Tracy and Andy Duncan are a couple living full-time aboard Another Summer, a boat they call home with their five children. (linktr.ee/SVanothersummer)
Leaving behind suburban life in Atlanta, the Duncan family embraced a life of adventure, spending their days on the open water and learning to balance work, family, and self-sufficiency. Tracy shares how COVID pushed them to rethink their lifestyle, how their time together during the lockdown led to a deeper connection and a desire for more freedom, and how homeschooling was a natural fit for their children, particularly those with special needs.
Living on a boat has its own set of challenges, from organizing a floating home with limited storage to managing basic repairs in a remote location. Andy and Tracy reflect on how their lives have become more organized than ever, driven by the necessity of dealing with the logistics of boat life—whether it’s finding the right part for a repair or packing food in small spaces. Their financial setup is unconventional, relying on adoption stipends for day-to-day expenses, while Andy’s remote IT work supports big-ticket items like boat repairs and upgrades.
The Duncan family has found an unexpected rhythm in their nomadic life, with their children thriving in an environment where they have constant access to each other and the natural world (complete with “roving pirate gangs” of teenagers). Tracy talks about how their kids have formed tight-knit relationships not only with each other but also with the broader boat community, which is a small, interconnected world of its own. Andy and Tracy also share how they balance the close quarters of boat life with the need for individual space and reflection, and how their family’s adventures continue to shape their values and sense of connection.
Full transcript: dirtbagrich.com/tracyandandy
Recorded in December 2024.
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript. Typos and mistakes exist!
Blake Boles 00:00
Tracy Duncan, Andy Duncan, welcome to Dirtbag Rich.
Tracy Duncan 00:04
Well, thank you.
Andy Duncan 00:04
Thank you for having us.
Blake Boles 00:07
When you tell people that you’re going home nowadays, what does that mean and what does it look like?
Andy Duncan 00:13
So we live on a boat and we could be anywhere from 200 miles from our old address to where we are located right now, which is a thousand miles. So in the short term, I would say we’re headed out to the boat, but in the long term.
Tracy Duncan 00:29
That would mean we have to travel from wherever in the world we are to nearby our home so that we can store our boat, rent a car, put the boat away, make repairs before we go, and then go crash on families’ houses because we don’t really have a home home. And it’s a very large process to go home.It’s led to juggle.
Blake Boles 00:54
Well, let’s talk about the short term and the easy part of it. Tell me where you are today. And if you tell someone today that you’re going home, what does that mean?
Tracy Duncan 01:04
So today we are in Georgetown, down in the Exuma Islands of the Bahamas. Going home here means that we’re in a very large boater city.It’s not a large town, but there are 300 and something boats that congregate here. A lot of teenagers, because we have a lot of teenagers on board, and we’re all just here living our lives.
Andy Duncan 01:27
lives. And going home would be, if we’re at a beach, or the odd chance we’re actually at a restaurant or something strange, we’d have to get in our dinghy and travel back to the home.Think of the dinghy as your little personal runabout boat that’s your minivan or your car or your bicycle.
Tracy Duncan 01:48
Yup. And we live on a 41 foot catamaran with right now three teenage boys.Um, and we do have six children total, but three are back home currently living. That’s where back to the big home, the other home.
Blake Boles 02:04
And where’s the other home?
Andy Duncan 02:07
Just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, in one of the suburbs, it’s funny.
Blake Boles 02:12
And who’s living in that home right now?
Andy Duncan 02:16
Currently oldest son who’s 22 and our third in-line son who is nine.
Tracy Duncan 02:25
And then there’s another son living elsewhere back home as well, who is 21 now.
Blake Boles 02:33
Are these sons paying rent for that house in Atlanta? They just live in the cushy life.
Tracy Duncan 02:37
No, two of them are paying rent. They also have roommates, and that is part of how we are able to go do what we go do.
Blake Boles 02:46
Well, if you’re living in a Cameroon in the Bahamas, you’re obviously fabulously wealthy. You probably got some huge inheritance or sold a tech company.So tell me how you made your millions or I’m sorry, billions, which is the
Tracy Duncan 03:02
I’m just a dog walker on television.
Andy Duncan 03:05
and I sex butterflies during the butterfly breeding season.
Blake Boles 03:11
Please explain.
Tracy Duncan 03:12
That is a stab at the real estate shows where like 30-year-olds go out and buy these house hunters. Yeah, the house hunter show and their budget is $1.4 million, and she’s a dog walker and he does some obscure, weird, strange thing and you’re thinking, how in the world do you people pay for this?
Blake Boles 03:31
Exactly. That’s what I’m thinking. How in the world do you people get to travel around nice places on a boat with teenagers?
Andy Duncan 03:40
Strike one, strike two, and strike three on your guesses. We are not trust fund babies, no huge inheritance.We made some choices and decisions and structured a lot of things and worked our butts off to where we could take time while we still have some influence over our sons that are still at home and spend some time. And it’s not glamorous and it’s not, I don’t have lunch served to me on the Lido deck every day. It’s a modest home that we live on on the water. It’s nicer than some but way not nicer than 98% of the people that are out here next to us. So we’ve made sacrifices and we’re not roughing at camping but it’s not glamorous.
Blake Boles 04:37
Tell me about some average day in the life on a boat living with three teenagers. Like, how do you actually spend your time?
Tracy Duncan 04:46
Yeah, so I don’t know that there’s an average because no two days are really the same. If we are traveling heavily to get somewhere, we could travel for 72 hours straight without stopping where all night and all day everybody is taking turns sleeping and taking turns getting us where we need to go safely.
