We're a couple of born and raised Midwesterners with hearts belonging to the ocean. After a decade of dreaming + planning to buy a sailboat, we found a beautiful Tartan 37 in Wisconsin, sailed for a season in the fresh water of Lake Michigan, and are migrating south via the inland river system to saltwater and warmer climates. Join us on our journey!
Lauren & Kirk
We’re a couple of born and raised Midwesterners with hearts belonging to the ocean. After a decade of dreaming + planning to buy a sailboat, we found a beautiful Tartan 37 in Wisconsin, sailed for a season in the fresh water of Lake Michigan, and are migrating south via the inland river system to saltwater and warmer climates. Join us on our journey!
At WeBoating.com, we profoundly acknowledge the unwavering dedication that Sailing Soulianis and other creators invests in crafting each and every video. Their passion for delivering exceptional content shines through every frame, and it's a labor of love that deserves your attention.
We invite you to watch their captivating videos and actively engage with their content, including their social media links above. Liking, commenting, and sharing their work goes a long way in fueling their creative fire.
We're also inviting you to explore any sponsorships and partnerships highlighted in the videos descriptions, or directly on YouTube. By considering their offerings or purchasing services and items, you not only support Sailing Soulianis but also the brands and collaborators they're associated with.
If you have any feedback, corrections, or additional information about Sailing Soulianis or their videos, please use the comment form below to share your thoughts with us.
Thank you for being a part of our community and supporting the creators we cherish. Your time and support truly matter!
Welcome back to our little corner of the internet! After another unplanned hiatus (5 months — oof) we’re excited to finally share our barn build with you! This episode we finish all the groundwork in preparation to start building UP.
We’re building ...
** Big thanks to our partner BoatUS for making this episode possible! Need new lettering for your boat? Go to www.boatus.com/graphics to get started! **
Hellooooo!! Anyone here? We’re here, we’re here!
What a break that was — 8 months! — of near-...
We decided to build a HUGE barn for our sailboat with absolutely zero construction experience. Is it…
Crazy? Maybe.
Educational? Better than school.
Cost-effective? Jury’s out.
Exciting? Never a dull moment ;D
Come watch us prepare the foundation of ...
Thanks to our sponsor BetterHelp for making this episode possible! Go to https://betterhelp.com/sailingsoulianis for 10% your first month of therapy with BetterHelp.
The beauty of our trimaran is in its foldability — it unfolds to be sailed and folds to...
After nearly a year of planning, we’ve arrived at DAY ONE of our barn build: excavation! Seeing the earth being moved — the first real visual progress — is pretty thrilling.
Prior to breaking ground, our discussions of the barn’s size and locatio...
** Huge thanks to our partner BoatUS for making this episode possible! Need a domestic MMSI number for your VHF radio? Go to www.boatus.com/mmsi **
Does your boat have a LIFE-SAVING button? Ours does! Well, let’s be honest, pressing it in a maritime eme...
We escaped the traditional 9-to-5 life, sold our belongings, and left an idyllic Southern California lifestyle in search of what lies beyond the horizon. We’ve spent the last 10 years preparing our lives to set sail.
Join us on our journey!
Website:
ht...
We show you a slice of our San Diego lives, and talk about why we decided to leave our beach cottage in California — for life aboard a sailboat.
Our search for the right sailboat took years: We researched thousands of sailboats online, saw hundreds in ...
The sailboat hunt is on! We drive from San Diego, California to Guaymas, Mexico to see a catamaran named Imi Loa. We’ve had our eye on this boat for a little while, and have been in contact with the sellers — they assure us this cat is ready to go crui...
We’re off again to see another catamaran — this time to Seattle. We fly from San Diego, hop a few trains, ride a couple ferries and even inflate a paddle board to get to the boat, which is moored on Orcas Island, in the San Juan Islands.
Kirk knows ab...
There are literally thousands upon thousands of boats on the west coast, and we can’t find one to fit the bill? Up until this point, we had limited our boat search to catamarans, with a price tag of $50,000 or less. Yes, we admit, we probably could find ...
Our offer was accepted on a Morgan 382! The boat is in fabulous condition, but still needs a bit of work. Fortunately she doesn’t need repairs, just finishing. Kirk and I do kind of like the idea of finishing out the systems ourselves. The woodworking, o...
WE FINALLY BUY A SAILBOAT. It feels like we’ve been searching for a boat forever! In this episode we finally buy a boat, a beautiful Tartan 37.
Before we find the Tartan, we look at two other options in the Milwaukee area: a Pearson 38 and a Southerly 3...
The Tartan 37 is ours, and it’s time to celebrate! With the 4th of July arriving just days after we close on the boat, we decide it’s rather fitting to pop some bubbly and celebrate our own new-found freedom… from land!
The hardest part of moving ab...
Until now, family and friends have always sailed with us on our Tartan 37, but this time we sail her by ourselves, up to Milwaukee and back.
Leaving the dock at our marina in Racine is tricky. The dock is on the Root River (which frequently floods and dra...
Products in this video:
Tea Kettle - https://sailingsoulianis.com/products-we-love/bodum-electric-tea-kettle
Manual Food Processor - https://sailingsoulianis.com/products-we-love/zyliss-manual-food-processor
We bought the boat, daysailed the boat, and hav...
It’s our FIRST OVERNIGHT PASSAGE! We set sail across Lake Michigan, leaving in the middle of the night to ride the fading winds of a storm. Kirk’s dad arrives just before midnight to join us for the trip.
The sail starts out with 15+ knts on the nose,...
