This is our NEW TRIMARAN! (Boat Build Begins!), video by Sailing La Vagabonde
December 27, 2022
Sailing La Vagabonde were recently in the factory to video their new Rapido 60, Hull #04, Sailing La Vagabonde III.
They have just released their first video of the build – see below (not sure why the video is “age restricted” – perhaps because minors are too young to own a Rapido?).
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Sailing La Vagabonde
Today's most famous sailors have little in common with a quiet man like Eric Tabarly or a scholarly writer like Joshua Slocum... Riley Whitelum, Elayna Carausu and their son Lenny sail, and they look good: they have a whopping 1.59 million subscribers to their YouTube channel (Sailing La Vagabonde) and have become serious pros at video and social media communications.
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Published 09/06/2021
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Sailing La Vagabonde: Digital Nomads at Sea & New Boating App
Dreaming of dropping everything to sail the world? Sailing La Vagabonde Riley Whitelum & Elayna Carausu have done just that, becoming parents, digital yacht nomads and internet sensations in the process…
They sailed greta thunburg across the atlantic and now, together with the young cruisers association, have developed a much anticipated boating community app, milly karsten reports ..
Riley Whitelum and Elayna Carausu have been sailing around the world for 9 years. With over 1.9 million subscribers to their YouTube channel, Sailing La Vagabonde, and helping to develop and launch the SeaPeople app, this Australian couple are certainly bringing a new and exciting dimension to seafaring.
‘It’s just dopamine hit after dopamine hit’, Elayna and Riley told me over a Starlink call between my London office and their boat off the coast of Amami Ōshima, Japan.
Having met in Greece back in 2014, this Australian couple just weeks into knowing each other, took a leap of faith and set sail for the rest of the world. Elayna, tells me, “It was just meant to be one month of island hopping Greece and Turkey, and when my return flight to Australia was (…) Riley asked me, ‘do you want to come live on this boat with me and sail the world?’. Elayna was just 20, and Riley 29.
Having followed their journey on instagram and YouTube for years, I was keen to hear about their dreamlike and beautifully documented adventures first hand. However, these seasoned sailors, now parents, digital nomads, and internet sensations, also bring to light a new and continually evolving way of life, where sailors and adventurers can live and work on the go, at sea. They’re one step ahead of the working from home revolution – they’re over the horizon, and showing us what we’re missing out on. But it’s not all been picturesque archipelagos and plain sailing…
How has it been becoming digital nomads with Sailing La Vagabonde and creating content together at sea?
Elayna: It took a year for us to be able to earn a living from the YouTube channel (…) to earn what I could earn at a bar basically, it took a year for that, and it was hard work… and obviously didn’t cover the costs of setting up a production boat for bluewater cruising.
Riley: If we go back and tell the story… We ran out of money and Elayna was making movies, but very infrequently, (…) a bit of a comical thing in between Elayna and I was that I was very practical, and I was saying well in the end what is it all for? Maybe we should be concentrating on basically anything else…
Riley then admitted that in the beginning, with little income being made from these videos, he was sceptical, but Elayna saw potential, and asked him to give it time.
E: After a year we completely ran out of money, we had to fly back to Australia to get work. Riley worked offshore again on the oil rigs, for maybe what 3 or 4 months?… And we saved up again then flew back to the boat.
R: But during that time our audience, which was quite small at the time, were freaking out, and they were like ‘is this going to be the end of the movies?’ … Some of those people said look, ‘sign up for this website called Patreon and we’ll all chip in a couple bucks and we can get you going again’.
E: We got back to the boat with some savings that Riley had got off-shore, and in that time I’d set up a website with Patreon and I’d recorded an album of cover songs and got people to pre-order… it was desperate times and we got back to the boat and worked real hard for…
R: 10 more years!
What advice would you give to someone wanting to do this?
E: The only thing I would say is, don’t do it in the hopes to make money, do it out of passion.
R: It’s too hard…
E: We’ve seen people start out thinking it’s a good business plan, and hope on a boat and completely fail (…) that can’t come first, you need to sail and have fun and, have the videos be an afterthought and it’ll evolve.
R: Or you know, the videos can be your passion, but sailing and boats has to be as well, you can’t have that as a secondary (…) you need to be tough basically, you need to be able to live a really hard life, not because you think you’ll make some money out of it (…) very few people are going to get compensated adequately if you consider it a job… If its a way of life that you enjoy, then yeah, it’s a banger way to live!
Are your parents and friends fully on-board?
