The New Generation World Cruisers

Follow millennials Nathan and Lindsey as they embrace their new role as trawler owners and attempt to show that passagemaking is also a young person’s lifestyle.

Nathan Cicio and Lindsey Lock are a couple of millennials who might have guessed 15 years ago that they would wind up making a career out of posting videos of their worldwide cruising travels. The two met at a pub in Bismarck, North Dakota, where Lindsey was bartending to help put herself through college. Nathan was working at a board shop that catered to skaters and snowboarders depending on the season, and after weeks of hanging out at the bar, mustered up the courage to ask Lindsey if she’d like to go wakeboarding with him. The rest is adventure romance history fit for the YouTube generation. Well, it will be. As soon as the shake down of their Nordhavn 41 is complete.

The couple already has their YouTube channel, @The71Percent all dialed in, through which they have documented their travels up and down the Florida coast aboard their 57’ Riviera Ruth Pearl. In just over four months they gained a following of folks who check in to watch as the twosome explore the Sunshine State’s boating gems such as Jewfish Key and Stump Pass. But Nathan has had greater aspirations – for his boating destinations and for the channel. With vlogs uploaded weekly, the writing was on the wall regarding the fate of their cruising situation when, in one early episode, Nathan blurted out off-handedly that “life of an express boat going 30 knots is not the life for us.” He started to casually hint in one video to the next about wanting longer cruising itineraries and his and Lindsey’s interest in getting a trawler-style boat.

It wasn’t always this way. Soon after Nathan – and later Lindsey – relocated to Atlanta for Nathan’s work in the automotive performance sector (his company builds racecars), they discovered lake boating, and jumped into the lifestyle with both feet. Weekends were reserved exclusively for raft-ups with friends, barbecue dinners at anchor, and exploring the farthest reaches of Lake Lanier. They found themselves buying boats big enough they could live on for a few days at a time (especially when weekends stretched to include Mondays – holiday or not) and continuously worked their way up the size range of the sport boat market (“Five-foot-itis is real,” says Nathan.) But when Nathan expanded his business with a second location in the Tampa area, the couple saw that the ocean offered a heck of a lot more square-mileage of water to be explored.

They sold the lake boat, relocated to Tampa and landed on a 44-foot Tiara. “There were no limits to ocean boating,” said Nathan. “It sparked a curiosity.” Once again, they found themselves climbing the boating food chain, seeking boats they could stay longer on and cruise further in before arriving at the Riviera. It was a whole new world. But it wasn’t the world.

Nathan wanted to know what was beyond Florida and began watching sailing and trawler videos, searching for any content using a #circumnavigation tag. He was fortunate enough to have Lindsey’s blessing. “When you are in your thirties and thinking about your future, the idea of living on a boat and seeing the world – it’s not the typical first thing you think about,” says Lindsey. “Usually it’s house, kids. Crossing the ocean to the Mediterranean seems like a movie.”

The idea of world cruising did sound exciting, but Lindsey, a hip 30-something who had a career in event planning with the likes of Red Bull and Ducati –which she spun off into her own freelance company, feared that a trawler meant trading in the couple’s youthful edge for something synonymous with retirees. With a passion for interior design, she couldn’t imagine herself living for months – let alone, years at a time, inside a boat with traditional dark wood interiors that – no offense to her grandmother – reminded her of her grandmother.

Meanwhile, Nathan was running into a youth-blockade of his own when it came to finding folks his age documenting their trawler travels. “I looked at everything from people on full-displacement and semi-displacement boats,” he said. “I read about or watched every video on passagemaking. I read Voyaging Under Power. I spent two years studying and learning about long distance cruisers.” But he couldn’t identify with any of the boaters. The only Gen Y-oriented world cruising channels he found were the likes of La Vagabunda del Mar, reserved to sailing. Nathan and Lindsey decided it would be their mission to launch a passagemaking powerboat channel injected with youth and flair.

With a loose game plan in place, they decided to go to the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show and climb on a few long-range cruising boats. They’d read about the new Nordhavn 41, which was being exhibited at FLIBS, but it wasn’t until they stepped aboard that the wheels started turning. “When I saw the 41, I thought, ‘this thing is cool.’ The styling inside fit our style: light and bright and more modern,” said Lindsey. “It was inviting me to go have an adventure on it.” (And it was cool enough to handle the graffiti-esque boat name and homeport paint job on the transom.)

At the time, there was a two-and-a-half year wait on a new N41, and it was too new a model for the brokerage market. Nathan and Lindsey opted to outsmart lead times by waiting out the used market but found themselves competing with a whole bunch of other buyers with the same idea. (Since its debut in 2020, the N41 has largely eluded the brokerage market.) While they remained patient on the cruising boat front, they got to work on the cruising channel part of their goal.

