Brace yourselves as we navigate the captivating life and career of Roger Moore, the visionary co-owner of Nautical Ventures. From leaving his stable life in California and embarking on an audacious 13-year voyage around the globe to transforming a modest kayak and sailboat retailer into a booming boat dealership, Moore’s extraordinary journey is a testament to the human spirit.
In this immersive episode, Moore shares his secrets to thriving in a challenging industry, the transformational role of customer service in today’s fast-paced market, and his strategic maneuvers that made Nautical Ventures what it is today. Moore isn’t just your average entrepreneur – he’s a dedicated sailor, a self-taught classical guitarist, a former pilot, an innovator in water purification, and a globetrotter with a monkey companion! If you’re seeking a story that combines entrepreneurship, adventure, and captivating personal tales, this is a podcast you can’t afford to miss.
Dive in and join us as we ride the waves of Roger Moore’s exceptional journey, navigating the thrilling intersections of nautical life and business. Get ready for some real-life adventures that sound like they’re straight out of a novel!
Brought to you by SHIPSHAPE
Hosts –
Transcript ——————————————————————————
Farah [00:00:09] Hello and welcome to the Shipshape Podcast, a series of podcasts where we meet amazing people and talk about their experiences, personal, technical and all related to the maritime world. Come and dive in. Dive in. Dive in.
Merrill Charette [00:00:36] Today on the Shipshape podcast, we speak with the president, founder and CEO of Nautical Ventures, Roger Moore. So let’s hear his James Bond story on the water. A world sailor, a liveaboard, a mover and shaker in the industry. Your host today are Merrill Charette. I’m a liveaboard on a tasking to ship a 36 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Talha [00:00:57] And hey, everybody, this is Talha Bhatty. I’m aboard my Luhrs 40 in Virginia and we have a legend with us today. He’s been living aboard for years and years. These are lots of stories. He even had a pet monkey. I’m really excited about that angle. So we’re going to jump all over the place. But welcome to the show, Roger.
Roger [00:01:18] Well, thanks for having me on the show. I’m excited to share my history and and the last 30 years that I’ve been living aboard and and loving it. People ask me, what in the world is going on in my mind that I don’t want to live in a house and living aboard? I just. There’s nothing that suits me better. So I love it and I’m happy to share my experiences and and how this got started.
Merrill Charette [00:01:43] Well, as you say that I’m reflecting on my own scenario, and maybe it wasn’t that bad of an idea to live.
Talha [00:01:49] On the board for the.
Merrill Charette [00:01:49] Past six years. So, Roger, where are you coming to us from?
Roger [00:01:55] I’m coming to you from my office here in in central Fort Lauderdale is our main office for Nautical Ventures. We have about 12 locations now throughout Florida, but this is our I call it the intergalactic headquarters, which is obviously an exaggeration, but I’m a little bit of that way anyway. So we’ll we’ll start it off with that.
Talha [00:02:15] And then headquarters, all of it. So that’s where this all started. What was the origin story?
Roger [00:02:22] Well, we can go way back when I was just in New York as a kid. My parents had a boat. We’d spend every weekend on it. They had it on the kill van. Call an old Atlas Yacht Club there. And when Dad got two weeks vacation, we’d move it down to the beach and we’d spend the two weeks on the boat. So I was brought around boats because my dad loved it. That was a 33 foot wheeler, and we’d live aboard it for two weeks. And I had my first boat was a little eight foot pram. And then at 16, I had my eyes on this correct craft, 17 foot correct craft that needed a lot of work. And my dad said, Roge, if you want to do it, if I’ll match whatever you match was a six year hair back then. And man, I came up with three, four bucks in a real hurry working my tail off at the marina and was surprised. Then that was the start. This 16 foot correct craft with a 60 horse Ford Flathead V8 in it.
Talha [00:03:24] And so this is a fast center console. And yeah.
Roger [00:03:28] No, it’s not really a center console. It’s that style forward seating and aft seating.
Talha [00:03:33] Uh, okay. Okay. Like a wheeler again? Sort of.
Roger [00:03:36] Yeah.
Talha [00:03:37] Well.