Andy Duncan 05:09
feeding, whatever, in the safest manner possible. But for instance, right now we’re in Georgetown. There’s a roving band of teenagers, 30 to 50 young male and female youth in the 14 to 19 year old age range. And my kids get up, they do their schoolwork.As fast as possible. As fast as possible. We have our morning coffee, we have boat projects because a boat is a hole in the water in which you pour either money or time into to maintain. You have to work on a house to keep it going. But we also have to balance power. We produce all of our own power. We produce our own water. So some of the mundane things are changing oil in the engines, are making sure that the solar panels don’t have the lettuce that the kids made off overboard last night to reduce our power input. While we’re trying to produce enough water so we don’t run out.
Blake Boles 06:17
Lettuce like edible lettuce
Tracy Duncan 06:21
Yeah, you know, little food, gentle food scraps are often tossed overboard because we don’t have trash. There’s no, we pay $5 a bag to dispose of trash where we are.So we feed the manatees sometimes if it’s edible waste that can go away. Food waste. Yes.
Blake Boles 06:38
Got it
Tracy Duncan 06:39
Yes. There’s always something to be done, checked on, fixed. You know, pumps have to be monitored. The kids have, you know, kind of chores where they check and make sure there isn’t water in the bilges. And one of them is in charge of pulling the anchor if we’re going somewhere, and one is in charge of kind of monitoring the dishes and putting stuff away and making sure that things are stowed so when we are moving things aren’t falling and crashing. And so it’s definitely a division of powers of tasks, I guess I should say.But there is no two days that are the same, even if you’re sitting still somewhere, because one day it might be we get up and go diving and snorkeling, we go look for something to eat for dinner, or we go to walk the beach, or a friend wants to do, you know, X, Y, or Z, they go out on the dinghies and do some water sports, and we call it recess and PE. Right. And then there’s days where we work hard on schoolwork, or especially if the weather is bad. So it’s just it’s just always different. You never know what every day is going to hold, and you can have a plan, and it is never going to happen. So we just kind of don’t make a plan.
Andy Duncan 07:53
And I want to expand on that a little bit. You’re an accomplished writer and blogger and blogger and all of that. And I know you live in a big glacial estate.
Tracy Duncan 08:02
You’re talking to him, not me. I’m talking to him. Yeah.
Blake Boles 08:06
Yeah, yeah.
Andy Duncan 08:07
That’s right. So you understand living in a small space.Our whole house, our boat, our transportation, all of our supplies is crammed in a boat that’s 41 feet long and 23 and a half feet wide. And that includes our dinghy hanging on it, our propulsion, our solar panels, generator, water maker, which is a reverse osmosis machine, where we store our clothes, our food, how and where we cook our food. So you often have to pick something up and move it out of the way to open up a cabinet or a box to get out the parts. And the things could be stored in 17 different places on the boat. And you may or may not have a direct memory of where things are. So you need a hose or a pipe fitting or a tool or your neighbor does. It goes into boat yoga trying to locate and retrieve those items some days.
Blake Boles 09:13
Sounds healthy, boat yoga. Have you ever calculated how much square footage you have for living?
Tracy Duncan 09:20
No, because that would be hard, you know, but it’s not square.
Andy Duncan 09:26
That’s nice to learn.
Tracy Duncan 09:27
But no, I mean, I mean, we could get a rough and rough understanding of it, but.
Blake Boles 09:33
It’s small.
Tracy Duncan 09:35
Yes, it’s small, especially with teenagers on board and hormones and attitudes and personalities and stuff. I mean, they have water toys and they have schoolbooks and things and clothes. Yeah, it’s a lot.
Andy Duncan 09:52
So just the surface area of 23 and a half times 41 is about 950 square feet.
Blake Boles 10:03
five people. Yeah. Yeah. And I know you’re not using all that.Um, I want to dwell on the, the teenage aspect here as someone who also spends time with teenagers. And first of all, I wanted to know the schoolwork. Are they, are they doing virtual school or they homeschool somehow? And then second of all, talk to me about this roving band of teenagers, this sort of pirate gang of the Bahamas that forms and what that social group is like.
Tracy Duncan 10:30
Yeah, sure. Absolutely.
Andy Duncan 10:33
You want to take the school is a hybridization of multiple homeschool programs and and some online aspects of that and the boys have to be self sufficient to a degree out. They are all we meet them at their level and we we’re just trying to educate them properly it’s not necessarily a fixed curriculum.And it’s also a combination of world schooling. Which I know you’re a big fan of as well. As far as the roving band of teenagers these kids. I’m going to sidetrack this for a second my wife grew up in a similar situation on a boat. When she was 13 her family moved on a boat and spent some time down in the Caribbean as well and they had sold a business, but I don’t know. They took those formative years and came down here and when Tracy would meet someone in an anchorage and they would go away it might be the last time they ever see them or they might be pen pals. And they would exchange some letters but they didn’t know if they’d ever see them again technology has changed all of that and i’m gonna let Tracy take that thought.
