delos - a 53 'sloop rig ketch - 83,000 nautical miles which is the equivalent of circling the earth at the equator more than 3 times. Their latest adventures include sailing as a family with their 6-month baby, Sierra, and outfitting the boat with a heater so they can explore the Arctic this summer after several years in the Tropics.

what we really enjoy about cruising is being able to take our house and all its creature comforts and go to an extremely desolate location where we can have the entire beach to ourselves and living off the grid so we have dello setup that once we have provisioned and fueled up we can be off the grid for anywhere from three to six months you know we make our own power with solar and wind we make our own water with a desalination plant we have onboard and we have enough food storage to support us for a long time and so you know we can have a very low impact on the environment we can move the boat around with the power of the wind and the weather and it’s incredibly sustainable and fulfilling way to travel and live over the course of the entire trip ten years we’ve sailed Dulles $83,000 miles which is the equivalent of circling the Earth at the equator just over three times we’ve visited six out of the seven continents and sailed in every major ocean in the world my name is Karen Chapman and I am born and raised in Sweden my name is Brian Chapman and I was raised in Flagstaff Arizona this is a little Sierra Abbott Troutman she is six months old and she is a little sea baby she loves the ocean and she loves sailboats huh Sierra yeah I’m originally a software engineer but now. 

I am a full-time sailor and YouTube video maker I knew nothing at all about sailing but I read lots of books I read lots of blogs and I came up with a four-year plan basically at the end of that plan I sold everything I owned I sold my house I bought a sailboat named Ellis and I took off on what was supposed to be an 18-month sailing trip headed towards New Zealand I was studying Landscape Architecture in Australia and went on a backpacking trip to New Zealand where I met Brian and he asked me if I wanted to go sailing for the weekend and that was nine years ago now Wow yeah I never left I had never sailed before and it was absolutely life-changing I fell in love with it straightaway and of course fell in love with Brian sue.

welcome to our home Dulles she is a 53-foot sloop rig ketch which means that she has two masts and 1/4 day and right now were in the cockpit of Dulles which is like the brain of the boat is how I like to think of it this is our navigation and steering station what I like about it is the helm is super protected so we can sit here we can drive here we have an excellent view and you can stay safe you can stay dry you can stay very comfortable even when the conditions are wet and completely handle all the sails and drive the boat back here we have some more sail controls all in the cockpit so to sail Delos we actually never have to leave this area which makes her a very safe boat when we’re sailing short-handed and when the weather gets bad or you’re sailing at nighttime you don’t want to leave the cockpit and risk falling overboard so it’s a very cool area when we’re not sailing this is also where we spend most of our time so this happens to be really our outside porch our living room and everything sort of all rolled into one so welcoming to our kitchen this is really a one-man kitchen or a 1/1 Lane kitchen he’s not really big enough for two people and it’s kind of narrow which makes it really good whoever on the ocean passage and it’s really rough so you can hold yourself in you also have this so you can clip yourself in so in case it is really rough you don’t go fine across the whole boat.

We have everything that you’d find in a normal kitchen I would say we have you know its pool sinks we have an induction stove which is very nice so we don’t have to worry about propane and stuff we have just a normal little oven and it’s all kind of attached to a gimbal system so when we’re healing this

stove can swing with pretty good force and we won’t lose dinner on the floor here we have a toaster which is a bit of a luxury and we have some fresh potatoes onions and stuff like that things that don't need to be refrigerated it’s kind of like a puzzle so everything like the pots and the pans have its place and if you put it in the wrong place the things won’t fit in there we also have a cabinet here that is a bunch of random things and it kind of just extends down you never know really what to find down there it’s a bit of a surprise here we have you know our bowls and our plates and our sauces you know its nonstop by three this is our fridge yeah for being a bowl I would say it’s a very nice fridge most fridges on boats are top loading and I have not heard one single good thing about a top loading fridge so he’s very nice when it has a door and you can have everything like organized in there well not a thing that I’m extremely happy about it’s our washing machine it’s just a smallest one that you can find on the market basically but we do run it every second day to do the diapers for Sierra because we use cloth diapers on her to save a lot of trash and I would not want to wash it by hand so I’m very happy about this feature another feature is her little chair that we have strapped in right here so she can sit here and eat and be part of you know like us making dinner and stuff like that this is the navigation communication and electronic station on Delos this is our single sideband radio so this is a ham radio and it allows us to communicate via voice and also an analog modem via email or thousands of miles so if all the communication systems ever go down and Armageddon happens we can still talk to other people out there we have our VHF radio that allows us to communicate it like close distances basically line-of-sight boat instruments this gives us our speed and the depth and then down here this is maybe the craziest thing that most boats aren’t going to have this is the server rack that I installed for the satellite communication system so this is what allows us to basically beam Internet to us from space anywhere in the world we.

