If learning to sail is on your bucket list you’ll love this episode with Nautilus Sailing founder Tim Geisler. Tim tells us how Nautilus Sailing came to life, what learning to sail is like with Nautilus, and shares a success story of someone who began with no skills and is now a proficient sailor
Brought to you this month by Thrive Market.
Brought to you this month by:
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Special offer for listeners if they wanna learn to sail
“We would love to offer $500 off on any of our week-long live-a-board courses for your listeners. So if that’s somebody’s listening to this they think, Hey, this sounds amazing. We’d love to try it. Email us and let us know that you heard about us on your podcast, Rick, and then we can take it from there. The offer is good until August 31, 2022. Call Nautilus at CALL +1 800 680 7902″
How Tim got into the Outdoors
My parents were super adventurous, They actually were global nomads, and both of ’em in their kind of late teens and early twenties. They traveled around Europe and North Africa in the middle east in Volkswagen vans for a couple of years. They actually met in Lebanon in the middle of the six-day war.
They were travelers and they decided to move to Morocco. So I was actually born in Morocco lived in Morocco till I was 10 and then moved to Southern Spain and lived in Southern Spain. And during that time, my parents were just all about adventure.
How Tim got into Sailing
My perception of sailing, I really didn’t know what sailing was about.
I went out to The Bahamas and I was doing a scuba diving course out there getting Patty certified and uh, the last day of the trip the scuba school said Hey, we’ve got this beautiful sail sailboat. Does anybody wanna go sailing for the day? And. Sure why not? And so hopped on this boat and we just sailed off to this beautiful little island. We were just hauling across turquoise waters. We anchor off this white sand beach and this Bahamian gentleman guy with dreadlocks, he’s man, you want lobster? And was like, sure. So he jumped off the back of the boat and about 20 minutes later, came back with two huge lobsters and threw ’em on the grill. And that’s when the light bulb went off, Rick and I just thought, oh my gosh, the sailing thing is pretty darn cool. You could really use it. As your platform for adventure.
How did you come up with this idea for a sailing school?
Yeah, great question. my wife and I were teachers in Southern California for many years. We taught in inner-city LA in our twenties. And when I learned how to sail, I went down to the local sailing school in Southern California, and the first ???? I had eight different instructors over two years, Rick and I basically would show up every Sunday for about two or three hours. We’d take a boat out, and come back to the dock. And it took me two years to get the certification that I wanted to be able to charter and rent sailboats internationally. And the eight different instructors I had, all of ’em were great sailors. Most of ’em were older gentlemen, probably from 65 to 80, and sadly, even though they were amazing sailors, they just didn’t know how to teach
the first couple of times on a boat, we had guys just yelling at us don’t touch that. What are you doing? And we were just terrified. So it it was not a very good experience. At the same time, my wife and I were teachers in inner-city LA I had a master’s degree in education. I trained new teachers. I was helping design an experimental education program. And so we knew what real education should look like. From there, I moved on to international project management and years later we had a chance to reinvent ourselves during the crash of 2008.
I lost my job in international project management. We said, Hey, what should we do in life now? And we kept coming back to sailing. We had sailed all over the world at this point and our best vacations every year were those spent on a boat. We just loved getting away from, just the crowds and being able to be in control of our vacation.
We’re like, Hey, let’s go to that island. There was something beautiful about that. And at that point, we’re like how about we try starting a sailing school? That’s based on education’s best practices. So we thought about that. And that was our vision and how we came to start a sailing school.
A success story of someone who started with no skills, and is now a proficient sailor?
The one that comes to mind in back in March, I had a chance to do a course and we only take four students on our courses. And 2 of the students were a couple from British Columbia, from Victoria. He was an anesthesiologist. She was a stay-at-home mom and they had three young kids, I think all under eight years old.
And they just dreamed about sailing and they wanted to start chartering. And then eventually they were thinking, Hey, it’d be really cool to take a year sabbatical and sail through the Caribbean with our kids. And so I taught them how to sail in Mexico. Just had an absolute blast, a really neat couple, and learned really quickly, very adventurous.
I got an email from them a couple of weeks ago and they said, Hey Tim, we just did our first charter. We went back to Mexico, we were terrified, we were worried about how it was gonna go, but we had an absolute blast. Our kids loved it. Now we’re going to Tahiti in November. Can we talk to you about Tahiti and where we need to go? So we started talking about that and then I got another email recently and it said, Hey, now we’re planning our vacation already for next year and we wanna do The Bahamas. can you talk to us about The Bahamas sometime? It’s just really cool to see somebody like that who went from not knowing much and now sailing has changed the vacations for their families. They are so excited about sailing and this is what they wanna keep doing as a family.
Advice for folks wanting to get into the Outdoor Adventure Biz
Just do it. Go for it. For us, it was really daunting.
My wife and I went from teaching and then I was in international project management and it would’ve been easy to go back and get another job in that space. But we really had a chance when I lost my job in 2008 when the whole economy just imploded. We had a chance to stop for a couple of months and just reevaluate.
And at that time we just thought, what would we really like to be doing? What is something that we were passionate about? Something that will give us a lifestyle that, we can take time off and enjoy with our boys and our family. And at that point, we just realized that, Hey, sailing was it.
I read, there was a quote by Mark Twain, where he said, make your vacation, your vocation and I thought, Hey, why not? Our best times every year were sailing. So what could we do in that space? And so for us, it’s not easy in the beginning trying to start an outdoor business and, work in that space and figure it all out. But the rewards are just exponential and the lifestyle it affords is just beautiful. We have no regret. And I think our advice for folks contemplating it is just diving in, and give it a shot. You won’t regret it.
What’s your favorite outdoor gear purchase? Under a hundred dollars.
We spend a big chunk of our disposable income on gear, living in the mountains in Colorado seems like we’re constantly buying gear.
Probably the best one in the last year or two is my wife found these really cool Luci lights, like this kind of collapsible lanterns. And they’re basically solar-powered. They collapse down flat and you just accordion expand them.
They’re really cool cuz on the boat in the evenings, you can hang them up and there are three different brightnesses. When you go ashore to have, a beach bonfire and grill some lobster on the beach, you can hang them [00:22:40] on a Palm tree or something.
When you go camping, you can use them. We have really got our money out of those. We just we’re loving ’em
Special offer for listeners if they wanna learn to sail
“We would love to offer $500 off on any of our week-long live-a-board courses for your listeners. So if that’s somebody’s listening to this they think, Hey, this sounds amazing. We’d love to try it. Email us and let us know that you heard about us on your podcast, Rick, and then we can take it from there. The offer is good until August 31, 2022. Call Nautilus at CALL +1 800 680 7902″
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