Tracy Duncan 11:58
Yeah, so what he’s saying is absolutely true and a really cool side note is we’re here in Georgetown, where my family spent a lot of time when I was a teenager. And one of my good friends that we met then is here now. So we’ve been able to reconnect what 40 years later, exactly 40 years, which is really cool.But, but we have not seen each other in 40 years. And because of technology, we were able to find each other two years ago through a mutual voter friend. And we’ve just reconnected since then. But now we have online like Facebook groups, and there’s WhatsApp groups that voters join. And we can all communicate, you know, like, hey, we’re heading from here to here, where’s everybody going. So it’s a really great way for the teenage kids and younger children. I mean, a lot of people out here have very young children can just get together and have social groups, but the kids that we do tend to meet out here. And it was the same when I was young too, just most of them are homeschooled, they’ve been raised in the nucleus of their family, generally by people that aren’t fit for the traditional society. So the children come from a little bit of a different angle. They’re very sociable, they’re very appropriate. You hope that there isn’t one that gets thrown into the mix that brings in trouble, because you know, teenagers will be teenagers and do what they’re generally led to do. But you just feel like there’s just a different, I don’t want to say class of people, but definitely a different mindset towards socialization and fun. I mean, they do get out and they have fun. And they get off technology and you’ll even see one say to another, could you put your phone down? Like we’re doing X, Y, or Z, which is super refreshing to me.
Andy Duncan 13:55
Um, they also developed violence.
Tracy Duncan 13:57
sport of games. Yeah, and they do. They all hook, one will like kind of get together with another one and that becomes their person. And you’re like, Oh, really? I would never have seen that combination knowing that child and you, but there’s something about the two of you that draws you together.And so they, they definitely have their friendships and
Andy Duncan 14:14
Each of my sons probably has a different friend group of 10 to 15 people that they know where their other buddy boats are, no matter where they are in the world at the time. And oh, we’re in Georgetown, this other boat’s coming in.
Tracy Duncan 14:28
And then it’s the hey, we got to go talk our parents into X Y or Z because we want to be with with so-and-so But honestly the parents kind of want to be together too because the children Enjoy that. That’s why we’re here.You know, that’s part of what we’re out here doing is Giving our kids experiences and getting them out of the normal quote society suburbia suburbia Yeah, so it is nice that we can all communicate
Blake Boles 14:55
Did I answer any of your questions? You did, you did.And for the life for the teenagers or for the young kids, it sounds a lot like Tom and Huck or Calvin and Hobbes or sort of like a permanent summer camp, not permanent because you’re moving and the social groups are being reconfigured all the time. But as you said, because you might not see this person again, even though today you can stay in touch with them much more easily, I feel like there must be so much more value placed upon today and tomorrow. And not assuming that that someone will always be available leads to this, this higher quality, this higher intensity of experience for young people.
Tracy Duncan 15:37
I would definitely agree with that and you’ll see, I mean, I walked up to the beach the other day because there’s kind of a place here that all the cruisers congregate in the afternoon and they have volleyball and all this and there was this little boy that had this like piece of wood that he had made into a boat and it had a cardboard sail on the stick that he had been able to wedge into the piece of wood and he was just up there having a ball and I was like, oh, you would never see a kid back home build a wooden boat out of scraps and play with it. He’d have a little, you know, a plastic dump truck that somebody had given him or it’s just a different mind creativity that I think children have lost today that they are forced to have out here, some ingenuity, some think through it, you know, coming up with things to do.Last night they went to the beach and played flashlight tag or something and they may have a bonfire one night but they kind of come up with a plan of what they’re all going to do and then they communicate it through the, we could call it the coconut telegraph and they all let each other know what they’re doing and but it is nice to see them out kind of socializing and just being children the way I think of children the way I grew up because that’s kind of how we did even not living on the boat, we lived rurally and we just didn’t have all the things that kids have now.
Andy Duncan 16:54
And I would say it’s changed my person. I’m very social, and I develop friendships, and we come and go, and I love keeping in touch with people.But I’m also, when I’m in a group, I put down the technology. And I’m a geek. I love technology. And my boat is wired up with every sensor and all of that. And I’m just drawn to it like a moth to flame. But I’m way more intentional now in my life in being present, in the now, in spending time with the people that are around.
Blake Boles 17:34
Let’s talk about the practical and logistical challenges of having five or six people living on a boat, especially things that are like everyday concerns like laundry, groceries, just that the day to day stuff that makes family life, you know, seem like it’s, it’s way more easy to do in a house in a single place where you can drive to the store whenever you need to, how do you, how do you tackle this?What’s easy? What’s hard?
Andy Duncan 18:03
There’s several aspects to that answer, and Tracy and I are going to tag team out and back. I’m going to let her handle groceries in a moment, but I’ll start with laundry. It’s not my favorite thing. She does most of it.But if you live in suburbia, you wear a shirt, sometimes for an hour or two, you take it off, you throw it in the laundry. Both people are a little different, and I’m sure hikers and other people are different. You wear those clothes and when you do shower, which isn’t always every day, you sink, rinse it, and then you hang it up to dry and you collect that laundry. I’m amazed sometimes how far we can push laundry and not be stinky at all because we’re around so much less environmental chemicals and things that you would find in regular society, I think. Laundry, it might be once a month. If that, that you do laundry. Laundry is a big deal because you have to load it all up. We don’t have a washing machine on board. We can hang things out if the weather is right, but we have to load everything up and sort it and go into town. Even in Georgetown or every town is different, it’s an adventure. You’re not allowed to touch the machines or the machines are rusted out, or there’s a propane flamethrower that blasts across the top of the five dryers that make your clothes so hot that anything that’s not a natural fiber gets cooked, the elastic’s gone, the plastic melts, and that’s just laundry.Groceries, we have to prepare for months at a time for certain things that we might want, and I’m going to hand it over.