Have a couple of safety devices so fire extinguisher and this isn’t EPIRBs a stands for emergency position indicating radio beacon so forever sailing in the middle of the ocean and we have a life-threatening situation the boat is on fire the boat is sinking something like that we can activate this by pulling this cord in the back it has a built-in GPS and it transmits our position and our boat name and who we are - is satellite in orbit and then its picked up by the closest maritime Authority and they will route like a Coast Guard if they’re available or a container ship or a cargo ship or something to try and help us so over here this is our water gauge so its super simple we carry a thousand liters of water on Delos right now we have 500 liters and when we fill our pickup it’s enough water to last us for almost a month this water maker is capable of making 200 liters or approximately 50 US gallons an hour so this is our living room this is basically where we do most of the things when were inside of the boat you know eating we work here you know lounge around you can fit a lot of people which is very nice and we have a lot of crew on board one other thing that I really love with dolls is that we have so much food storage this is all food and stuff and if you here inside the cell phone we have freezers it’s a bit empty right now because we haven’t shopped in about a month but it is really  cool to have freezes like this because if we catch really big fish or if were going off grid for a long time you know its important to have some good food frozen so we have two of those on each side of the sofa on this side right now is Sierras Plenty area as she’s getting bigger it’s been a bit challenging with her starting to climb over things and stuff so we have sown a little they don’t like to call it caged but it’s a playpen so we can close this up she can still be part of the action because you can see through 

It we can leave her in there if we need to do something like change the sails or something is going on where she needs to be put in a safe place this is where we put her do you think she likes it yeah so if you lift this up this canned food milks all the floors really lifts up and its deep builder so all the canned foods we name them all so you can easily see what’s inside and we take the labels off to prevent the spread of cockroaches so that the procedure but it works well and we don’t have a cockroaches right now which is very nice one of the things that I had never thought about when I first moved on to Delos 9 years ago was when you go off grid and you run out of food that it there’s no more getting more oh you’re out there is no store close to you and I remember when we first sailed up into like the islands in Indonesia and it was very remote and we ran out of tomatoes we ran out of eggs we ran out of all fresh vegetables and we were eating for the last really, month we were eating cans, it was an eye opener for me. her for me we spent most of our time anchored about 10% is sailing and 90% is a tanker on average we sail about 8,000 nautical miles per year and when were at anchor we tend to try and stay out of actual port ports like places like marinas where there’s a lot of boats and restaurants and bars like it’s cool every once in a while but number one you spend a lot of money in places like that and number two we tend to like being on remote desolate places our plans for the you really depend on the weather we travel by the wind and the currents of the ocean and so looking at the seasons ahead of us is incredibly important both for our safety but also for our comfort we’ve had a sixty people fail on bellos over the last ten years it’s been a lot and its been absolutely incredible right now it’s only me and Bryan and Sierra which is awesome its perfect yeah its very nice I think it’s safe to say that we’ve actually never been anywhere that we didn’t want to go back to you there’s always something special that you can find about the place of the people this is our bedroom in the back of the boat in the stern the two people its pretty perfect we can even stand up we have a little desk which is really nice to sit back here and work a little bit we have a pretty big bed I would say he’s not huge but it’s nice and comfy and cushy if it gets really hot we have two fans so this is basically how we kind of stay cool back here we never really run the a/c unless or in a marina which is not very often we also have a separate bathroom also called the head on the boat which is kind of weird but this so in here we have everything you have in a toilet.

