I chatted to Harry Guinness about cadging rides on yachts, cheap sailing adventures, and living a “location-independent” adventurous life.

Alastair: The idea of being location independent is a pretty good option for anyone who wants to have an adventurous life but without necessarily doing it in the way, say, that I do through self promotion.

Harry: It enables all my adventures. For the past two years I’mve been getting myself in a position so that all I need to make money is a laptop and an internet connection. Then I can just head off, see the world and get one-way plane tickets. I’mm going to Brazil for four to six months and I’mm just going to be working there with a laptop and internet connection. I can make as much money there as I can sitting in my pants in my bedroom in Dublin.

Alastair: You can be in your pants on Copacabana beach with half the living costs.

Harry: Yeah, half the living costs and twice as good looking girls. There’s no downside to this.

Alastair: But presumably you’ve had to put in quite a lot of time and effort in order to get the skills necessary to be able to live from a laptop?

Harry: Yeah, it does take dedication and you do have to go out of your way to set things up for that. And the money is not great. Well, that’s not true, the money is reasonable. It is a living wage if you put the time into it and it’s especially a living wage if you’re somewhere like Copacabana beach or South East Asia. A lot of people go out to Thailand, to Vietnam to do this because you’re able to live in gorgeous apartments out there for $400-$500 a month.

Alastair: It obviously suits a certain person at a certain time of their life, without ties, essentially. But it’s a nice way for people who want to be adventurous but don’t want to have no income. It’s a nice halfway house isn’t it?

Harry: Yeah, exactly. You can’t quite do the really crazy stuff. I couldn’t walk across a desert or cycle around the world like this. It wouldn’t really fit with the stopping to work occasionally. But for things like going to South America, doing long road trips, just seeing the world in general, it’s perfect. I’mm planning to spend a few months in Brazil, a few months in Colombia scuba diving.

Alastair: You’ve obviously given this some thought. What are some good ways you can earn living with just a laptop? What sort of skills have you had to build up?

Harry: There are two ways that people look at it. There is passive income and freelancing. Passive income, where you’re earning money when you sleep, is the dream but it’s very much a dream for a lot of people. It’s something I’mve tried hard to do and had small measures of success. You create a product that gets sold, it’s things like books and DVDs. But people underestimate the amount of work that has to go into selling these things once you’ve actually done it, so it’s not that passive. And also the amount of money you can make from it. Until you reach a certain level of success you’re paid in pennies. You’re not paid big money.

Alastair: In which case you need to have lots of products earning pennies.

The easiest way to make money online is to teach people how to make money online.

Harry: Yeah, lots and lots of products earning pennies. So people go about things like search engine optimization, they try to game Google to display affiliate links and all sorts of things. And there are lots of products out there on how to do this but one of the truisms of the internet is the easiest way to make money online is to teach people how to make money online. So a lot of the guys selling courses on, “This is how you make money on search engine optimization” and all this, make huge amounts of their money by selling these courses.

Alastair: That’s funny.

Harry: For a solid year I really focused on that, trying to set things up. I’mve had some modicum of success working with you on ‘There Are Other Rivers’, and other stuff like that. So basically passive income is disconnecting time from income. And then the flip side is freelance work where you’re keeping time and income tied as tightly as possible. You are paid purely on the work you do. The freelance stuff is far easier to get into. And it’s not actually more work if you’re smart about it. If you develop some good relationships there’s a lot freelance work out there. If you can write well, if you’ve got any design skills, if you’re any good at teaching yourself things. That’s what it really comes down to for me. I like to learn new things so I can quite happily spend an hour or two with a new piece of software or a new app or anything like that, pick up enough of it that I can actually teach people who know less than me. You don’t have to be a total expert to be able to teach people and share information. You just have to know more than the other person and be able to teach it well. That’s what I mainly do – I mainly write tutorials. And as I said the pay is quite good. It’s about $200-$250 an article. And I cunningly sneak a few links to my other stuff in here and there. So they have these huge sites that have hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and they’re driving traffic towards me, so that this will help towards the passive stuff eventually. But yeah, I basically teach people how to do things.