Roger [00:03:38] We alerts. They’re still making the the older correct crafts. I loved it. I learned a lot about engines and boat maintenance and fiberglass and just love the boat to death. And when we left New York and my folks moved to California, I went out there and got into business after school. I flunked out of school after two and a half years because I didn’t realize at the time that I was A.D.D. and I had a lot of trouble in school. I got A’s in chemistry, math and physics and F’s and anything. I didn’t like school. Mm hmm. Problem child and a problem student had a knack for business and ended up getting in several businesses in California without going through all that. Purchased a 50 foot golf star to use for business and fun in the Disco Bay area, which is a phenomenal place to sail, as you guys probably know.
Talha [00:04:31] To these first Marine businesses that were there, whether it was more chartering or repair, was.
Roger [00:04:36] It? But they weren’t marine businesses. It was I was in the real estate business.
Talha [00:04:41] Oh, so you just had a boat on the side and you had vacation?
Roger [00:04:47] I have several patents in the field of water purification for drinking water. And, you know, had had a really nice series of careers and several businesses there. In 1986, we sold our business. We because my wife and I helped build it. We built it. We decided or I suggested, let’s take off and cruise down the coast of California. Well, she’d been cruising in the bay. You know, we had the 50 foot Gulf star, and she loved it. So she said, okay, whatever you want, Rob. She was wonderful. We bought this 63 foot toy, La Motor sailor. Wow. Everybody said, Roger, that’s not a sailboat is not a powerboat. That’s the word world’s. And we proved over the next 13 years that. It was a perfect boat for really. So I was really lucky in selecting that’s.
Talha [00:05:41] A big boat that 60 feet.
Roger [00:05:43] 63 feet and heavy and ketch rig. So if there’s any tip to anybody that’s thinking about cruising, I have a cute little story that never cruised. We’d never been out of the bay. So I went down to the bookstore and I talked to somebody there and I said, Listen, can you get me a couple of books on cruising? And I’d like to know what the people want to do, and I’d like to know how the nice way to cruise is. So I got a couple of books. One of them was called James Cornell Cruising Routes, which was more like a dictionary or a Cyclops of where and when to go. And then I got James Skoog cruising in comfort. That was a great book because he really went into all the creature comforts that we’re used to. And if you go out there and try and rough it too much, maybe guys can get by with that. But the women know it, so you’re not going to have a happy couple.
Talha [00:06:39] Good advice. Yep. Yeah.
Roger [00:06:43] So the joy was fantastic because it had a great galley freezers, refrigerators, generator, air conditioning, icemaker. We had all the creature comforts. So my wife loved it. I loved it. And what was supposed to be a six month journey down the coast of California, what I call gunk calling, stopping in every day, every marina, mostly at anchor. We loved it. And after about four and a half months, we were in San Diego and said, Hey, let’s go to Mexico. And so we started cruising down the coast of Mexico and got as far as Acapulco, which is you look at a map way down. We didn’t know what to do from there. We met some people that were planning to cross the Pacific, and I pointed at them and I said, You’re nuts. That’s 50 miles. No. When am I going to do that? 30 days later. Off we went.
Talha [00:07:42] 31 in the same boat. I mean, it’s an ocean boat race.
Roger [00:07:47] 30 days later, 30 days after we got to Acapulco. We had made the decision to go ahead and make the crossing. And the crossing took us 22 days. It was a magical journey for us. Some of the funny stories is we were a motor sailor and we were going with three other boats. This is a lot of detail, but I think of something we started. Sure, sure. So we’re having all these meetings. Samantha, my wife, who sadly passed away five years ago, my mate for 48 years. But anyways, we talked about the planning and she said, Roger, they can launch the space shuttle with less planning than you guys are for this trip. I mean, we really worked at it. One of the captains thought he could pick up the Southeast trade, so he headed south. Another was going north. Of the three boats, one dropped out. So it was us and two other boat really cool people. One guy was a doctor. His wife was a nurse. Other people were in the real estate business. And we all went a little different direction based on our gut feel about where the trade winds were blowing. We also departed based on water line length, so the slower boats with the shorter water line left first and then we left last being the 63. You know, we had a pretty steady six knot cruising speed on one engine and before sailing, it sailed pretty well also. So off we go across the Pacific. And I have to I have too many stories, so you guys have to.
Talha [00:09:27] Well.
Merrill Charette [00:09:28] Let me ask you this. So, you know, we’ve talked to sailors all the time. There’s obviously the whole conversation of, you know, more boat, more problem and having a budget based on certain size of boat. I mean, having a 60 foot boat and cruising for that long. How did how did you really budget this whole thing? Like, how do you manage that?