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I think but just compact this is where you do your business and we have an electric motor so if you press this it basically fills with soft water from the ocean and then either pumps it straight out or we also have a holding tank so depending on where we are if were out in the ocean it just goes up and if were in somewhere where is a lot of boats and stuff we keep it in a holding tank we have pretty deep sinks which is really nice because I do some hand washing so it’s really good to hand wash stuff here and it can also act as a bath for Sierra which II was a little smaller we kind of have a combined so it’s not a separate shower so you had the toilet there and then here you use clothespins baby shower in there well this is our closet it’s not very big but it’s pretty perfect for us and I’ve actually gone through a lot of

our clothes and just got rid of a bunch of stuff and just have the necessities so this is all Brian’s clothes on this side and all of my clothes on that side but we do have some smaller cabinets to like here I have my clothes so to maximize even more storage things that we don’t get to like that often is under this bed so under here is all of our kind of store away stuff that long long-term storage so we have some extra sheets some cold weather stuff cold weather clothes and its quite a lot of good storage down here so I’m gonna have a lot of people on the boat its very nice to work back here too and then you pull this little chair out you can sit back here and do your computer things which is not very nice this is a very  good safety feature on Delos and this door is actually a watertight bulkhead so if we would get a hole in our house in the boat back here we could close this door and this whole area back here would be separated from the front of the boat so this could be filled up with water and we would still float so we have a few of these on Delos and its crucial if you get a hole in the boat and so you don’t sink basically we have the forward cabin you can sleep three people up here if you’re very good friends otherwise its good for one person or two people to sleep on one side and then you kind of have this other area on the side that a little sofa or where you can put your stuff and right now because its only me and Brian on board we have this as our kind of workroom we do sewing up here this is also our diaper drying station right now because the wind flow in here is awesome so it drives them really fast and up here we also have a second toilet which is very nice to have on board in case one of them fails which happens quite often actually so this is a same as the one in the back and it works pretty much exactly the same we earn money by making.

YouTube videos yeah that pretty much it we have a project and it’s called the Delos project and its 100% supported by what we refer to as the Delos tribe which are the people that watch our videos and we make some money with things like YouTube ad revenue and affiliate links but by far the majority of the support comes from crowd funding on patron where people that like the videos and get something out of them support them by giving us a few dollars every time we produce a video yeah it wasn’t always like that though like for the first four years almost five years of the trip we were stopping to work and so we would sale and then we’d run out of money and then we would stop to work wherever we happen to be we do random things like I would do remote software consulting wed roll burritos wed flip burgers work in hospitality whatever it took to continue sailing for another season how much it costs to live on a boat I’ve met people sailing around the world a family of five spending about $1,000 a month which is probably at the low end of the budget Karen and I and Sierra to live and sail on Delos we spend about $2,500 a month and that including like our food our provisions fuel for the boat insurance visa fees some things like that what it’s not including is the actual price of the boat so if you don’t have enough money to buy a boat outright you’re gonna have a mortgage or owe money and then that gonna add on top yeah Brian spent a lot of time working on the boat yeah it’s too you know imagine taking your house and shaking it up and put it into a wet saltwater corrosive environment and then moving it thousands of miles away from the nearest hardware store or anybody who could help you fix anything and that a little bit what sailing around the world is like and so I spent a lot of time maintaining the boat in fact I’ve needed to become an electrician.