Alastair: I think that’s a good reminder for people who maybe don’t do this sort of stuff yet. They’re not location independent, they don’t think they have the skills or the knowledge. But you are a reminder that you’ve got to start somewhere and if you just go out, learn stuff and get good at it you can start to carve out your niche.

Harry: Yeah and so many of the sites out there are looking for open pitches. You want to start with the slightly smaller ones but these places make money based on content being out there. The more quality content they have up there, the more traffic they get from Google, the more ad impressions they get, the more money they make. They want content. It’s that simple. So if you’re able to write or take good pictures, do design, if you can edit, there are plenty of resources out there that will tell you how to do it, how to get out there. Chris Guillebeau’s “Uncommon Guides”, there’s one to freelance writing which is very, very good.

It’s one of those things that once you start doing it, things snowball. The first gig you get is the hardest gig because you’ve got no content. You have to blog a bit and do all this stuff yourself.

Alastair: And bluff a bit.

Harry: Yeah, blog and bluff a bit, basically. I’mve got 40 articles written in the past eight or nine months. I’mve started getting emails from other sites interested in me writing for them and I’mve had to turn some of them away because they don’t pay me enough, which is a wonderful situation to be in.

Alastair: Indeed! I had actually intended to be talking to you today about the sailing adventure you did. Can you fill me in on that?

Harry: The basics of it are there was a 55 foot yacht, Yucatan, that had to be moved from Aarhus in Denmark to Vigo in Spain, about 1300 nautical miles. For the majority of the trip it was just me and the professional captain, my godfather, on board. We sailed down Denmark, stopped in a ship yard, then to Germany, went through the Kiel Canal, were in Germany when they won the World Cup, then left there sailed along the Dutch coast without stopping, and crossing both the Amsterdam and Rotterdam shipping channels at night which was terrifying, until Oostende in Denmark, got there and saw Status Quo play at a beach festival, sailed from their to Calais where there wasn’t much going on, Calais, through the English Channel, to Cherbourg which was a gorgeous old port town, then Cherbourg to L’Orient on the French coast of the Biscay, we waited there for a few days then sailed across the Biscay which was the highlight of the trip.

Despite the forecast we had huge waves and force seven winds. We were tearing along at almost ten knots with feck all sail up and dolphins playing in our wake. At night we were the only thing around, so being on deck by yourself with huge waves that could kill you, 3 thousand metres of water beneath you, perfectly clear stars millions of miles above and a meteor storm going on is a little bit humbling!

After crossing the Biscay we got to La Coruna, another gorgeous old port town, and on round to Vigo, a less gorgeous port town and the final destination.

Most of the passages were about two hundred and fifty miles (the Biscay was 350) and took one or two nights at sea. We were on tick-tock watches, 4 hours on, 4 hours off during the day, 3 on, 3 off at night so sleep patterns got interesting and their was a lot of solitary time. As with all these things, I got a tan and a beard!

Other random bits, I saw whales in the Baltic sea. The autopilot tried to kill us twice. Also met an old harbour master in Germany who drove us to the shops in his X5, he was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘œtoo old to die young’ and broke red lights, drove about 20mph above the 30mph speed limits and took roundabouts like nothing else.

The cost was very small. If you can find a way to spend money when you’re a hundred miles from the nearest shop with no internet connection you’re doing something very right, or very wrong. Flights were a total of â‚¬350 and were the biggest expense. Food is cheaper on the continent in general and we weren’t eating haute-cusine. Ham sandwiches and cereal was the staple with the odd bit of bacon. In port I often ate in restaurants to get some real food but, again, it was fairly cheap. I had an amazing steak in Spain for â‚¬13. All told, I probably spent another â‚¬150 on food and drink. A lifejacket was â‚¬70 and bringing your own is a must for this sort of thing. After that, taxis to the airport and the like bring the total up to somewhere around â‚¬650.