E: We started at a time when travel blogging was just kind of new, (…) For our friends and family it was really surprising and weird, and when we’d go home for those first few years people didn’t really know how to talk about it with us (…) mostly they wouldn’t even ask, it was like we were doing something so out there it was hard to even talk about it.
R: Social media still had that stigma… We operate in a bit of a grey zone, because we’re not merely Instagrammers, I like to think we’re not… We are on social media, but we’re not documentary film makers either, although we try to get as close to that as we can these days. So people didn’t know where to put us immediately…
E: We’re definitely not tik-tokers, (…) we’d rather just work really hard on YouTube, make good quality movies that people can sit down and watch and learn something, rather than the fast paced [Scrolling].
What has it been like raising your family on board?
R: The great thing is that Lenny in particular really and truly loves the boat, (…) we’ll spend more time away than he’d like, and that’s exactly how we’d want it, we want them to be excited to go back to the boat.
E: We bought them both back when they were only 6 weeks old, tiny little babies (…) There’s so many easy little hacks, for example a chair that clips into the saloon table that clips them in when Riley and I have to go and take a reef (…) I think learning to sail trained us for children, because someone always has to be alert (…) someone has always got the kid hat on, like someone’s always aware of where the kids are and if they’ve got their life jackets on.
E: Sailing and young children are very comparable!
R: Equally disastrous!
Sailing La Vagabonde & Greta Thunberg Across the North Atlantic
In November 2019, climate activist Greta Thunberg made a double crossing of the Atlantic to attend two climate conferences, her return eastward journey was made on La Vagabonde with Riley and Elayna – a harrowing winter crossing, and one which Elayna was not convinced of doing. Yet, when asking the sailing duo what their best experience had been, they’re answer was this:
R: The most rewarding is the most difficult, so whatever your hardest passage was, arriving after that is the most rewarding, so that’s going to be the Greta Thunburg trip across the North Atlantic.
E: We had a week to prepare for this trip, we had a really great female English sailor, Nicky Henderson (…) so we had Nicky, Riley, Me, Greta, and Greta’s Dad.
R: And Lenny…
E: Who was only one… and when we left there was snow, there was ice on our boat the day we left and it was snowing, in the Chesapeake Bay, it was freezing.
R: Milly it was a ******* disaster!
E: It took us 19 days to get across the other side, and in that time there was freezing cold weather, there was hot water from the Gulf Stream…
R: There was lightning that was striking the water right near… Nicky was at the helm, she is such a rockstar… we just cannot believe how incredible… what a leader she is!
R: I mean I could talk about that for hours… we had to go up the rig in 20 knots… the furling line for the headsail snapped and I had to go out the front in legitimately… we don’t even know what it was, but it was well over 40, because it had sustained 40 for I don’t know how long, and then the wind picked up and that’s when the line snapped (…) I had to go forwards, like crawling on my belly to try and furl in manually the headsail, while Nicky was trying to go dead downwind…
E: You felt ‘the sublime’ on that crossing didn’t you
I asked what this was…
R: More philosophy… So, in order to have an encounter with ‘the sublime’ the necessary ingredients are power outside of your control, particularly if it’s nature, and you need to feel threat of your life, so your life needs to be basically out of your control (…) and it was the first time that I really felt that way.
E: It’s a feeling of Awe…
The SeaPeople App
Alongside their sailing adventures, bringing up a family onboard, and creating content for over 1.9 YouTube subscribers, Elayna and Riley have been busy with a new project – working with the Young Cruisers Association to create and launch a specialised app to connect sailors around the world.
If you’ve watched their videos, you’ll know these two don’t shy away from talking about the rainy days, and trials of living/working/parenting on a boat. They talked to me about their experiences of seafarer’s isolation, particularly through the pandemic, and their difficulties with mental health over the years.
It’s certainly a lesser spoken aspect of living afloat… We hear of grand dreamlike adventures and are shown remarkable photos of beautifully calm or high seas, but easily miss checking on a key component of life – connection and community. And so, it seems the SeaPeople app is an exciting step in the right direction.
“SeaPeople is an app designed to bring all the elements of the human side of boating into one place. Sharing your photos, the stats of your trips, your tracking history, and communicating with other boaters has been spread across multiple platforms for too long. SeaPeople brings it all into one place.”
E: We really needed something to connect all sailors… to organise sundowners on the beach, to see who’s around you, who’s onboard, if they’ve got pets or children, where they’re going and at what speed… like you can see the world on a beautiful world map and zoom in on anyone’s boat and ask them a question, ask them if they’ve got a spare part… It’s really for connecting all seafarers.