I’ve needed to become a plumber diesel mechanic toilet repairman air conditioning and refrigeration specialists and everything in between it’s pretty common for me to spend at least a few full days a month just working on keeping the book in shape it can be incredibly expensive if you don’t do your own work and so I figure our maintenance budget on Delos is about $700 a month averaged over the entire year and if we were not doing the work ourselves I think you could easily triple that amount just paying somebody a technician to come out and fix things all right now we’re gonna take a look at the engine room which is really the heart of Delos and it lives in this cool little door this waterproof door in the bottom of our cockpit so we just want to put it up like that and then we have a ladder when you climb down here and once you get down here it has everything in it that really runs the boat so on this side we have a fuel tank its 600 liters of fuel and that enough to last us three to four months this is our engine so when there’s no wind this is the main diesel engine that we use to propel the boat this is our generator so this is an 8 kilowatt AC generator runs off diesel fuel and when we need to charge the batteries or if you don’t have enough solar or we need to do something that requires a lot of power we can flip this guy on this is our hot water heater so we have hot water showers on the boat which is actually quite a luxury I don’t know if you can see down here this is our dive compressor so we run this off of the generator and it’s what fills our scuba bottles so were totally self-sufficient for diving which is totally cool we have the declinator which turns saltwater into fresh drinking water which allows us to basically stay at sea indefinitely without that we’d have to go into port like every few weeks for water and battery chargers electronics and all sorts of cool stuff but it’s a this is this is really my office so having a baby on the boat is absolutely incredible and extremely challenging at the same time yeah if you can imagine you know maintaining and sailing a boat is a full-time job and then having a child is also a full-time job and so we basically have two full-time jobs well I think somebody.

Wow so this is where Ciara sleeps she has a little beach tent as a safe place to sleep in here and right next to it we changed the diapers right in here above Sierra we have all our medical stuff everything you can think about antibiotic if you have a really bad sprain if you need to so some wound up we have pretty much everything EpiPens so under here we have eight 100 amp hour batteries it’s a 24 volt system so this is I guess you could call this our back porch really we have a nice big area on the deck where we can sort of lounge and relax back here we have some solar panels we actually have 1400 watts of solar power on Delos which allows us to power the entire boat freezers fridges all the electronics everything off of solar and also wind power so we have two wind generators up here they each produce 400 watts of power so when the wind is blowing those guys are spinning and its pumping in power this giant dish right here is our Internet so this is a gimbaled satellite dome and it allows us to get broadband speed internet anywhere we go which given our line of work is absolutely fantastic now let’s go check out the floor deck of Delos so this is Delos mainmast and where the mizzen is 52 feet high the main mast is 66 feet high sits over a six story building so it’s pretty high this is our mainsail it’s on a roller furling and these are electric motors with gearboxes that actually control how the sail comes out and how the sail rolls out of the mast that what’s controlled by those buttons in the cockpit so we never have to leave the cockpit to come up front and reef the sails or put them in or put them out so it’s a super cool system you really can’t be scared of heights when you live on a boat otherwise go to the top of the mast you’ll be in trouble you know when you’re in a house and a storm comes by and the wind and the rain starts it could be a very cozy experience on a boat it can sometimes be a very harrowing experience because you know your ear houses is in peril you know just the other night we were here and we woke up at midnight because we felt this sudden thud and the wind had shifted just enough to push Delos into shallow water so instead of floating happily at her anchor she was now bouncing off the bottom of the ocean which is a terrible terrible scenario to be in so here we are midnight middle of the night winds blown it’s raining and we have to get dressed we have to go outside and we have to pick up the anchor and we have to move the boat to deeper water and so that  a challenge you’re always sort of living on guard and on the edge for situations like that so because we live on a boat things are a little bit different than a house in this locker we have survival supplies for worst-case scenarios so here we have a gigantic manual pump so if we start taking on water we start pumping for our lives literally here we have a life raft so this is a six man life raft its Otto inflating if anything were to happen. 

We pull the life raft out of the boat we throw it over we tie it on and it has enough supplies to last for I think seven days for six people we have spare water so we have 40 liters of fresh drinking water in case anything happens to our main water supply and we also have a ditch kit and so a ditch kit contains all the supplies that you would want to take with you if you abandon ship so we have spare VHF radio we have flashlights we have food we have even more water in here we have fishing gear we have signal mirrors if worst-case scenario were to come we take all this stuff out and then we would abandon ship with it and it would allow us to hopefully be rescued and survive long enough for somebody to find us I absolutely love living on a boat its extremely special and I think one of the things I love the most is that you are so connected with the weather and nature you literally live outside all the time we’ve sailed in the tropics for quite a number of years and were really looking forward to exploring some places that are different for us so we are gonna sail up to Greenland and up to the Arctic and play around in the ice for a little bit this summer it feels a little bit terrifying in fact when I think about it it puts like that.

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