Stepping out with SAILING UMA
How did two college graduates become one of the most famous sailing couples on the planet? Rob Melotti reports
YouTube sailing channels are a global success story. Thousands of sailing fans worldwide subscribe to the videos posted by La Vagabonde, SY Delos, Sailing Uma and hundreds of others. So when British Marine announced that they had invited Dan Deckert (30) and Kika Mevs (28) from Sailing Uma to speak at Southampton Boat Show, I booked a half-hour interview that ended up being a full day of sailing with skipper Kass Schmitt aboard Zest, her Humphreys 36 custom cruiser-racer, out on the Solent.
Dan and Kika met as students of architecture in Atlanta, Georgia, but on graduation they both agreed that real-life experience was required to figure out their own way forward in life. “There’s a lot better ways of going through life than just doing it for money,” says Dan.
Their vague plans to buy a small boat to learn to sail, then progress to something bigger, went into fast-forward when they spotted a 1972 Pearson 36 for sale 1,500 miles away near Boston. They were surprised when an extremely low offer was accepted, so in October 2015, having sold almost everything they owned, they drove from Atlanta to New England to start their new lives. Yet just three months earlier they knew so little about sailing that they didn’t actually realise you could buy a boat with accommodation and facilities built in.
“One Google search later and we’re like: ‘Oh! Boats designed to live in for people sailing around the world, like Duh!’ This has happened for 100 years,” says Dan. “It wasn’t a linear progression. It was much more of a cluster over a couple of months of things happening and snowballing and falling into place and realising that what we wanted to do 20 years down the road, we could actually do now...”
Vlogging
They began video blogging at about the same time they bought the boat, and success has been steady rather than spectacular. Their videos are described as ‘steps’ – leading viewers down the path taken to the ultimate aim of sailing the world. In Step 1, they describe their boat as ‘Neither fancy and expensive, nor cheap and flimsy.’ By step 3 they have resorted to transporting Uma by road to Fort Pearce, Florida, to escape the New England winter, leaving behind their non-functioning diesel engine and deciding to buy a $100 electric forklift truck engine instead. Step 7 – Dan gets a crash course in navigation as half of a delivery crew on board a yacht from Guadeloupe to Miami.
Steps 5 and 6 the pair grind out the floor bearers over the keelbolts and rebuild them completely. Step 8 Dan removes the chainplates, repairs sections of the deck’s balsa core, reassembles the mast and standing rigging, services the roller furler and devises a new attachment for the unit to the deck and supervises the mast lift. I would feel confident on board having seen
how hard they have worked on Uma.
And the rest is documented in the 138 steps plus dozens of other free videos on their YouTube channel. The electric engine is an ongoing saga, they replumb the boat after discovering the holding tank is still full from the previous owner... Sailing Uma is the natural home for PBO readers. It is inspiring watching their progress.
Critics insist that many of the most successful sailing channels trade on their looks – scantily-clad women (and men) larking about in front of the camera with little or no interest in sailing. Kika and Dan in the Caribbean are, of course, rarely found in sleeves and long trousers, but, without naming any names, they described to me tales of online stalking, restraining orders and worse as being the price to pay for some of the channels that have boosted their audience with titillation.
Safety is also a bone of contention for a section of their audience that comments on social media. Dan’s decision to ride out Hurricane Matthew on board Uma is perhaps the most controversial, but it’s the lack of guardrails that gnaws away at me while I watch their episodes. Needless to say, they don’t care what you (or I) think about how they choose to sail.
Their grand plan over the next few years is to sail transatlantic via Canada, Greenland and Iceland then down to the Med. This avoids the need to spend weeks at a time on the open ocean, but it will be interesting to see what effect cold, tidal, open water passagemaking has on their laid-back cruising style. Stay tuned...
‘We realised that what we wanted to do 20 years down the road we could actually do now’