3 days of BOAT LIFE 🛥 on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland with Scho & Jo!

This is cool! Chesapeake Bay here we come! I'm driving a boat right now, no big deal. For the next 72 hours we are trading van life for boat life. We are currently in Crisfield, Maryland which is on the Chesapeake Bay and we're about to meet up with two very special people, our friends Jen and Elliot, also known as Sho and Joe, for the first time in real life. So a little bit of backstory on them. We met them on Instagram about two years ago, started messaging, started texting, started having FaceTime dates, and then finally starting to plan to meet in real life. Jen and Elliot started their full-time travel journey back in 2019 by going abroad. They visited some amazing places in South America, New Zealand, and Australia before getting stuck in India for five months when the pandemic started. Once they were able to get home to the U.S. they decided to America's Great Loop. This is a 6,000 mile route that goes through the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway to New York, through the New York canals to the Great Lakes, to Chicago, down the inland rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, and around Florida. The journey has been full of highs and lows and you'll have to watch their channel to see what their largest setback was, but they had to pause the Great Loop for this year and have been here in Maryland for a while working on boat projects before cruising back south. So for the next few days we're going to join them aboard Pivot and experience what boat life is like, maybe explore the area a little bit, and most importantly have a ton of fun. There they are. I hope they like us. Oh my gosh. What's up? Hello, I'm Elliot, also known as Joe. And I'm Jen, and I'm the Joe to the show in Joe. And this is our girl Ollie. This is Ollie, our new best friend. My new best friend. Our new best friend. You may notice that Kona's not with us. That's because she doesn't always love dogs. We don't know if she would like a boat, so we figured it'd be less stressful to have someone watch her. So we'll get lots of Ollie clips. Welcome to Pivot. This is so cool. It's so big. Yeah. This area is already bigger than the van. Just this area. So this is Pivot. Pivot is a 1989 34-foot marine trader, and she's a trawler, which means that it's very comfortable, a lot of space, but also we move very slowly. Our cruising speed is about six knots, which is like seven miles an hour. So brisk walk, essentially. So coming into Pivot, the first thing that you see is our galley, where we have a two-burner propane stove. We have a Dometic convection microwave. This is our fridge. We have like essentially like a cheese shelf. Let me see. It's in your fridge. Let me see. It's in your freezer. Oh, wow. That's so shocking. More cheese. Oh my God. There's ice cream too. The amount of ice cream that their freezer can hold makes us very, very jealous. Very jealous. Coming forward, we have our V-berth. So this is where Jenna and I typically sleep. We have kind of two bunks, and we have a future project coming to close off and make it a big bed. And then we have our forward head, which is our toilet and our shower. We have 600 amp hours of lithium batteries on board and two solar panels. They're both 175 watts, and we are going to be increasing that soon, doubling it, just the solar capacity. And here's where we have all of our controls for navigating as well as for our batteries and for our electrical. That is so cool. It's like a fog horn horn. It's cool. Here's the GPS. And so this little dotted line, this is where we came from. So you can kind of keep track. Yeah. This is our salon, or if you're drinking, we call it the saloon. And so this is where we typically do our work. We eat dinner, all that kind of stuff. And we also convert this area to our movie theater room because this table drops down and we can move the cushions around and kind of just have some time to chill. And then moving backwards, we have our aft cabin, or if you want to be fancy, it's called the state room. It's a I can't really stand up fully in this one. I'm six one. And so I can't stand up fully, but it's still pretty high. We have a bigger bed back here. This is, I would say it's more like a full size, maybe in between a full and a queen. And then we have another one that's like a little bit bigger than a twin and the other head. It's an electric Marine head. So the one in the Ford is like a manual one. So you have to like pump it. And this one is the same sort of thing, but it's, it's electric. So you basically, there's a button that you press and that button will flush and bring in water from where your boat is. And that's the water that uses to flush. This is our new anchor. So this is great. This means that it'll like dig into the ground a little bit. And then this bar means that like, if it gets, um, if it like drops on that bar, it'll roll over. So there's going to be probably a million comparisons we'll bring up between the van and the boat. But first initial reactions here is they have two bedrooms, a big salon area, like their living room and upper area. Just thinking about that with how much space we have in the van, it's much more spacious and maybe a little bit more comfortable. In two bathrooms. Yeah. Thanks for coming to visit us. Thank you very much. We appreciate you guys driving all the way to Crisfield, Maryland, just to come see merely old Jen and Elliot. As we mentioned earlier, Jen and Elliot were in India for five months. And while they were there, they learned how to make a bunch of different Indian food. And for months, we've been telling them that we wanted