Tracy Duncan 19:47
be able to afford depending on where we are. I mean, groceries in the Bahamas, I don’t know how the Bahamians afford to eat food. It is painfully expensive, at least double the price of most items and probably triple the price on produce.So we do stock up before we go when we’re somewhere to stock up in the States or whatever, we carry months and months worth of dry goods with us. But fresh produce and we do have a large freezer, thankfully. But occasionally, we have to get meat or cheese butter. So it’s a planning to be somewhere that there is a market that has good fresh food and being there on the day after the boat comes to deliver said fresh food. So it’s all kind of an act of what can we get and then what do we want to eat versus
Andy Duncan 20:40
We’ll always spend the money on.
Tracy Duncan 20:41
versus what we’re willing to pay them for a mango. You know, it puts your food back into this perspective of this is what’s fresh, this is what’s local sometimes if you’re lucky. And it’s not always maybe what you want to eat. So kind of the traditional meal planning goes out the window.It’s more of, okay, we have this meat and I’ve got a fresh cauliflower still. So that’s what we’re having for dinner, no matter if so and so wants spaghetti or this one wants something else. We’re eating what we’re eating, but it can be a several day process to get groceries because we came over from the island we were at before here. It was an eight hour trip across. We had to plan that to get here during the day. Then we spend a night. Then you go to the market the next morning and find out there hadn’t been a mail boat in two weeks. Everything is looking a little rough, still the same price. So then you sit and wait for two or three days sometimes for the mail boat to come in before you can provision again, or you just say, I’ll just eat some canned goods.
Andy Duncan 21:44
And when we say we stock up with months worth of food, a lot of times that’s dried beans and powdered milk and belvita. I don’t know if we’re allowed to do trade names. Don’t tell anybody that we eat belvita.We are open to sponsorship.
Blake Boles 22:01
thing. I’ll get in touch with craft after this. You know, if I didn’t know you were on a boat, and I just heard this excerpt from the past few minutes, I would think that you were through hikers on the Pacific Crest rail, or you are doing a long distance bike trip in some very rural area without many services. You’re not cleaning up that often. You’re not taking many showers, not doing lots of laundry. You have limited food choices. Sometimes you just can’t buy the stuff you want to buy because it’s too expensive or it’s just not available. And it sounds like you’re voluntarily taking on a lot of hassles and restrictions in order to make this life possible.And I’d love for you to each answer the question like, why? Why is it worth it? Why are the compromises and the trade offs for comfort worth this life?
Tracy Duncan 23:00
You’re absolutely right, and some days we look at each other and go, why are we doing
Andy Duncan 23:05
It’s not often.
Tracy Duncan 23:06
like why are we here what are we thinking it’s so much easier to go home right it’s so it’s so much easier to x y or z but is it it would be very hard to go home and we can discuss that in a bit if if you would like also because you know we set out on a three to five year plan and we’re coming up on that and so we’re kind of making some back pedals as to how we can sustain what we are doing um but that’s a different topic um but the reason we do it is because we are not i have not ever truly been fit for society i think once you’ve done what we do it it just gives you this different you know perspective on the mundane everyday life and what the majority of people think is important um yes i think education is important yes i think that a lot of the things that drive the majority of our society are important but i also think that the nucleus of your family is the most important thing and the society has such a control over our kids and we haven’t really discussed our kids but they are from an adoption background they have a lot of trauma and a lot of uh learning differences so they never fit into the box of school or the education system either so for us it’s it’s having that power of influence the exertion of a good normal for us uh i don’t know what i’m trying to say like somebody asked one of our kids the other day so are you ready to go off to college and they just kind of went uh so then we had to have a conversation with them about like it’s okay to have a canned answer for that you’re not the normal society kid and that is a normal society question that you will be faced with um so it is okay for you to say while i’m on the boat i’m enjoying my time on the boat you know you can come up with something like that that doesn’t jump in somebody’s face because there’s a gap here yeah because they’re just asking a question right which is normal um but it’s okay to have you know kind of a response for yourself because we are out here just learning life and experiencing different things and i don’t remember what the original question was what was the original question why is this life worth it oh why are we doing this yeah oh yeah why is this life worth it uh yeah just giving different experiences being away from society i mean every anytime that i was faced with some societal thing back at home i just would be like really this is what’s important to you or you know that’s what that’s how you’re gonna handle the situation with your child like no you’re trying you are you are the the crown of what your kid is gonna think about things and how they’re gonna be facing adversity in the future and what are you showing them um we’re also teaching them you know kind of resourceful life skills out here they’ve we get frustrated with them and then we look back over the last three years and we’re like oh my god we’ve come so far you know like they they just they do think of things differently and um you know they’re not perfect we’re not great but but but we’re out here to kind of have that influence and for society to not have that influence being being raised by tiktok is is not okay
Andy Duncan 26:48
why it’s worth it to me is the more time I spend away from punching the clock nine to five every day and seeing suburbs and we’ve done all of that and we’ve done the travel soccer is chasing just the commercialism loop. You’ve got to have enough money to buy this, to buy this, to buy this and this is last week’s item but I need a new item and I’ve got to upgrade the house every three to five years and I need a car and I can’t really afford a new car so I’m gonna put it on lease and I can’t afford the lease really so I’m completely underwater and under debt and all of that but the youth that we meet and our sons become so much more self-sufficient and resilient and oftentimes when you’re traveling you could be at an island 20 miles away from anyone else.There might be one other boat but if something happens, 911 isn’t right there. The Coast Guard doesn’t show up if you’re in US waters in a couple of minutes. Sometimes it could be a day or two and you might only be 50 miles offshore for them to get resources. So you have to know how to fix things and know how to keep a calm head under pressure and to see the growth, one of the reasons that I love this and I wanna fight to stay out here as long as I can is to see the growth of myself, my wife, my family and see how that reacts and there was a boat fire in a marina two years ago.We’ve been on board for two and a half years. Yeah, it was right after we got the boat. It was right after we got the boat and the boys even at that point, every one of them responded correctly and they were heroes and we didn’t put the fire out because a plastic boat when it catches on fire, it’s gonna burn until it sinks usually but we saved all the other property around that boat and no one panicked and if things get hairy out here, they reached down and draw on strength physically and mentally that I may have not known that I had or they had.