Roger [00:09:49] All right. Well, that’s a great question, because when we started, I was having trouble getting insurance because two of us on a63 foot boat insurance company didn’t feel that that was adequate through. We thought it was adequate improvement, needless to say. And they promised me I had insurance. By the time we arrived at our destination, I found out we didn’t have insurance. So at that point, I said, The heck with the insurance, we’ll self-insure. And we owned the boat because I’d sold our business and we owned the boat, so we didn’t have payments on the boat. And I’ve actually calculated we were spending about $32,000 a year. That was our our cost to do the trip that we did over 13 years. And. Also included a one of us traveling home each year. We never both left the boat. Somebody was always with the boat from whatever departure point that was. So for $30,000, I had a couple of real estate investments that were generating a little bit more than that. I think that’s an attainable number. Maybe that number is 40,000 now, but it’s not as good as you think.
Talha [00:10:58] Of course it’s nice.
Roger [00:11:00] We were anchoring. We didn’t like going in the marinas. Samantha was a great cook. So, you know, we eat on the boat. And as we go through this story, we really became the locals. And when we stop places. So cost of living was minimal. And another proprietary story, when we started out here, it had two 3208 diesels in it and it was catch break know a nice rig. So I needed to learn more about diesel engines. So I hired the cat mechanic, I brought him to the boat and I said, Will you bring any specialty tools with you? An extra set, I’ll buy them. And I sat him down on the battery box in the engine room, gave him a beer, and said, Teach me how to adjust the valves. Teach me how to pull the injection pump. Teach me the basic things that I’m going to need to know if we’re not around. And of course, I had all the manuals on making notes in the manuals, and I did the work. He told me what to do. And wow, did that pay off?
Talha [00:12:05] I bet. And that’s a good tip to read, is that you, especially for these longer passages, you definitely need to know your boat inside out.
Roger [00:12:12] Absolutely. And we did the same thing with the air conditioning. Guy said, bring a tank of Freon, bring a set of gauges, bring any specialty tools, teach me how to recharge the AC and we know what the pressure should be. And I bought a book, the Encyclopedia of Air Conditioning, so when I forgot something, I could go look at it and my God, that hell knows how much refrigeration ac I was held up.
Talha [00:12:37] And so at this point, Roger, do you already have the monkey at this point?
Roger [00:12:41] No, no. Don’t have the money now.
Talha [00:12:43] Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So this is this is the first passage. So you left Mexico, Acapulco, and you went towards.
Roger [00:12:50] The Marquesas was our first stop. And then, what, 22 days? Wow. We could have gone 90 days. I mean, we had a had a great routine, which was kind of natural for our bio rhythms. I’m a morning person. She’s an evening person. So she would take first watch from maybe 8:00 until two in the morning, like 6 hours and to wake me up. And then I’d take the watch at 2:00 in the morning or 1:00, depending upon how she felt, which was great for me because it was exciting to be on the boat and, you know, it’s black and you can see the stars and it’s just so gorgeous out there and I could look forward to and get excited about the sunrise. So by the time the sun came up, Samantha had had a nice rest. We’d have breakfast together and we had a routine where we had breakfast, lunch and dinner together. The 6 hours was was not difficult for us. People tried to get to and wow, you just don’t get the rest.
Talha [00:13:50] Yeah, that’s hectic.
Roger [00:13:51] A very interesting little piece of this was as we started we were a bit nervous to take off and lose the sight of land. And as we took off in Acapulco and we saw the lights disappear in the distance, it was time for a swap, you know, next shift, I went down to the master state room to wake up. Sam and I stepped on the carpet, this beautiful white carpet we had in the cabin. It’s squishy. It’s full of water. I said, Oh, my God, yes. So I reach down and I touch it and taste it. It’s salt water. I said, Oh my God, we’re.
Talha [00:14:27] Now.
