I guess it's a phase that the social
internet is going through - at which point do all the 'had a dream, bought a
boat, going sailing around the world to inspire others' patreon grabs go stale?
A new couple on youtube just showed up today - Inspire Sailing. A young couple who have never sailed before (other than a beach
catamaran for him). They are from NZ and have bought themselves a
Lagoon 420 in
Spain. They've flown over and without any hesitation left the marina and are heading west in the Med with plans to cross the Atlantic soon. Home movie quality videos (yes, I did watch them) and apparently at least one patreon already! So people are willing to pay, and I'm guessing it's not always (or even usually?) about the content. Though they have cracked the YouTube code and are showing plenty of shots of her in a skimpy bikini doing stuff around the
boat.
Is this what it's like now - "Just Do It" (apparently most successful branding ever)? Even something like sailing across an ocean with no experience and no knowledge of what it takes? All good when things go well, and I guess that's the challenge of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc, in that the lives that those platforms portray have very little to do with real life even when they are purporting to show reality.
How often are even the experienced posters (Delos for example) showing the **** hitting the fan? Nighttime squalls, boats dragging anchors, gear breaking, heck, even
passage planning so that they don't hit
reefs? Almost never. It's all sunshine and sprinkles and unicorns.
All I can think, "you don't know what you don't know", and it doesn't lower the risk to not have a plan to find out about the unknowns. That's true for all of us, but has greater consequences for the newbies.
I used to do a lot of mountaineering, and in that community the exact same discussions go on about the "new way" that only needs desire and sees no need for apprenticeship.
Hence, I'm a bit jaundiced about stories like the L47 that ran itself onto a reef due to the
skipper not knowing what he was doing, then blaming it on the chart presentation. Awful at a human level for the people involved and their loved ones back home, but entirely predictable in general risk terms.
A counter example is Gone with the Wynns (I'm not sure there are any others) - they're super conservative and their plan includes
learning before they jump. I guess they have to retain their
insurance coverage as I believe they've financed their boat. Though we breathed a sigh of relief when they finally cut the apron strings and set course for
Panama, after months and months and months of Florida-Bahamas-Florida-Bahamas etc.
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