The Long Play

Building Something That Lasts

We’ve been silent here. Over 2 years of silence in this corner of the internet. Not because nothing was happening, but because almost everything important was.

No good story comes from things going exactly to plan. The real gifts in life tend to show up in the detours. There is no version of our life where we could have planned our way into running a YouTube channel, sailing around the world, or starting a yacht design and build business. Sometimes life takes you down a winding road. At times painful. Other times exhilarating. Looking back, if you want your life to be interesting, you have to accept things not going to plan. If you knew the ending, it wouldn’t be worth the watch.

Most people know us immersed in the tropical latitudes, following the trade wind belts. But over the past couple of years we’ve spent a lot of time back in our home country, Canada. A place we will always crawl home to. A beautiful, rugged part of the world.

Canada has become a refuge of sorts. Away from the tropical heat. Away from cameras, thumbnails, and algorithms. A place where we rest and build. Build things meant to last decades, not seasons. It’s also become an anchor for our children. Bodhi and Willa are getting to know the wild coast of British Columbia, and that feels important. Canada will continue to play a big role in our lives.

I’ll be honest. Sailing around the world for the first time is absolutely exhilarating. Remote anchorages. The Panama Canal. The people of Papua New Guinea. Tribes of Madagascar. The raw sailing around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. It’s edge-of-your-seat stuff. A second circumnavigation, following much of the same route, is different. Still good, still meaningful, but far less thrilling. It circles back to that earlier point. When you already know the ending, the experience changes.

That realization forced us to ask harder questions. Not just about where we sail next, but about what we build next.

Which brings me to a question many people have asked quietly, and some not so quietly. What happened to the Nahoa 55?

We announced that project back in Cape Town in 2023. At the time it felt straightforward. Design a capable aluminum catamaran. Build our dream boat. Then take that concept and turn it into a small production series. In reality, it’s far harder than it looks.

When the early excitement fades, you’re left with reality. A list of everything that can go wrong. That’s where the gut punch starts. Charlie Munger talked often about inversion. Don’t focus on what can go right. Focus on what can go wrong and work backwards from there.

We had a design largely complete. We spoke with yards. On the surface, everything sounded promising. Timelines. Finishes. Big assurances. But when we pushed for references and real-world proof, the answers got thin. More importantly, we came to a hard realization. Without exclusivity on the design, there was no viable foundation for a production boat business. You cannot build something meant to last decades if the underlying structure is compromised from day one.

So we walked away.

That was a tough year. A tough couple of years, really, rebuilding and redesigning from scratch. We walked away from an amount of money that would have made a meaningful house down payment. We walked away because continuing would have meant compounding risk, not perseverance. There is a difference between the two, and learning to tell them apart is costly.

And then we started over.

This time with different questions. What can go wrong in this country? What can go wrong with this design? What can go wrong with this yard?

That search led us to Pierre Delion. His experience with aluminum sailing catamarans built to actually go places stood out immediately. More importantly, the alignment felt right. Clear boundaries. Clear ownership. A foundation we could build on without second guessing ourselves.

Today, we’re nearing the point where that work becomes visible. The design is real. Suppliers are being selected. Decisions are being made carefully and deliberately. Quietly, for the most part.

I’m not here to sell you anything. That’s never been what this space is for. I’m not even sure what you’re supposed to call it. A blog, a journal, a place to slow things down. Whatever it is, it’s where we can be a bit more human and talk about what happens behind the scenes of the things you usually only see once they’re polished.

YouTube has been an incredible career, if you can call it that. It gave us a life we never could have planned. But YouTube alone was never the end goal. The longer we’ve been out there, the clearer it’s become that if we want to build something that lasts, it has to live beyond an algorithm or a posting schedule.

The work we’re doing now is a long play. It pulls together everything we’ve learned over eleven years at sea, combines it with some of the best design minds we could find, and leans on people who’ve actually built and outfitted expedition boats meant to go far, not just look good at the dock.

That path doesn’t just lead to our next boat. It opens the door to places we haven’t been yet. To stories that take more than luck and enthusiasm to reach. The kind that require a boat strong enough to get there in the first place.

The excitement faded a long time ago, somewhere along the road where we had to walk away and start again. What’s left now is something better. Confidence. Clarity. And a much clearer sense of where we’re going.