to try some of the things that they could make. They started us off with homemade chai, which was the best chai I've had in a very long time. And they've made us a couple other goodies, which we'll let them explain because we don't remember what they are. So first we have dhal fry, which is, um, like a lentil kind of soup stew almost. And then we have papadum, which is like a graham flour and it's like nice and crispy, um, really light and thin. So it's really delicious. The palak paneer. So this is like spinach with palak cheese, which is kind of like a with paneer cheese, which is like a, like a soft white kind of almost Indian mozzarella ish. And then we have the chapati. All right, here we go. All right. First off, awesome job on the chapati. It's good stuff here. It's like got nice little chew to it and it's perfect little scoop for palak paneer. And so you scoop up and you just get like a really good spiciness to it. It's got perfect spice level. They describe the paneer as like kind of mozzarella-y and it does kind of have that kind of flavor, but it just all works so well, especially with your utensil here. Super delicious. And I'm trying the dhal fry first, which is a lentil based dish. And I did it on rice and it has a bunch of Indian spices in there. Some tomatoes. This is so comforting. Like on a cold day, this is the best thing you could have. It is just rice and lentils and so much flavor. It's just, I don't, I don't know how to describe it. It has a different taste than anything else I've ever had, but it is super flavorful and good. For our second course of the night, we have some assortment of Indian desserts. First up, we're trying gulab jamun, which is kind of like a dough ball with maybe some Indian spices in there. And then it's soaked in sugar water and they're, they're warm. Oh wow. Oh wow. This basically tastes like a donut with the glaze like melted off of it and then just like soaked in it. And then there's a little bit of nuts in there. And then the spices, it is so sweet and so doughy and so good. And I'm going to eat that whole bowl there. So the next dessert we're trying is ladoo, which is a traditional Indian sweet made from chickpea flour and garnished with saffron. Oh, that tastes just like kind of what you described the last one tasting like, kind of like a soaked donut. It has kind of the texture of a donut, but with a lot more moisture to it. You guys killing it on the feast tonight. Next up, we're trying the barafi. This one is super awesome too. It has kind of a gritty texture and then you definitely taste the pistachio and the other, uh, was it nutmeg and cardamom in there as well on this. So we have a handful of these little guys and the box says mix bite and it says it's a condensed milk sweet, but we're not a hundred percent sure what it is. Oh, it smells kind of nutty. It has a tan color and you can see some nuts in here, like chunks of nuts, but it has kind of a compact hardened appearance. But I feel like when you break it apart, it'll be softer on the inside. That's not what I was expecting from the texture. It's so much crunchier than I thought it would be. Not even just the nut, but the inside, it kind of has like a crispiness to it. It's really good. Every single one of these is different from anything we've ever had before. They're all a little bit different from each other, have a ton of flavor. This is honestly like Jen slaved over this feast for like three hours and then these desserts they picked up, they didn't make these ones, but everything has been so good. It's fun to get to travel internationally while here in the States just through food. Food is like our favorite part of travel. So this has been so fun. So as we mentioned, they have two bedrooms and they gave us a choice of which one we wanted, which shows the aft bedroom, which is in the back. And this one is lovingly called the coffin. One of us gets to sleep under here. Cozy. Hopefully I don't have a nightmare in the middle of the night. I feel pretty good. Yeah. Got lots of head space. Comfy though. Lots of head space for you. Yeah. This is our first time ever sleeping on a boat. It sways a little bit and you kind of feel it in your head more than you do your body, but I feel like it'll be a nice like rockabye baby kind of thing. Good night. Night. Sleep tight. Vampire. Mostly pretty good. Took me a while to fall asleep and get used to the coffin, but pretty good overall. Definitely not affected by the boatiness. I didn't feel any swaying or anything. It was nice. So as we mentioned before, Jen and Elliot had been here in Maryland for a while doing projects on their boat. So they're not actually out cruising right now. They're docked at a Marina and we're hoping to take the boat out tomorrow. But today, since it's a little windy, we're going to take out their dinghy named Fred to get out on the water a little bit. And Fred just got a new motor yesterday. So it should be a pretty awesome ride. This is cool. I drive the dinghy. So this is like the kind of like the key. So this is magnetic and it, uh, you put it in this little channel here and that lets you start it up, I guess. And so, you know, you steer with this thing. Uh, not sure the technical name, but you turn it this way. It'll go forward, turn it that way. It'll go backwards and we're going to rip through here. We're going in circles now. Docking is Jen's least favorite part of boat life and they're making me dock a dinghy on my first try. I didn't feel super confident steering, so I am not docking the dinghy, but Adam's going to give it a try. The dinghy only holds three and a half people. So we're taking turns on it. We have three humans and one dog and that counts as