Blake Boles 29:18
Sounds like you want your kids to be able to experience life as an adventure and you see that this is a much better way to do it than staying at home in suburbia and trying to combat all the forces that are thrown at you in that environment.
Andy Duncan 29:32
That’s one way to say it, but it’s not always adventure. It’s not adventure.When you say that, I think of either Indiana Jones or glamorous, but I want them to know how to change the oil in an engine and how many kids can still do that these days.
Tracy Duncan 29:50
How many parents do it?
Andy Duncan 29:51
How many parents do that? There’s of the 300 and some odd boats that are out here right now, maybe two thirds do that.The rest of it, they hire it all out. I don’t have the money for that. So have something breaks. YouTube’s my friend, not sponsored by YouTube. But you read, you ask, you figure it out. You fix things in exotic places with tools and parts that you don’t necessarily have. But you also have to plan for that as well.
Blake Boles 30:20
That’s a great segue into the question of money. So how do you two make money? How often do you work and are you able to save in this lifestyle?
Andy Duncan 30:31
saving no, currently. We originally had about a three year plan to be out in the water. And our plan was, we didn’t sell everything, but we sold all of our vehicles. And we still have a home that’s being serviced by the renters. And then after that, we were planning on coming home and working every day, the rest of our mortal lives, which just, the more I say that, I said it as a joke originally, and it breaks my heart every time I say it now.And since then, I have picked up some contracting jobs that helps put a little money in the kitty, pays for your diesel engine when it blows up and you have to replace it yourself. But we’re trying to, we’re transitioning into a stage in our cruising. And Tracy alluded to earlier, original plan was we’re going to circumnavigate, we had all these huge plans. And sometimes when you start on a hike, your destination is way out there. But the best thing you can do for yourself is reevaluate as you go and say, you know, this, this route isn’t the best for me, or it’s not feasible. And there’s roadblocks that are money. So we’re in the Bahamas right now. And we’ve run up against some roadblocks where insurance to go further would really, really blow the budget. And then we don’t trust most of the insurance carriers that even say that they would cover going south and from experience of others, they don’t pay claims. So we’ve changed a little bit of that. And we’re happy right now where we’re at bouncing around between the US and the Bahamas.I’m doing contracting work. But my wife has decades experience on the water. And we love being on the water so much more now that we’ll find just about any way to stay out here. So we’re enrolled in captain’s classes, so we can pick up some delivery jobs are become a charter captain or a day captain for a contract length of time, let’s say we have to work for 1314 weeks, and then that might pay for our year to just continue doing this.
Blake Boles 32:59
Before we hear from you, Tracy, Andy, can you just elaborate a little bit more on what specific kind of work you do and the length of the contracts and the nature of the work? Thank you. Thank you.
Andy Duncan 33:10
do currently some short-term contracts with an internet provider at conventions and trade shows. So a trade show might be in San Francisco or Philadelphia or you name a city wherever. The company trucks in all the equipment with the plans and layouts. I help install that plan and make sure the internet is provided for 70,000 to 200,000 people.You work for a week or so before the event happens. During the event you make sure everything stays smooth and then a day or two later everything’s packed up and is gone and you’re flying back to your boat.
Blake Boles 33:53
So you have to be away for a week or two and you work intensely. And then you have to come back and how many times a year might you do that?
Andy Duncan 34:02
not as often as my budget would really really like. I’m averaging about two or three of those a year.
Blake Boles 34:10
That’s not very many. It’s not.
Andy Duncan 34:15
But we have, we structured so much before we came out and paid off all of our debts, and I’m a side hustler. And besides my full-time job, I would side hustle and buy and sell things on the side, and I would deliver Uber Eats on my way to work, and I would work my shift.And if I never left for lunch, I’m a workaholic, I would just stay at the office and trudge through. But when we developed this goal of coming out and going on this adventure, I would get up and walk out and get in my car and deliver Uber Eats, and then get back and invest that money at the very end of that hour and 10 minutes, because I’d stretch it as far as I could, and go work the rest of my shift, and then drive home and deliver Uber Eats on the way home so I could ride off that mileage as well.
Blake Boles 35:08
What about you, Tracy? What was your career? What were your side hustles? What did you dedicate yourself to?
Tracy Duncan 35:16
So I am a dog groomer. I have owned countless businesses. We owned a mobile grooming business where we had two vans at one time on the road. Then I opened a shop that was boarding, grooming, daycare, retail, extraordinarily time consuming. When the children started coming along, we knew that that was drawing a whole lot of my time and fostering is also a whole lot of time. So we ended up selling that shop.And then I worked from home. I had a trailer at home that was kind of like a little freestanding grooming shop. So I would be at the house, but I was also able to make pretty good money doing that for a while. And that’s all I’ve ever done as an adult is groomed dogs.
