Near and Medium Term Plans

It's been about a week, and I'm far from better. However, I am on the mend. Sadly, my lovely wife just came down with whatever it is I've got. She's been working herself pretty hard lately and it caught up to her.

I hope to get to my water well project in a few days. Amazon has some pretty inexpensive endoscopes so I went ahead and ordered a 10 meter one. That should allow me to find the problem. The buried line can be checked from both ends. There will only be about 6 feet that I won't be able to see. If the problem doesn't show up in the scope, it's in the 6 foot section I can't reach. Between the scope and a drum auger, any blockage should be able to be cleared up. The problem could be a leak, but the scope should find that. If the scope saves me from digging up 66 feet of line, that's a good thing.

Hopefully I can sort out the water situation soon. The temporary surface line is working out, but eventually freezing temps will arrive.

With luck, the weather will hold long enough to get some projects done on the van and sailboat. We've pushed out travel plans off until after New Years. That will give more time for places like the Florida Keys to recover. They are a tourist area and if I can spend some time and money down there that will help out a bit.

Some people have suggested that I film my trips and put up a You Tube channel. There are people making a good income from posting sailing adventures. However, there's only a few making real money at it. After doing some research I figured out a ballpark estimate of what the top 10 sailing vlogs make. The top end is somewhere around $300,000. That includes money from You Tube, Patreon, endorsements, sponsorship and other things. By the time you get to number 10 on the list, the income has already dropped to about $30,000. While that's nothing to sneeze at, your budget gets blown if you need a new sail or major engine repair.

Make no mistake about it, filming sailing in paradise is a job. There's an investment in cameras, audio gear, computers for editing, software and other odds and ends. Putting out a weekly video takes a lot of time and effort. Then you have to search around to find a high speed connection to upload the video. Instead of seeing the sights, you are spending 12 hours at a wifi hotspot trying upload on a dodgy signal.

You also need to look good on camera. Being young, fit, and having bikini clad young ladies on the boat is a huge plus. It's not absolute necessary, but sex sells.

Being lazy, I'm going to continue operate on a shoestring budget on old and small boats. I will post photos and do my best to keep the blog up to date. Text and a few photos are not nearly as data intensive as video.

That being said, I did buy a well rated cheap knockoff of a gopro camera. There may be the occasional video clip included. The learning curve is steep as I've never done much filming of any sort before.

So if all goes well, the fall projects will wrap up in the next couple weeks. Then we'll do the final prep for winter and spring travel.

-Sixbears