three and a half. This is essentially like our car. And so this is the method that we use to take our dog Ollie to shore. We're back. So fun fact about Crisfield, Maryland. It's apparently the crab capital of the world. So what do you do in the crab capital? You eat crab. We came to a spot called the crab place and we were going to get some of the blue crab, but I guess the crabs weren't biting today and they didn't have any here. So we got the next best thing, crab cake and fries and some corn. And Adam got some hushpuppies. I have never had crab or a crab cake before. Oh, but this looks good because it has a nice crisp on the outside. Looks like it's been fried, but very soft on the inside. Smells like fish. Chicken. It is delicious. It's just so tender on the inside. Has lots of juiciness, but then just crispy on the outside. It's not overly fishy or anything. So I've had crab before, but it's been a really long time. So it's basically like I haven't had it ever. Oh yeah, there's tons. This is loaded. Awesome flavor. Tons of meat in there. Super delicious. I was super surprised and happy to see Catherine's reaction. I was not expecting that reaction. She was very delighted. It's 4.49 PM and yesterday daylight savings time ended, which means that sun is setting. Nice. We came to this dock right across from the library in town. Seen an amazing sunset. The sun's popping through some clouds right now, so we're going to enjoy this, head back to the boat, play some games tonight and just hang out. Tomorrow should be a very big day because one, the boat, and two, it's Adam's birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday. The big three, four. We have a busy morning ahead, getting the boat ready to take out on the water, but first I'm going to take my first ever boat shower. Elliot explained to us last night how to work the shower and I was kind of tired when he explained it. So let's see how much I remember. But from what I remember, you basically get the water temperature, the right temperature, the temperature you want. Feeling cold? A little warmer. Okay. And then once you have it the temperature you want, the showerhead is removable. You pull the plug. So this bathroom is a wet room, just like in our van where you have like the toilet and the shower all together. And similar to the van, you have to take really, really quick showers. Elliot called them sailor showers, where basically you rinse off, turn off the water, suds up, turn back on the water, rinse off and repeat until you're done. So they're like two minute long showers that really don't take that much water. So to prevent the entire bathroom getting super wet, they have these shower curtains that you can go like this and then one right here. Bye. How is it in there? It's good. It's nice and warm. Good water pressure. A little cold when the water's not on though. What would you rate it compared to ours? About the same. Yeah. In the process for preparing Pivot for launch for Adam's birthday, we have a lot of maintenance and checklist items to do. And the first thing that we do is we set up the flybridge and we set up our home station in here. So that way we kind of have options for where to move the boat. And it's always good to have options because a while back we were navigating up there and then our wheel fell off. What is that you see? That's our steering wheel, not on our home station. And so good thing this was ready and then vice versa. So you never know. So we have like, we transport these items back and forth. And so we have our GPS, we have our radio mic, we have some first aid items and some SOS items and extra horn and just odds and ends for navigating. So this is an old tractor engine. Like they just like ran so well that they fitted it up for a lot of boats. I'm checking how much oil or what the oil looks like. Let me have like a little bit extra oil in here for some reason. The oil looks good. Now I check fuel. We don't have any gauges on our dash for what our fuel level is. So every day as part of our checklist we have to come down in here and we have a site where we can basically see what our fuel is at. So we have to manually check it at the start of every cruise. We have 300 gallons of fuel so we don't need to fill up hardly at all, which is nice. It's things we don't have to worry about. But we still check it just to make sure and just in case we had a leak or something and we didn't know about it and then we would see because you don't want to leave and then not have enough fuel to get back. So the rule of thumb is you want to have like double at least double the amount of fuel that you need for like your next leg of your journey. Elliot says the last time they filled up was in South Carolina and we are currently in Maryland. That is crazy. We're clear. It was very impressive to see everything that they have to do to get ready to get out on the water. They have this huge long checklist that they go through every time to make sure that their trip out on the water is super safe. And it's crazy to think about all the different variables that they have on the boat as opposed to what we have in the van. All we have to do is just maybe check the weather, check the road conditions if it's kind of adverse weather and then plug it into Google Maps and just go. But they've got all that. Then they've got to check the wind, check the weather, check the tides. It's just it's a lot and it's a lot it's very impressive to be able to see that and that they can do this. We're proud of them. They do an awesome job and it's so much fun to be here on the boat with them. Chesapeake Bay here we come. So a few fun facts about the Chesapeake Bay. It is 200 miles long and includes