Blake Boles 36:07
It sounds like you’re a couple who loves to work. You’ve been workaholics for a long time.It sounds like you were not very time wealthy in your previous existence. And now you’re very intentionally making space for time and space for family and for not rushing around and hustling and doing side gigs all the time. Do I have the right picture here?
Tracy Duncan 36:29
Absolutely. And it can be hard.I mean, there’s times that I’m like, oh, I just need something to do with myself. So I crochet, you know, we read a lot now. But yeah, that is absolutely the correct picture of who we were. And when we weren’t working, we were running kids to soccer and to football and to this and to that. And yeah, it was a lot.
Blake Boles 36:52
How did you know it was the right time to take a break from that American suburban work hard hustle life?
Andy Duncan 37:01
I’ll start with this and I’ll let Tracy finish up a little bit. We were foster parents for 10, 12 years and had many kids in and out of our home, and ended up enlarging our family through adoption, which I have a history of in my family that goes back a couple of generations. There was so much trauma to the youth, to the kids, and to us individually, and as a couple, that it was painful for so many years, and you’re fighting for these kids, and you’re fighting for each other, and all while working and juggling capitalism and commercialism, and suburbia, and then COVID happened. Very quickly, we realized that we didn’t need to keep up with the Joneses, that we were really happy together as our family unit.Our bubble was a lot bigger than it is on the boat here, but there was a lot of people in small space and we got along. In doing your dreaming, when you’re all locked away in your little hovel, Tracy started for the first time really romanticizing her time as a youth on the boat, because she didn’t enjoy it when she was a teenager. She had fun times, but it was hard when she was a youth. We use that as what if, daydreaming, and went down the rabbit hole of watching all the videos, that some of these content creators were putting out of this glamorous lifestyle on boats. It’s not all glamorous. It’s toilet repairs. It’s mundane. It’s getting greasy and dirty. But that was our vision that pulled us through COVID, and then I’m going to turn it over to her and let her go off in another side tangent.
Tracy Duncan 39:05
Well, so yeah, so, you know, we started, like he said, watching YouTube and just kind of entertaining ourselves at home and the kids, you know, would say, oh, blah, blah, you know, that’d be really cool to go to, you know, Thailand and rent a dive boat for a week. And I’m like, we can do that. Like, I can do that. Y’all know I have this skill, right? Like, we can do that. So it kind of started out almost as a joke, like, he would come home and complain because he worked the whole time during COVID. But he would come home complaining about X, Y, or Z. And I would say, you know where that doesn’t happen? In the Caribbean. So that kind of started off as a joke.And, you know, in your mind, you’re like, there’s no way we could financially pull that off. Like, when we left, my parents had a plan, they sold a huge house that my dad had built. So I don’t know that they held a lot of debt on the house. My dad sold a company and financially things just aligned. But I also knew that when we were done cruising for the years that we cruised, they both had to go back to work. You know, I had a I wasn’t unrealistic about the finances of what we had been able to do. So it was just kind of one of those pie in the sky, we could never line that up to do it. Like, look, look, here we are with all these kids stuck in suburbia, and we’re stuck, right? Like, this is where we’ll be for the rest of our lives. Um, so he just came up with a plan, we moved money over to a financial advisor that we had just kind of accumulated in different places. And we thought, Oh, this guy’s going to tell us, you know, for retirement sake, you’re there’s no way you can go do this, you’ll, you’ll never make you’ll never be able to retire. And so after we got everything lined up, and he had a clear picture, and we kept shoving money in there as hard as we could, like he would call and be like, nobody puts $100 a day into a retirement account like this, like, what are y’all doing? And he’s like, Oh, I went into Uber, and I did this, and I sold x and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, we finally just posed the question to him, like, this is our plan. This is what we want to do. Do you think that it’s feasible? And he was like, Yeah, if you can rent your house, and have things paid for that way, then absolutely do it.
Andy Duncan 41:24
When you came to me with this, I laughed to myself.
Tracy Duncan 41:27
Yeah, he’s like, I rolled my eyes in the background and laughed at myself because I thought you people are nuts.
Andy Duncan 41:32
I ran the numbers and I ran the numbers again, and after the fourth or fifth times I ran the numbers, I was like, they’ve almost got this figured out. So we’re not doing great.The boat, people say break out another thousand when something breaks, and we’ve had things break, but we’ve also saved ourselves a lot of money by doing so much of the work ourselves.
Blake Boles 42:01
That was my next question for you, which is how do you prevent the boat from becoming a money hole?
Andy Duncan 42:05
Yeah. And it still can be a money hole sometimes. We bought the boat, it had a lot of engine hours on the engines and we knew that at some point they might go.
Tracy Duncan 42:18
Of course, it went when he was off on one of his contracts, and I was alone on the boat, but that’s a different subject.
Andy Duncan 42:26
So coming back, started getting quotes and it was, it was going to cost $20,000 to get an engine replaced. And we were going to be on hold and pay out to boatyards and, oh, you can’t be on the boat while you’re doing all this. And in a month or two of just this stoppage waiting for landlock to line up. And we ended up finding a mechanic that had some engines that he was recertifying. And the price came out to be less than that for a double replacement for a newer kind of upgrade. And it’s a longer story, but I ended up replacing both the engines in the boat all in less than $15,000, but I did all the work myself.Well, I can’t say all myself. My family did all the works with me. We did all the work ourselves, but I was also hanging upside down in a really tight, think of a diesel engine running in the space of a normal American standup bathtub shower. That’s only half as high and you’re constrained on all sides and you’re hanging upside down over one side while it’s running, trying to figure out where oil is gushing out of the side of the engine. Underneath your bed. So to get in there, you have to roll your mattress up out of the way and get your linens and your clothes out of the way so they don’t all become a greasy mess while it’s ejecting oil out everywhere.