I think that sort of sums everything up!

Alastair: Absolutely! Fantastic! The thing with Adventure1000 is to try and break down the preconceptions and barriers and excuses and things that stop people doing stuff. And what interested me about yours is that the idea about yours is that the idea for a normal person to go on a yachting adventure. Because surely sailing is just for rich, posh people and you need a yacht?

Harry: Well no, you just have to find a yacht. If you want do it, and it’s the same with the passive income stuff, it’s just creating the opportunities that allow it to happen. There are opportunities there for almost everyone and if you shut yourself out to these opportunities, if you don’t look for them, if you don’t think about them, if you don’t think, “Who can help me?”, if you see yourself in a bubble then you won’t be able to do it.

Alastair: Yeah, making stuff happen is the crucial element to all of this, isn’t it?

Harry: And if you’re saving £1,000 that’s an amazing step. You are making it happen. Specifically for yachting, boats are looking for crew. There are plenty of passages. Big yachts need people to help people to move them.

Alastair: So how would you get involved in that then? As a total outsider.

Harry: Well the first thing you don’t do is go to the South of France. If you’re looking for boats, if you want to sail on a boat there are things like Crew Finder which looks to find crew. And it is a popular thing that people want to do. And there’s lot of people in the likes of the South of France looking for boats to go sailing around the Caribbean, on the super yachts and things like that. You won’t find it there. You’re far more likely to find it down at your local yacht club. If you live near the sea there’s a yacht club. There are boats that race every weekend. I’mm going racing tomorrow morning, hopefully. I don’t know who I’mm racing with but I know someone will need crew tomorrow morning because the big boats, if people race them, need six or eight people on board. So I’mm going down there. I’mll meet new people. I will hang around these people. These people will go sailing for the summer. They’ll want someone who can say, “Yes, of course. I’mm happy to spend three days sailing with you to Scotland.”

Alastair: You don’t need to be able to sail do you? But what do you need to be able to do to to impress someone enough to let them help you on their yacht.

Harry: If you’re on a big boat they need you just to sit on the side and stay still and then when the boat turns around, you run to the other side as fast as possible and sit on the other side. And then they’ll tell you to pull on ropes. Just be open, you’ve just got to be open and listen to what people do and accept that you’re an idiot and a novice. If you accept that you’re an idiot when it comes to it they’ll be really happy to tell you just pull on this rope.

Alastair: Do as you’re told, exactly when you’re told to do it.

Harry: Yeah, exactly. It’s a friendly thing. I know yachting gets the reputation as posh toffs stuff but they’re all just people. If you can go and hang around with these people, these are people who will take you sailing. The amount of English boats we ran into along the French coast, they just spend a day going from Dover over to Calais and then they work up and down the French coast. Gorgeous scenery in Brittany, absolutely gorgeous. If you’re open to spending two weeks doing this and you want to do it, make friends with someone who owns a boat and they will take you with them because they will need people to sail with them.

Alastair: My final question: if I gave you £1000 for an adventure, what would you go and do?

Harry: There’s almost nothing I couldn’t do with a £1000. It’s enough to get me a plane ticket, and 3G dongle, anywhere in the world. Though working at the other end is probably cheating a bit, so what I’md do is get a plane ticket to Panama or the Caribbean. There I’md look for a yacht going through the Panama canal and up the coast of Mexico to California. I’md try get on as paid (or unpaid!) crew and enjoy the 5000 mile trip up to the States. One of my best mates got married and moved to LA earlier this year so once I reached Cali, with whatever change I had from the plane tickets, I’md make my way to there and show up and surprise her. All this should have me away for a solid two months at least, and when I was ready to come home I’md do the opposite. I’md head to San Fran and look for a yacht going through the Panama canal, across the Atlantic to the Med. From there it’s only a Ryanair flight home.

Follow Harry online here.