Nathan and Lindsey will tell you they are not influencers by the current definition of the term – that is, people who consciously try to get a consumer to do and buy things. But they are organic influencers: helpful by nature, eager to share a tip or life hack they found incredibly useful. “Helping makes me happy,” said Nathan. “I kind of always felt like it was my calling. The more people I can affect in a positive way, the better the world will be. That may sound cheesy but it’s the truth.” He did feature as the expert in a handful of car-based tutorials on YouTube, but it was nothing like the effort hosting an entire channel requires.

So they tested the waters of content creating by producing a channel that focused on their lives aboard the Riviera. They invited viewers to join them as they “travel on their boat bringing unique and interesting angles of beautiful places and exciting adventures” via their YouTube channel @The71Percent. The name is in reference to the percentage of water that covers the Earth’s surface, with their aim being to explore as much of it as possible. They uploaded the first video August 30, 2024 and have amassed an audience of 9,000 followers, with each video averaging around 20,000 views. One episode that documented them battling through 8-foot waves during a crossing of the Gulf of Mexico garnered over 300,000 views. Those are the kinds of numbers Nathan is hoping to reach more consistently, saying, “I do feel like people want to be involved in our journey.”

The journey is about to get infinitely bigger – and more interesting. With the purchase of the Nordhavn 41, the couple have lofty cruising ambitions. But the crux of the channel will be about them and the storytelling that comes from the way they are living their lives as 30- and early 40-somethings roaming around the world by boat. For one, it will initiate a massive shift in the way they are approaching their new boating lifestyle. For those keeping track, the duo are downsizing from a 57-foot boat. They are still keeping their house to have a land base, but for all intents and purposes, they will be doing the majority of their living from within 570 square feet of space. “I used to be the king of the ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’” admits Nathan. “I had to have the latest and the greatest whether it was motorcycles, cars, watches, TVs. But I’m embracing a more minimal and sustainable lifestyle. [Living on the N41 will be] a lesson in figuring out what it really is that brings you joy.”

In fact, it’s one of the aspects that Lindsey is most looking forward to: leaving the excess behind and re-centering life around relationships, experiences and taking a more organic approach to their daily routines. “I see us moving our lives more in tune with nature, surrounding ourselves [with] nature, aligning our circadian rhythms with the sun and moon, eating healthier with seasonal and local food,” she said. It’s a mindset that aligns with the current movement of doing small things to make the world a better place such as eliminating waste from their lives and embracing different viewpoints. Both Lindsey and Nathan say this type of personal growth seems to be a natural byproduct of cruising. Just from their day trips up and down Florida, Nathan has sensed a change in himself.

“I continue to stretch myself personally by being a better partner, a better captain, a better person,” he says. And getting to experience other parts of the globe – even other parts of the country – will enforce the trajectory. “I have spent a lot of my life not surrounded by people whose voices I should be hearing from. Experiencing people’s cultures, hearing their stories. My mind is being opened to what the world has to offer versus the same one-sided perspectives.”

Nathan has been working toward this for a long time. Over the past two years he has hired and trained staff to manage his racecar business without the need for his constant supervision. He still expects to conduct anywhere from five to eight video conference calls per week, but the boat they purchased is already equipped with Starlink, a necessity for connecting to his team but also for uploading videos. He is looking at operating @The71Percent as a new full-time job. He has purchased special cameras, special software and hopes when they’ve got the systems of the Nordhavn 41 all dialed in, he’ll be able to ramp up to two episodes per week plus two bi-monthly live streams. Fueled by the excitement of it all, that schedule might prove to be a bit over-ambitious. Then again, Nathan says he’s never been one to look away a challenge. “I want The71Percent to be the biggest boating channel there is.”

As the type of cruising they’ll be doing on the Nordhavn 41 will be different from the trips they’ve been making on the Riviera, so, too, will the content of the channel evolve. The couple aim to focus less on the actual places they visit, although there will be some of that. Instead it will be more about their life as liveaboards and all that entails. “I don’t want to create a channel that’s about visiting a different city every week,” says Nathan. “I want to focus on boat life, sea life, the people we meet, the transit, what we do when we drop anchor.

“I think people will – and do – follow us because they like our energy and honesty and being involved in our journey. We are being our authentic selves and that comes off in our videos.”

That and the high production value Nathan plans to continue to bring and hone along the way. Producing is something that interests him and he sees working on @The71Percent as a boredom cure-all during long passages. “It will give us something to do that will be a blast. I love the tech side of it.”

Viewers can expect the first video of @The71Percent (the Nordhavn years) to debut tomorrow, Wednesday, February 26, kicking off with the seatrial and survey of their Nordhavn 41 in Charleston, South Carolina, and to continuingas they shake the boat down the southeast coast with stops in Savannah, GA; St. Augustine, FL; Jupiter, FL and on to North Palm Beach at Nordhavn’s southeast hub to give the boat a quick once-over before they jump on a good weather window and head for the Bahamas. After that, a loose itinerary includes following up the Bahamas with climbing back up the coast to the northeast and maybe a trip around the Great Loop before they embark on other world adventures.