Blake Boles 44:01
That makes through hiking and bike touring actually sound much easier.
Tracy Duncan 44:07
So we’re back to that. Everything is difficult.If you want something on a boat, it is in the bottom of the hole that you’re looking at every time, guaranteed, no matter what. It has fallen to the bottom, and you have to remove everything to get it out.
Andy Duncan 44:24
We’re also more organized than we ever been in the whole lives. Absolutely.We’re both scatterbrained ADHD, but we have inventory lists of where every food item is. That’s in the shoe locker and this kid’s room aft in the back of the boat. That’s under the step. That’s under the couch and under the couch isn’t this cupboard that you just open a pantry door and reach in. You’ve got to get the cushions out of the way, the covering board, you’ve got to unload all the other food that’s stacked on top.
Tracy Duncan 44:57
And it’s all packed around the refrigerator unit that could turn on and run at any time. So you have to keep your hands out of the way.
Blake Boles 45:05
think this is why a lot of people they like the idea of long-distance hiking or cycling or living out of a truck or a van or maybe a tiny house. Yeah it forces you to not be a hoarder, to have some organization.It’s a sort of like mental decluttering that’s forced upon you by your physical reality and when you are surrounded by open ocean you just can’t really, you can’t bend that reality. Right.
Andy Duncan 45:33
Thank you. the hardware store in the town we’re at right now. We’ve spent a total of two weeks here this year. Yesterday was the first time the hardware store was open.And she doesn’t like to open before noon and she always closes by four, but she might only be open one day this week. And it’s a dinghy ride across. It’s a two or three mile dinghy ride across water. So if it’s raining or the wind’s blowing in the wrong direction and the waves are too high and you need a bolt. First of all, odds are they’re not gonna have it.
Tracy Duncan 46:10
If they’re open and you’re going to get really wet trying to go find out.
Andy Duncan 46:14
And she took credit cards yesterday, but she only takes cash today. So you have to, we plan months and months in advance for so many things.
Blake Boles 46:25
I use the adventure word and I’m using it in the lowercase a adventure, not Indiana Jones uppercase a adventure. Thank you. Thank you for recognizing that. Yes.Just to close the loop on the money question, you previously told me that you also get a stipend through for adoption. Can you just explain how that works for people who are curious?
Tracy Duncan 46:48
Yeah, absolutely. So we adopted our children through foster care. Every state is different as to how it works, but we adopted two different sibling groups. So in the state of Georgia, where we’re from, there’s parameters of whether you get an adoption subsidy or not for that child. It’s based on age, how many children there are, and their needs. So all of our children, actually four of the five have some pretty severe educational challenges. So that put them into one grouping, and they are both, all of them are from two different sibling groups, and they are minorities. So that all put them into the, they get an adoption stipend. They were also older children when we adopted them. So until they are 18, or if they are still enrolled in school until they are 21, they receive a subsidy from the state of Georgia, which comes to us for their living care.So that is a lot of what we day-to-day live on, is their adoption subsidies. And as they get older, those subsidies will drop off. So that is a large part of our income now. It is our income. The house pays for the house, like it’s kind of self-sustaining, but we don’t make money from it. In fact, a lot of months we spend money that out of our pockets to sustain it. And then our day-to-day grocery bills and that kind of thing do come from our children’s adoption subsidies.So are we saving money and putting any money away? No. Will we have to do some more of that? Yes.
Andy Duncan 48:29
Is being a foster parent lifestyles of the rich and famous? Absolutely not.
Blake Boles 48:35
And so Andy, the money that you bring in with your IT work, does that go towards things like new engines for the boat or other big one-time expenses?
Andy Duncan 48:46
it goes towards whatever home needs to be plugged. Yes.
Blake Boles 48:50
I want to circle back to the beginning and talk about just the quality of family life in this boat life, in this boat community that you’ve chosen and that you feel quite attached to now after being part of it for a few years. And I just wanted to hear about how it compares to when you’ve been living with your kids back in Atlanta and the quality of connection that’s possible.The parent-child connection, connections between children. We’ve already talked a bit about the roving pirate gangs, so maybe just stick within your family unit because it really seems to be the central theme in why you’re making all these choices.
