We are not Glamorous YouTube Sailing Celebrities. We are not particularly young. We are not rich. We live a real sailing lifestyle and we love it. We hope to share a little about what it’s really like in a contrast to the Glamorous YouTube Sailing Celebrities you may be used to seeing 🙂

Dan has lived aboard since 2017 and Synthia has lived aboard part time since 2018. Each of them has sailed for over 30 years. Dan grew up crewing on racing sailboats starting when he was 8 years old, and has raced everything from lazers to J-120s. He prefers cruising now, and has cruised primarily on the West Coast of California but also has spent lots of time cruising in Lake Superior and too little time in BVI. Synthia is from Paris, with lots of family in Martinique, and has spent lots of time on cruising boats in Martinique and Saint Lucia.

Dan owned a Hunter 28.5 in San Francisco for many years. In 2017, he moved onto a Cal 34 MkII, “Satya” based in Ventura California. He met Synthia and she started living on Satya with him part time. They started spending weekends and then weeks cruising around the offshore islands of Central and Southern California and up and down the coast. In 2021 they bought a Beneteau 461, “Scandal” in San Francisco and sailed it down the coast. Dan is still full-time and Synthia part time on Scandal, based in Ventura Harbor and cruising everything from day trips to 2-week trips around Southern California and Baja in Mexico.

They were inspired to share some reality about the liveaboard and cruising life when they sold Satya to a couple who had been inspired by various YouTube sailing celebrities to sell their house and buy a sailboat to live the glamorous cruising lifestyle they saw online.

Their story is told more in full here. The short version is: cruising life was a lot more difficult than glamorous YouTube sailing celerbrities had made it seem. Satya was destroyed a few months after they bought her, smashed to pieces on the rocks in a cove. Luckily they and their dog survived.