Roger [00:14:27] 6 hours out. And where the hell we taken the water? I was pretty upset. Thank God Samantha was an adventure because I was ready to turn around and I’d spent getting the boat ready. Everything spare parts, drinking out everything. And here we are, you know, ten, 12 hours out of Acapulco, and we’ve got salt water entering the boat. What is going on? So I said, Sam, let’s turn around and go back. And she said, Rach, let’s consider that we’re halfway. What would you do if I said, You know what? Here’s something else. Yeah, let’s do that. So I climbed in the laser and couldn’t find the water. I had lots of tools on board, so I pulled the the upholstery off the settee in the back, took the saber saw and cut a big hole in it and found that when they built the boat to drill the holes in the bulkhead, they just drilled poll after poll after hole and then punched the middle out and ah, all these little stars sticking out all these little protrusions. Well. A six inch exhaust pipe pulsates a little bit as a building. It spits the water out. So it’s for a hole the size of your pinky finger in the bottom of this house. And that’s where the water was coming from. So we shut down that engine started the other engine. And the reason we’re starting engines here, because in the bowl, if you look at Mexico, it’s kind of like a big bowl there and there is not much wind. So you’ve got a motor out of that or sail at two knots, which is no fun. So we’re motoring out or sailing out and we switch the engines. And then I got some silicone. We had rubber material on the boat, a couple of big old clamps, and I smeared it with silicone, put the rubber on there and the hypos clamps. And to this day, I think it’s still the same way. So that was really fun to solve the problem.
Talha [00:16:29] And continue the trip. That’s going to be the biggest plus.
Roger [00:16:32] Absolutely. So you guys started something here. We can go on for a long time. Of the three boats that ended up making this crossing, the one went down to pick up the southeast trades, which did not materialize. The name of their boat was Bartella. That was the real estate guy and his wife. They had what I call a daisy chain electrical system. They needed the engine running to charge the batteries for the inverter to be able to operate the air conditioning and the refrigeration. And they lost the inverter, so they had no refrigeration. All their frozen goods that were in there for the trip were deteriorating. They weren’t picking up the Southeast trades. It was a horrific trip for them.
Talha [00:17:16] Absolutely awful.
Roger [00:17:18] Becalmed as we talk twice a day at noon and midnight on the ham radio. We’d hear them. They were starting to get really irritated with one another. If you’ve been on a sailboat and there’s not a lot of wind and you don’t have power when that boat rolls, you know how the mast slaps and the sails bang. It’s like the.
Talha [00:17:40] Doldrums, right?
Roger [00:17:42] That’s where we were in the doldrums. The other boat that was ahead of us that took off the smaller boat that was called Kahuna. The doctor and his wife, we were about halfway across when we were in pretty close proximity to one another. So we altered course and we rendezvoused in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was amazing. And the swells in the South Pacific are huge. We’d see his boat disappear and then come up on top of the swells and disappear again. They came up and we rendezvoused. We hooked a bunch of lines together, let their boat trail off the back of our boat, which was called Good grief.
Talha [00:18:20] Good grief.
Roger [00:18:24] They swam over with a bottle of wine and we sat on the back deck and had a bottle of wine in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The two of us, it was really cool. We had a great water maker and I said, How’s your trip going? They said, Well, we don’t have the AC. It’s hot as heck. We’ve got to rinse ourselves off three or four times a day. We’re running low on water. So I said, How many hoses have you got? They had two. We had two. We hooked them all up and I filled their tank up.
Talha [00:18:53] To do it. And that’s what friends are for.
Roger [00:18:56] They were so excited about that. So off we go. And the next day at noon, we’re doing our standard noon communication. How are you doing? And Gerry says, Roger, there’s a helicopter hovering overhead. I’ve got to get off the line. I’ll call you back. I said a helicopter. You hallucinating? There is no helicopter that could be flying 1500 miles from land. He said, shut up. I’ll call you back. So turns out it was a long liner fishing boat out of San Diego. And they have a helicopter spotter plane to spot the schools. And then they sent out their launches with the nets to get them. Well, they saw Kahuna and his American flag. So they went over and asked them that they need anything. And they didn’t have to tell me that they needed some diesel as well because of the sailboat. Right. So these guys dispatch 30 gallons of diesel to them on one of their tenders and two quarts of chocolate ice cream. So so kahuna gets filled with water, lots of fuel and some chocolate ice cream in the middle of it, in the middle.
Talha [00:20:06] Of the ocean.
Roger [00:20:08] And it was really cool. Anyway, off we go. And of course, we’re talking to our poor friends South who are bashing and rolling. And when they got to the murder cases, they headed north to Hawaii and saw the boat.
Talha [00:20:23] That does it. But then the flipside was true for you guys. Like you guys were now just in hook, line and sinker. You were addicted for life.
Roger [00:20:30] Pretty much, because once you go that distance, what do you do? Go. To Hawaii and then back. We just decided to keep going, which was never the intention. I was supposed to be a six month journey and the six months, as you’ll see, turned in to be 13 years to go, 45,000 nautical miles and about 450 ports around the world. It was an awesome experience.