six different states and it gets half of its water from the Atlantic Ocean in the form of salt water and the other half is freshwater that drains into the bay from its enormous watershed. It is the largest estuary in North America and has the largest land-water ratio of any coastal water body in the entire world. This is our first time ever on the Chesapeake Bay at least together and so far it has been so beautiful. We definitely want to come back and explore more of this part of the U.S. either in the van or we'll just tag along with Jen and Elliot again. We're in a boat right now so we're attempting to enter this other channel to go through a little bit of different area here and the depth is getting a little hairy so the minimum that they can kind of cruise through is about three and a half feet and we're bumping right around five feet going to like 4.8, 5, 5.5, 6 somewhere in that range so it's getting a little tricky. We'll see what happens. We made it through the cut we turned back around but luckily that wasn't the drama. The drama was we almost lost the drone. It was so windy. Leaving the boat was easy, getting it back was hard but Adam was clutch and just ripped it out of the sky. It was crazy. It was just crazy. This time we are using our new anchor and we have nicknamed our anchor a good night's sleep so hence we should hopefully have a good night's sleep. The anchor we think it had a really good bite which we're really excited about because hopefully that means that we're getting a good night's sleep tonight hopefully but we'll find out and you guys will be our guinea pigs. So we made it back from our little cruise we're back in the marina that we've been staying in but instead of staying at the marina we've actually stayed in the little cove here we've dropped anchor right in the middle so we can get the full-on kind of out at sea boat experience so dropping an anchor is one of the options that you have and it's kind of like when we boondog we go find land post up there and that's where we stay for the night and some of the other options you have you can do what's called hook up to like a mooring ball which is a buoy above the water so they would hook onto that and it's fixed under the water down at the surface or down below the surface and then also you can stay at the marina. For my birthday dinner i'm having my absolute favorite meal steak and veggies what the heck i apparently bought silent streamers happy birthday dear adam happy birthday to you for the birthday extravaganza we have ice cream sundaes and the state dessert of maryland smith island cake so smith island cake originates from smith island which is maryland's only inhabited offshore island it's traditionally eight to ten layers of thin yellow cake separated by fudge icing but you can also get it in other flavors and we got a red velvet one it looks super moist that is super good because regular cake you know you might get a bite of just the cake and no icing this you're gonna get everything all in one bite why is this not more of a thing having the icing in between thin layers is clutch because you genius you get just the best proportion of icing and cake and yeah this is nice and moist oh hey look at that sweet binoculars like today that you wanted binoculars yeah like you say you say something and it manifests you know what i'm saying how cool that's amazing yeah thank you babe we had an amazing night sleeping out on anchor for the first time the water was basically like glass so it was just such a smooth night i slept the best i've slept on the boat the entire time we've been here but unfortunately it is our last morning here on the boat and with jen and elliot and ollie and we're about to pack up and then head back to the marina oh i'll miss you too this is where we dropped the anchor last night and you can tell this is where we kind of backed up on it to make sure it was set and then we made this little heart and then now the boat's over here so this is just how the boat rotates around the anchor so it looks like we've done maybe 30 degrees and right now we're about 50 feet away from the anchor miss you guys thank you guys thank you guys thanks for having us love y'all y'all too boat safe we are so sad to leave jen elliot and ollie they are truly some of the most genuine fun real just incredible people and we had the best time just hanging out going on the boat playing games and just getting to talk about the struggles that we both have with a nomadic lifestyle as well as with content creation it's rare that we get to meet people who understand those kind of two unique aspects of our life so it was just an absolute blast we've been looking forward to this for a year and it was even better than we could have ever imagined so make sure to go check out their channel because one they are awesome and two they'll have a video out from our time with them so you can see their perspective on our little three-day boat life adventure but we are officially starting our trek back to texas for the holidays we have a long journey ahead of us so we're going to spend the next few days just driving not filming anything but we do want to make a few stops along the way home and next up you'll see us at mammoth cave in kentucky great job i'm the captain now i knew you were gonna say that no pressure everyone's filming now we came to a spot called the i almost called it the crab palace we came to a spot called the crab palace and we were going again oh dang it baby shark once we are anchored and safe then you can take them off it'd be a very good disneyland ride like yeah well we want safe safety first world after all it is a small world after all exactly it's a deep water after all