Products in this Review
Suaoki 150Wh Portable Power Station
https://amzn.to/2K0XANF
Suaoki 100W Solar Panel Charger
https://amzn.to/2qLAS3m
--
Just when we thought we didn’t need any more solar…
When designing our boat’s new battery and solar sy...
Our shakedown cruise is officially underway! After crossing Lake Michigan with Kirk’s dad, we arrive in Pentwater, MI where we meet up with the rest of Kirk’s family. It’s our first of many ports of call along Michigan’s west coast we visit over th...
Every summer as Kirk was growing up, his family would visit Charlevoix, a quaint vacation town located on a skinny isthmus between Round Lake and Lake Michigan.
Round Lake was a boating mecca; all sorts of craft paraded across its waters, waiting for the...
Summer in Michigan is magic, because it’s so fleeting. It usually arrives sometime in June, and by the time you’ve attended a family get together and a wedding or two, it’s already August, and you’re wondering where the heck the time went…
If yo...
Freshwater surfing! Kirk’s beyond stoked to get a chance to surf Lake Michigan.
After leaving Charlevoix, we snuck into Leland just before a cold front moved in. The front brought strong winds that ended up sticking around for three days, which prevent...
That’s a wrap on our shakedown sail! In this episode, after sailing back across Lake Michigan to our home port of Racine, Wisconsin, and getting a little weird during the crossing (being alone on a boat definitely makes you go a little batty), we talk th...
Back in our homeport of Racine, we start tackling the long list of projects we want to finish before leaving for our journey down “The Ditch.”
Kirk researches the heck out of LED bulbs. He determines the warm Kakanuo bulb https://amzn.to/2JX40fS to be...
A leaky marine head can be a very shitty situation. At one point during our shakedown cruise around Lake Michigan, (thanks to a combination of rollicking seas, a leaky hand pump, and plain ignorance) we ended up with toilet water where it SHOULDN’T be ...
Settle in… we’ve got our first 20+ min episode for you! The river trip is right around the corner, and our preparations start getting serious. The list of boat projects we want to complete (as discussed in Ep 15) before leaving Lake Michigan is LONG. I...
Just one week is left before we depart our home port of Racine, Wisconsin — for good!?! — and take off south down the river.
The list of projects, errands, and to-dos is still a mile long. We need to buy anchor chain, install an anchor swivel, hook up...
This is it! After years of preparation, we’re finally untying the dock lines, leaving our homeport, and pointing our bow south.
Our first stop is Chicago, Illinois. It’s 50 nautical miles from Racine, Wisconsin, to Belmont Harbor, where our friends Ka...
Sailing into Chicago was pretty surreal for us. We first began hatching cruising plans while living in the city ten years ago. Now, looking back at the shoreline we used to walk along, a sailboat floating only in our imaginations, it feels like we’ve com...
Do you dream of sailing over the horizon in your own sailboat? If so, one of the biggest questions you probably have is, How much is the boat?
In this episode, we break down the cost of our Tartan 37, going into the buying process, closing expenses and tr...
What lies between us and saltwater sailing? 1300 miles of rivers! Before we can get underway, we need to unstep our mast. For this leg of our journey south, we turning our sailboat into a motorboat. There’s a fixed 19’ 1” bridge in Chicago that force...
At the end of our last episode, we left you thinking we ran aground. Yeah, we did. Though in all fairness, it was more of a “nudge the bottom” situation. The question was, how did we manage to run aground in 8 feet of water, when we only draft 4?
Turn...
Oh dear…This one’s for you dreamers out there who will one day become newbie boat owners, just like us. Take notes! Hopefully you won’t have to make these same mistakes.
Last episode, we had issues with our centerboard, which were — surprise! — ...
Welp, it’s about time we get moving south, eh? With all the boat dramas from the last few episodes now behind us, we’re finally making miles south down the Illinois River. And good thing, too, ‘cause winter is hot on our keel.
We encounter all sort...
As far as we know, we’re the last sailboat on the river. The only other watercraft are tows with barges, a couple motorboats being delivered for winter storage, and bunch of duck hunters. It’s a bit desolate, but beautiful. It feels like we have the ri...
Motoring a sailboat down the Mississippi River — a bit paradoxical, isn’t it? Back when buying a sailboat was still a distant dream, we can most definitely assert that motoring down a bunch of rivers was not on the to do list. But, sometimes you find y...
After flying down the Mississippi River at 10 knots, turning upriver onto the Ohio is a shock. It’s frothy with breaking waves, it’s running fast, and we struggle against its current. At one point, Soulianis slows all the way down to 1.5 knots, and we ...
At this point, we’re about halfway into our river journey from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico. We’ve transited several locks thus far, but no other part of the route has as many locks as Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.
It’s one lock right after a...
We’ve become pretty comfortable with our life on the river. Each morning, once we’re underway, Kirk takes the helm and I make breakfast in the galley. Then we switch back and forth with steering, giving each other a chance to get something done. One af...
Ooo this has been a long time coming… We make it to SALTWATER! After leaving the freshwater of Lake Michigan and traveling 1300 miles down the rivers (Mississippi and all the rest!), we’ve made it to the Gulf of Mexico!
Finally it’s time to turn our...
We put the mast back up and we’re pretty dang stoked about it. The electrical is reconnected, the boom goes back on, and Kirk takes a stab at tensioning our standing rigging himself. Soulianis is finally feeling more like a sailboat again.
Hope you enjo...
Even though the mast is back up and we’re officially a sailboat again(!), we’ve got a scary long list of boat projects to complete before we can leave the dock in Mobile, Alabama.
In this video we bend the sails back on, replace the kitchen plumbing, ...
Manage Cookies
We use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. We do this to improve browsing experience and to show (non-) personalized ads. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Always active
These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable information.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