Merrill Charette [00:20:55] I definitely want to hear the part in which this monkey gets involved.
Talha [00:20:58] Okay.
Roger [00:20:59] Well, I got to get a couple of other little ones in the middle. Let’s. You want me to jump the monkey?
Talha [00:21:04] It’s up to.
Roger [00:21:04] You. Okay, let’s keep it in sequence because we love them. Our cases, the tool motors and the society islands and the Cook Islands. And we have been out long enough at that point where we were concerned about the weather. This book I mentioned, James Cornell’s World Cruising Routes. He has in there the charts that you need. When is the right time to do it? When you shouldn’t make a passage. And we followed that religiously. And what it is, is the compilation of things all the way back dating and the Captain cook and pilot charts that he distills into advice on when to do these things. You can’t read the book, but if you want to go from the Marcos’s to Tonga, you look in there and he gives you the best times to do it. So anyway, we get to Tonga, the North Island group, and we decided that’s where we were going to hunker down for six months and wait out the hurricane season or the cyclone season in that territory. And of course, this was an island group with about I think it was like 4500 people. I mean, this is small. And we put down a mooring, a big mooring in a very safe place, and we became Tongan residents for this period of time. The first thing I did is went into town to meet some people and there’s a video store. So I go into the video store and he’s got lots of videos and we’re all hungry for videos. We’ve been out for quite a while and I make a deal with him because we had a couple of hundred videos on the boat. So I brought in my library and made a deal with him for six months that we could use his library. So he got the rent our films and we became fast friends with him. His brother in law owns a grocery store, so now we’re friends with, you know, a couple of the key people in town. And I’m telling you, there were some incredible experiences pending. And they’re up seven months in Tonga and really becoming locals from there. We continued on across Tonga, Fiji, Noumea and then Australia, and then we spent another hurricane season or cyclone season in Australia, in Brisbane, and then worked our way up the Great Barrier Reef across Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, then across the Indian Ocean. And we’re getting close to the monkey head.
Talha [00:23:20] I mean, this is really sounding like a fairy tale. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.
Roger [00:23:24] And Elliot, I’m maybe you can hear it in my voice, but it’s just fun to share it because I’m reliving it as I’m explaining. We went to the Maldives and from Maldives we cut up into the Red Sea, and the first place in the Red Sea on the west Side is called Djibouti. And this is a French territory, a very small place. And I went into a souk, you know, a little bazaar store there. And we were looking at some things, and I’m not real proud of it, but I wanted to buy a couple of elephant tusks. And this guy’s got a monkey, and the monkey is on a little belt around its waist tied to a chair, and it’s just a teeny little monkey. Cutest thing you ever saw. So I asked the guy, How much is a monkey? And he says, It’s not for sale, it’s my pet. And I said, Oh, I left there with the monkey for $50 and blew it.
Talha [00:24:17] When I think.
Roger [00:24:17] Of our own circus on the boat because we had.
Talha [00:24:21] Yeah.
Roger [00:24:22] And a dog and a monkey.
Talha [00:24:23] Oh, boy, Oh, boy.
Roger [00:24:26] I love. I love animals. And so did Samantha.
Talha [00:24:28] And could you train the monkey, though, Because the cat and dog can still train. I mean, I used to have a pet monkey so I can dream. I don’t know.
Roger [00:24:34] What kind of a monkey did you have?
Talha [00:24:36] It was, I don’t know, a Southeast Asian monkey? Yeah, It wasn’t one of the famous one. This is. You remember the name?
Roger [00:24:45] Yeah, A vervet monkey. That’s what I had. It was. It was cute, funny, loved the boat, got along great with them. Most human monkey stories.
Talha [00:24:57] Yeah, I have so many monkey stories. So give me. Give me some fun ones I would really, like. Be like your sister. Would you, like, climb up all the way to the top of the mast and just be like, Oh, like, what do you do?
Roger [00:25:08] He would run up the mast and scare me to death because he jumped from the spreaders to grab the sheet. When we were slow, he walked down the sheet back on the boat. Go do it again. Well, man, if he missed.
Talha [00:25:20] You’re.
Roger [00:25:21] Going to find this. Yeah. He never lost it. It was really fun to watch him. Some of the hazards of him is the minute we let him out of his cage, he’d go around and he had some favorite things. He like to take the plug out of the. Dinghy that was on the foredeck and she was always getting into some mischief. It was really a hoot having that monkey.