Tracy Duncan 49:30
Here, you know, when we lived at home, there was school, you know, they’re out of your care for eight, nine hours a day under the influence of teachers, what they’re being taught, and the children that are around them that become their sphere of influence. On the boat, we’re the sphere of influence. They have each other. They’ve always, thank God, all of our children have always gotten along. And that was part of during COVID. Like, everybody was like, Oh, my God, we’re so miserable. If we don’t get out of this house, you know, X, Y or Z. And we’re thinking, really, my children are happier than they have ever been.Like, I truly think that that was our happiest family time was being home during COVID. We would go on walks at 11 o’clock. We’d go out in the woods at 11pm and go walking on the trail and just be out there just busting out giggling and, you know, getting scared by deer. And we still laugh about that today. This deer burst through the trees one night, and all the boys just started shrieking. And I think the deer probably had a heart attack. But we just we always had something to do. We were gardening. We were, you know, watching things as a family that then we could discuss later. So lots of good conversations came of it. And we just decided then that the sphere of what was being thought outside of our home was a little disturbing in some instances. And certainly the friend connections that we that many of them had, you know, just kind of came to light, as well as the lack of what’s the right thing to say, I don’t want any of our teacher friends to hear this and think I’m saying anything negative because I’m absolutely not. But the educational divide became very elaborated to us when they were at home trying to do school.And I’m thinking, really, like, you’re so separated from what you’re being taught. And that’s part of what our state does with special education is they teach that they still present the grade level material, even if the kid doesn’t get it, they still have to present it. So our children were just being left further and further and further behind the older they got and the higher the grade they were in. And we just thought, dude, you can’t even balance a checkbook. They’re trying to teach you algebra. Like, we need to back up. So that was, you know, like a big aha moment for us at home during COVID. And we had already started straight homeschooling then. So that big step that many people hurdle when they do move on to a boat and then all of a sudden they’re trying to educate their children. We were already there. I was homeschooled as a child. So I kind of understand the mindset of homeschooling and it’s not always teaching to what the state says is the proper education for your age.
Andy Duncan 52:28
Not that we’re perfect teachers, it’s still a point of frustration on a daily basis. But I’m going to step in here and do a compare and contrast. We talked earlier about how every day is different on a boat, and you tried to ask what an average day was, and that can splinter off into a thousand different directions. But when we were home, the bus would sometimes pick them up at 6am, depending on the age of the child, and they would be gone until 3 or 4pm.I would have to be gone for work 7, 8 o’clock in the morning, gone until 6 or 7 at night, and Atlanta’s known for no traffic at all, right? Right, of course. So an hour of my time each way, on the way to and from work at least, was traffic time and then picking up and running to soccer or whatever activity and scouting. We were very involved with that. So nights, weekends, we’re running over Hell’s Half Acre. And I take a big breath and I exhale and say, we’re in 950 square feet of each other. And sometimes, yes, on a boat, I’m like, guys, you have to go to the beach and get away from me for a little while. Tracy has to get off the boat and go, look for sea glass, or I need to work on something just to have my mind engaged in something else.So I feel that productivity that draws back to what’s inherently, and not all men, but many men, must produce, must fix something. But we’re in each other’s space. We see, we’ve always been intentional about when we sit down and have a meal, we sit down and have a meal across the table from one another, as far back as when Tracy and I first got married in 2000. But now I get to see and check in on them multiple times a day, because you can blow off your parents and say, yeah, yeah, I’m okay. But if you’re sitting across the table from them, and you see something in their eyes, you know it’s different than what’s being said. So that’s my prayer and contrast.
Blake Boles 54:53
closeness.
Tracy Duncan 54:55
Yeah, there aren’t many secrets on a boat.
Blake Boles 54:57
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think many people would say that being stuck together during COVID restrictions was the best time of their life, but if that was true for you, that definitely seems like a positive indicator for like intentionally putting yourselves together on a boat.And it’s a bit different because the teens can go out and you can go to other places, you can hang out with other people. It’s not like you have to be around each other all the time, but it really seems to be a good fit for your family.
Tracy Duncan 55:27
that does, and we were talking about the other teenagers that are out here. My kids know that on any island we go to, and they’ve had that demonstrated multiple times, two of them are dark brown skinned Asian children.And I’m like, you better believe going into town that every human being in that town knows what boat you came off of, or we’ll figure it out real damn fast if you act the full. So, you know, I’m putting you on notice that every single person around here knows from whence you came and your friends too. So, I think that helps them kind of think, you know, a lot of kids would be like, I’m in a foreign country, nobody knows who I am, I can do whatever, but no, it’s not, that’s not the case.
Blake Boles 56:10
It’s a small town.
Tracy Duncan 56:11
Yes, it is a small town and the boating community is a very small community and everybody knows everybody else’s business.
Andy Duncan 56:19
But they go off on an adventure during the day and then sometimes at night, the roving band of pirates go, it’s a boarding party on two other boats. We might have 10 or 12 teenagers sitting around the table inside playing a board game or all of them playing Super Smash Bros.against each other and it’s just hilarious. But it can also really
Blake Boles 56:41
loud. I think the pirate gang is the perfect place to end this. Andy and Tracy, what’s the name of your boat and how can people follow you online?
Tracy Duncan 56:51
So the name of our boat is Another Summer, which was the name of my family’s boat growing up.
Andy Duncan 56:57
and Andy can work. We’re always chasing another summer.You have our link tree, you can share that. We do have a private Facebook group, which is more day-to-day of our antics and other things. We’ve got different ways to track us that not only shows where we’re at, but to the temperature and the wind and what kind of water we’re at and what other boats are around us. And I’m getting ready to publish a live webcam that’ll show kind of surrounding areas. So if you want to share our link tree, which is link tree SV another summer, we can do that.
Tracy Duncan 57:37
But our Facebook adventures can be found at Small World Big Circle because we definitely live in a small world on a big circle.
Blake Boles 57:46
I will definitely put those links into the show description and I want to give a shout out to our mutual friends Joe and Armin.
Tracy Duncan 57:52
Yes. Love that. Connect to us.
Blake Boles 57:55
Andy and Tracy Duncan, thank you so much for coming on Dirtbag Rich.
Tracy Duncan 57:59
Thank you so much.
Andy Duncan 58:01
Thank you, sir. It was a pleasure.
Tracy Duncan 58:02
and we enjoy following you as well.