R: Everyone on a boat, they’re living this crazy adventure, and everyone’s got a story to tell, that’s why everyone had a blog and these disparate websites that were popping up all over the world for each individual boat… this is a way for friends and family to jump on to see where you are, what you’ve been doing, and then to see other similar people that might be nearby’
SeaPeople: The Hail Feature
For Riley and Elayna, the most exciting part of the SeaPeople app is the ‘Hail’ feature. Unlike VHF, where if someone doesn’t hear you, or the message doesn’t get through, there is no way to find that message again, this feature of the app allows you to broadcast a message which stays out there – creating a space for community, conversation, and advice.
E: With Starlink, now is the time for an app like this.
R: These ancient devices that we’re still using, like AIS and VHF, it’s just so necessary for this to exist now, for everyone’s safety and just conveniences.
Download the SeaPeople App
We’re excited to announce the SeaPeople app will be available to download from 10th October this year. Visit www.seapeopleapp.com
How to Watch Sailing La Vagabonde Videos
Follow Riley and Elayna’s latest Sailing La Vagabonde adventures – www.youtube.com/sailinglavagabonde
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June 08, 2021. Rapido Trimarans is thrilled to confirm that Sailing La Vagabonde (SLV) will sail the world's oceans aboard a Rapido 60! In fact, SLV's video announcing the decision to their 1.59 million subscribers (yes, 1.59m subscribers!) will go live live at 8.30am, Adelaide time in Australia (GMT/UTC +9:30) on 8 June 2021.
Need more content from SLV? Join our crew on Patreon for previews of future episodes and regular live streams to chat with us in real time http://bit.ly/SLVP...
Get all the exclusive announcements before everyone else.....Check out our Patreon page here: http://bit.ly/SLVPatreon We're. So. Excited. We've been expl...
The family of adventurers has finally witnessed the launch of La Vagabonde, the third boat to bear this name, a brand new Rapido 60 trimaran. ... I'm the captain today!" smiled Elayna. For the first time, she discovered the potential of their brand new trimaran: "I was so amazed by the tacking angles we can tack through pm the Rapido ...
Sailing La Vagabonde post a video of the launch of La Vagabonde III (Rapido 60 #04) on 2 November 2023. ... the new 16m globetrotter of a trimaran, by Aldo Fumagalli, Vela magazine, 24 January 2024; First look ... Rapido 60 Trimaran Boat Review: A Bold Gamechanger For Performance Bluewater Cruising, ...
December 27, 2022. Sailing La Vagabonde were recently in the factory to video their new Rapido 60, Hull #04, Sailing La Vagabonde III. They have just released their first video of the build - see below (not sure why the video is "age restricted" - perhaps because minors are too young to own a Rapido?). This is our NEW TRIMARAN!
We Boat A New Boat! (TRIMARAN!) | boat
Beautiful Boat Home - Take A Look Inside Our New 60ft Trimaran! ⛵️
When the boys get bigger they'll hate it. I'm sure they'll have been in atleast 3 different new boats for us to live/hate before the boys "get big". Hell, the boys will probably have their own boats by then 😂😂. I don't get why some of you guys complain so much about the new boat being a mistake.
Re: La Vagabonde's new Trimaran A higher performing boat is also likely a better fit for electric propulsion , as it can likely be sailed during more of the times when others would resort to motorsailing or just motoring.
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For this relatively confidential boatbuilder, this represents an unprecedented development opportunity. A quick look at the backstory: in 2014, Elayna and Riley began their great journey aboard a monohull, La Vagabonde. A few years later, they switched up to a catamaran and set out aboard an Outremer 45, logically named La Vagabonde 2. Every ...
Riley Whitelum and Elayna Carausu have been sailing around the world for 9 years. With over 1.9 million subscribers to their YouTube channel, Sailing La Vagabonde, and helping to develop and launch the SeaPeople app, this Australian couple are certainly bringing a new and exciting dimension to seafaring.
Location: Rochester, NY. Boat: Chris Craft 381 Catalina. Posts: 6,652. Re: La Vagabonde's new Trimaran. Quote: Originally Posted by blu3534. I somehow share the sentiment (in the sense I'm in general more interested in smaller boats, dawntrader e.g.).
We are an Australian couple (now with two kids) who had the dream of circumnavigating the globe by sailboat… initially having no clue of how to sail. We have now sailed over 90,000 nautical ...
Join Date: Jun 2020. Location: Europe. Boat: Dragonfly 920 / 30 ft. Posts: 144. Re: La Vagabonde's new Trimaran. I think it's a fantastic boat for them and their viewers. Its speed allows them to island-hop even faster than they did before, whereas other boats spend weeks on water just get a bit of distance behind.
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