Talha [00:25:42] And how about the birds that the seagulls like him or hate him? Was it Delia?
Roger [00:25:45] I don’t think there was ever any interaction between the monkey and.
Talha [00:25:48] No. You could see the reason I mentioned in my mongoose to love to do is he would climb up the tallest tree and then pull on the tails of, like, 100 crores. And there would be this giant swarm of crows above the tree. And then he’d run away and the crows and make fun of us all. And that’s funny.
Roger [00:26:10] Another interesting thing that happened is because of the monkey we were sitting at the it’s called the Djibouti Yacht Club, which is a gross overstatement. And we met the US ambassador to Djibouti, who loves it. So he was asking us about the trip and about the monkey, because the monkey sitting in a chair next to it next to us at the yacht club the next day, it was his wife’s birthday. So they invited us to the embassy for dinner and he wanted to hear about our trip and show me some stuff that he had that he was trying to design a boat. And we had a wonderful meeting with him and he says, Where are you going from here? And I said, I’ve been trying to get a visa to go to Saudi Arabia because I want to. And I didn’t want to go along the Somalian coast. I wanted to go on the canal. And the Saudis would never say no, never say yes. So I kind of gave up. The ambassador said, Roger, if you manage to get to Jeddah, which is the port we were shooting for, talk to this guy Chuck Angulo. He’s the US consulate in Saudi Arabia. Maybe he can help you. So now we’ve got the name of the ambassador and the US Consul general in Saudi Arabia. So we pull up, we’re approaching the Jeddah Islamic Port. Naturally, by coincidence it was during Hajj. So their security is at a high level and it was just at the end of Desert Storm. So Americans were most welcome, but there were no yachts and get a visa. So we pull in and ask for a spot to anchor. We finally get a little anchorage spot outside of the port, and out comes a little pilot boat with customs, immigration and all the officials. And what are we doing there? Of course, we always have the right of safe harbor. Well, we’ve burned more fuel than we thought, and we need water. Would it be possible for us to do it? And we’re sitting on the boat in the middle of the Red Sea at anchor and the boat is rolling. I mean, the toilet was phenomenal if the sales were up, but it was so balmy with a round bottom and not a deep keel that it was a ball. I get seasick.
Talha [00:28:16] Thinking.
Roger [00:28:18] So they said at home, I, God, this is terrible. You need to come into to the into the port and we’ll take care of you with some fuel and water. So nice. The next morning we follow them in. There’s this brand new foyer that they’ve built where the $50 million control tower that looks radar out over the whole Red Sea. We’re sitting there and we’re not there 15 minutes and we see a little forklift come up and deposit a guard shack about 75 feet from the boat. And here’s a guy with an automatic weapon at the guard shack watching us. I didn’t feel intimidated, but that was the first thing. And about 5 minutes later, up pulls this big Oldsmobile and two guys in the SoBe and good trade. I call it the opaque garb, the white robe and the accutron on the hat with the black rope around it. And we find out this is the secret police watching the military watch us.
Talha [00:29:18] Oh, boy.
Roger [00:29:19] Of course, I’m pretty social, so I go over and meet these guys and they said, okay, we’re going to help you arrange to get fuel and water. And I said, Boy, is there any chance that we might be able to get a visa? We’d love to see Jetta. No, not possible. So that afternoon somebody comes down and knocks on the boat. They ask me, Hey, there’s a commander, Jamie Byers. U.S. Military Sealift Command is here, and he saw your American flag and said, What the heck are you doing in the Jeddah Islamic Port? I mean, this is not a yacht club. This we’re the only boat. And everything else was commercial. So he’d like they said he mike down and visit you. Would you be willing to have him come visit? And I said, Man, we’d love it. So he comes down to the boat and he asks us about our story and what we’re doing and why we’re there. And he said, you know, we’ve got a we’ve got a host phone. I said, What’s a host phone? The Saudis have given us a phone so that we can call home and talk to our families. If you can get permission to come up to my office, you guys can use the phone and call your friends or your family, whatever you want. But heck, we’ve been up for a couple years. AM Radio.
Talha [00:30:23] Wow.
Roger [00:30:24] This was a great opportunity. So we go and we have some fun calling all our friends and we become friends with Jamie. Jamie. And he says, you know, we’re sending all of these containers home. Do you need any Cokes or water or anything? So he brings them and helps our boat up with with beverage in all these beverages. No alcohol, of course. And now he’s on the boat. We get a visit from the colonel of the port police in a welcoming me and saying, Sorry, they can’t get a visa. He brings my wife flowers and they’re all being really, really nice to us. We’d been there now maybe two or three days. They filled up our fuel tanks with the most beautiful diesel fuel I’ve seen. No dye.
Talha [00:31:10] It looks.
Roger [00:31:11] Like champagne. I’m happy as a lark. They wouldn’t take any money for it. So all.
Talha [00:31:16] Now.
Roger [00:31:16] Happening, and now it’s time to leave. So I invited all these people to come to the boat. And I’ve made contact with the U.S. Consul general, and I invited him to the boat, and he says, Man, we can’t come to the boat. You know, we’re not permitted in the jet Islamic sport. So I said, I don’t know. I go to the colonel, the port police, and I said, How come he can’t come in? He said, because he drives a diplomatic vehicle and it’s not subject to inspection. We can get uninspected vehicle in. So I said, well, what if he came in a regular car not far? And and I said, Hey, you can come in regular car and you’re not in an official car. So bingo, I’ve got the consul general, colonel of the port police, commander of the U.S. Navy, and we have this party on the boat making Saudi champagne, which I forget how to make it, but it doesn’t have alcohol in it. We have this wonderful time. Everybody’s meeting everybody. And it was really a hoot. Of course, they all love the monkey. And we’re asking, is there any way we can get a visa? We’d love to see Jeddah. And one guy winks at me and says, you know, your wife’s eye doesn’t look great. Maybe we need an emergency visa to get her to the optometrist there and a problem with her eye. So the A, this is where it gets fun. The next day, these two secret police guys come on board. And as they’re walking around the back of the boat where the monkey was tied up with a little belt around the table on the back deck where she liked to play, the monkey reaches over, picks up the soap and starts pulling hair on this guy’s legs. He’s dancing on the back deck because there’s a monkey attacking the hair on his leg. And I figured, boy, that just shot all our chances. But they fell in love with the monkey. So they come in to the boat and they started asking us questions. What are we doing there? Where we been? They said, Well, we’ve got some good news for you. When will you be ready? Ready for what? He said, Well, Prince Nayef, minister of the Interior, has invited you to be his guest. You’re going to be staying at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. He has a suite for you there, and you’ll be our guest. And of course, I was embarrassed. I said, oh, now we can’t accept. That’s absolutely incredible. But that’s above and beyond. My wife said, Shut up, Roger. We’ll be ready in an hour. So they send a car, they pick us up, they put guards on the boat so that they could take care of the animals. And off we went. And we spent two weeks as guests of the Saudi government going up type where the Kuwaitis ruled. And what an amazing place Saudi Arabia was. It’s another planet. It’s not a sitting country. It’s another.
Talha [00:33:57] Planet.
Merrill Charette [00:33:58] We’ve heard a lot of sailing stories, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sailing story twist into such a diplomatic situation mission.
Talha [00:34:07] But you know that.
Roger [00:34:08] The secret police guy, Colonel Sahab, who is our guide now, he was assigned to us. He kept asking me, he says, Roger, tell me, who are you really? And I said, We’re nobody. We just happened to meet a few people. He says, I guess you can’t tell me. And I said, Stop lying to me. We’re nobody. And it was just a hoot and too many stories for their there. But take the whole time going over that. But we left there. And when we left, we’d made so many friends. They sent the fire boat shooting water out of the hoses on our departure. It was bloody amazing. We went up to Egypt and then to Tel Aviv, Israel, where we spent seven months in Tel Aviv, a winter. The first thing that happened as we were approaching the coast of Israel is about 30 miles out. A police boat comes out and they circle us and tell us on the radio, everybody, please on deck and let us see your hands. So they want to find out what we’re doing there and we tell them what we’re doing. No problem. So they lead us into the Tel Aviv port, and the only place our boat would fit was at the police. Stop. So here we are at the police dock in Tel Aviv, and we’re filling out all the paper. You know, you’ve got Hell’s Immigration, Customs bomb squad. I mean, they really give you the order once over. I’m filling all the forms. I can say it now, but I had very cleverly hidden some weapons on the boat so that we could defend ourself if we ever needed it. But they were so well hidden that I never declared them, which is not a good thing. But if you declare something in one part of a country like Mexico, they take the guns. But you have to go back to that same point to get them. So it makes no sense. It doesn’t work. So you cheat and you sorry, lie and say so. I’m feeling well.
Talha [00:36:01] It’s your life on the line right now. So yeah, you got do it. Yeah.
Roger [00:36:05] So I’m filling out all this paperwork that says we don’t have any guns, we don’t have any ammunition, And we do have a monkey and a cat and a dog and all these other things. And one of the guys, the official said to my wife, Can I go inside? And we need to inspect the boat, of course. So they go down to the master state room.
Merrill Charette [00:36:25] Find your bazooka.
Roger [00:36:31] They didn’t find a weapon, but I had a case. Plastic case, all of shotgun ammo, maybe £100 or something, or shotgun ammo. So Samantha’s down there and she doesn’t have AR glasses with her. So the guy says, Can I look in the closet? Of course. He takes out the thing. He opens it up. And here’s the shotgun ammo you can imagine.
Talha [00:36:51] Why do you need ammo? Yeah.
Roger [00:36:54] Samantha says Roger Raj. So I go down there and I’m looking at him, looking at the ammo, and he says, Why did you declare this? And I said, Because I lied. And he said, This is serious. They all got off the boat and they went to the had a 40 foot ocean container right there on the dock, which was their office. So they go to the office and they said, do not get off the boat and where’s the weapon? And I’m trying to think, where is there a 12 gauge, where there is an Uzi with a silencer and all this other stuff. And I come up with a 12 gauge and a pistol and I give it to him. And the penalty is confiscation of the boat, imprisonment of me and Sam. I mean, this is really serious stuff. They don’t get off the boat. And I waited about 15 minutes, which seemed like an eternity. And I went up, got off the boat, went to their office, pushed the door open, fell to my knees and said, I can’t stand it. What are you going to do to me.
Talha [00:37:52] In the dock? Cracked up and they said.
Roger [00:37:57] The guns up here, we don’t have room for the ammo. Keep the ammo on the boat and you shouldn’t have done that. And you can stay here at the police stock because there’s no other place for you. So we spent like six or seven months at the police dock.
Talha [00:38:09] What it is.
Roger [00:38:12] And that and there are more monkeys. Monkey started there and on and so, so many more stories to tell.
Talha [00:38:22] Like how far down the Liveaboard bench are we now this is we’re still in the in the first single digits anyway.
Roger [00:38:28] Yeah. Probably three years. I’ve got a website made up I can’t remember.
Talha [00:38:33] Yeah, yeah. We read the end. Anyway, it would mention announced people know where to start looking.
Roger [00:38:37] Okay. It’s called offline Online. Offline is the name of our new boat or the.
Talha [00:38:42] Boating.
Roger [00:38:42] Liveaboard. Now are I liveaboard and it’s all f f hyphen line online MLB.com. And it’s sort of outdated. But if you look on the left side, it’s got the voyage track and all the details of the 450 ports we went to and my dog says, Have a drink. This is by Nicole Barnacle.
Talha [00:39:08] That’s adorable. So maybe we actually before we close off part one, because we’re actually going to come back for a part two. Looks like maybe just a couple of tips for somebody who wants to do something crazy like this. Just did it happen for you? Could just happen out of the blue, right? Six months that turned into 30 years. Yeah. So but how does somebody even start fairytale like that?
Roger [00:39:28] Well, I think you have to be a bit adventuresome and have your mate on the same page when you both have to be willing to try it. And I told you about. I think the best tip I have is it’s something that’s comfortable that, you know, the positive of being comfortable is more maintenance, you know, more upkeep, that needing to have a generator to keep all of those nice things functioning. So there’s more work. But if you don’t do it, it’s like going camping and who wants to go camping for 13 years? So I think if you have the desire to be adventuresome, then make it comfortable for your wife and I think you’ll enjoy the comfort as well. So that would be game scuba cruising and comfort. He talks about awnings and sunshades and things that make life aboard pleasant. Otherwise it can really be tough.
Merrill Charette [00:40:20] Awesome. Roger Well, everyone tune in for part two, where we actually talk about how he started Nautical Ventures and building an empire in Florida.
Talha [00:40:33] Yeah. Roger, Great having you on the show, Matt. Thanks so much.
Farah [00:40:42] Check back every Tuesday for our latest episode and be sure to like, share and subscribe to ship Shaped Up.
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