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Episode #53: Rob Hamill

Captain

The Cruising Kiwis

Rob Hamill
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Guest Bio

Rob Hamill is a renowned ocean rower, adventurer, and co-founder of The Cruising Kiwis, a platform dedicated to sharing sailing adventures and life at sea. With a passion for exploration and storytelling, Rob and his family travel the world by sailboat, documenting their experiences and inspiring others to embrace adventure and sustainable living.

Show Summary

In this episode, Rob Hamill shares his transition from competitive ocean rowing to life aboard a sailboat with The Cruising Kiwis. He discusses the challenges and rewards of full-time sailing, the lessons learned from navigating the world’s oceans, and how adventure has shaped his family’s journey. Rob also reflects on the importance of resilience, adaptability, and embracing the unknown, offering insights for those considering a life of exploration.

Key Takeaways

  • ✓ From Rowing to Sailing – Transitioning from competitive endurance sports to full-time cruising.
  • ✓ Life at Sea – The realities of sailing full-time as a family.
  • ✓ Resilience and Adaptability – Lessons from navigating the unpredictable nature of ocean travel.
  • ✓ Storytelling and Inspiration – Sharing adventures to encourage sustainable and adventurous living.
  • ✓ Practical Sailing Tips – Advice for those looking to embark on a long-term sailing journey.

What You’ll Find on The Cruising Kiwis’ Platform

  • ✓ Sailing Adventures – Stories and videos from life at sea.
  • ✓ Family Travel Insights – Tips on sailing with family and embracing a nomadic lifestyle.
  • ✓ Sustainability at Sea – Practices for eco-friendly ocean living.
  • ✓ Navigation and Sailing Tips – Lessons learned from years of open-water travel.
  • ✓ Community Engagement – Connecting with other sailors and adventure seekers.

👉 Visit The Cruising Kiwis’ Official Website to explore their adventures and learn more about Rob Hamill’s journey at sea.

Learn more about The Cruising Kiwis and connect with Rob at:

https://thecruisingkiwis.com/

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Podcast Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated on recording, and has not been edited by a human. It may contain lots of mistakes, crazy words, and stuff that makes no sense. The host and the guest are not responsible for the accuracy of the transcript.

Jason Elkins (02:44.428)
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Podcast. We have something a little different for you today. Very, very exciting. We’ve got Rob Hamill. He’s with the Cruising Kiwis. We’re going to learn what all that’s about. But he is a boat captain, skipper, sailor, all kinds of things that are going on here. And super excited to learn more about Rob, what you’re doing with you and your family. It’s pretty cool. So welcome to the show, Rob.

rob hamill (03:12.274)
Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here Jason. Looking forward to having you on with you and your followers and supporters.

Jason Elkins (03:15.384)
Yeah, so let’s…

Jason Elkins (03:19.424)
Yeah, yeah, no, this is this is pretty cool. You’re doing something that I used to sit on the couch probably for a year or two watching YouTube videos about people sailing around the world. And I used to, you know, I’d say to my she’s now my ex wife and I’d look at her as, hey, let’s buy a sailboat. And you and me and Jackson, our son can go travel the world, the sailboat. And she looked at me like there’s no f and way I’m going to do that. She’s not she’s now my ex wife.

rob hamill (03:29.538)
Oh, yeah.

rob hamill (03:42.357)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (03:45.012)
And I’m traveling full-time, but I’m not on a sailboat like you are. So I’m pretty intrigued. I think what you’re doing is pretty cool. So look forward to learning more about that. Where are you right now? Where are we having? I’m in Colombia. Where are you?

rob hamill (03:47.276)
Yeah.

rob hamill (03:57.958)
Right now we’re in Rebek Marina which is on a small private island which has a resort attached to the marina, or rather the marina is attached to a resort. The island itself is a five-minute boat ride off the island of Langkawi which is part of Malaysia. So basically I’m in Malaysia and a small marina just off the coast of Langkawi Island.

Jason Elkins (04:24.116)
Very, very cool. And who’s with you?

rob hamill (04:27.766)
Well my wife is somewhere in a berth downstairs. My eldest son is in another berth downstairs and my second eldest son has just dashed to the island of Langkawi that I just mentioned on the ferry because I left my cell phone on our rental motorbike little scooter when we got the ferry back about an hour ago. I’ve sent him back in to go get my phone.

Jason Elkins (04:50.592)
Ha ha!

Jason Elkins (04:55.329)
Is everyday kind of like that, Rob, when you’re traveling with your family?

rob hamill (04:57.382)
My phones, phones in me are a disaster. I have phone anxiety. Like a lot of people around the world, I’m sure there’s a lot of you can empathize with me because I am, and I am one of the worst examples of phone anxiety, leaving the phone. Anyway, that’s an example right there. My eldest boy who’s not here with us is 21. He’s in New Zealand. Second eldest, I think that’s Finn.

Jason Elkins (05:16.65)
And how old are your sons?

rob hamill (05:26.57)
19 and youngest 16 is Ivan. And Rachel, my wife has just turned 50 something yesterday.

Jason Elkins (05:32.005)
So it’s.

Jason Elkins (05:37.76)
Wow. Okay. Very cool. And so it’s, it’s really the four of you that are doing most of this traveling. Does your eldest come join you sometimes as well?

rob hamill (05:39.136)
Yeah.

rob hamill (05:45.606)
Oh yeah, yeah. And in fact, Finn joined us about September last year. He just came back from the World Rowing Champs in Serbia, and he was transiting home back to New Zealand to then begin preparations for hopefully this year, which will hopefully be an Olympic year for him. Yeah

Jason Elkins (06:03.668)
Oh, wow. Okay. Very cool. So there’s so many things the last time you and I chatted, you know, we came up with some things that we thought would be pretty interesting. And there’s a lot of it. And let’s start with just kind of let’s go back a ways like how did you get from wherever you were to where you are now? I don’t know how far back we need to go. But how far back do you think we should go to make all that relevant? Is this a childhood thing? How did where did this all start?

rob hamill (06:22.336)
No.

rob hamill (06:26.478)
Hmm. So, oh yeah, no, yeah, I guess you could argue I did a little bit of sailing when I was a tent and my dad put me in a little, if you know what an optimist yacht is, a little seven foot dinghy that kids start, you know, their very first experience often as an optimist in Europe and America. For New Zealand it’s a P-class yacht, similar size. My dad threw me in one of those and we…

I started learning how to sail there. Did that for two or three years and then I quit, moved on, discovered other things, partying. Sailing didn’t seem that exciting. I didn’t want to say that. Well, actually other sport, actually other sport as well, took my eye as well. But yes, all that stuff and a little bit of…

Jason Elkins (07:06.066)
Girls.

rob hamill (07:19.15)
alcohol as well took over but there’s a lot of a lot of reasons for that actually I had some stuff going on that was not so great and it was a bit of an escape that’s holding up the story but the uh we could go into that

Jason Elkins (07:29.132)
Yeah. Well, I’m curious, was your dad got you into sailing? Was your dad a sailor then I take it?

rob hamill (07:35.934)
Yes, he had a keen interest in sailing. Yeah, he did a lot of sailing and his family. Well, he was brought up with sailing boats. His father did a lot of sailing and really old, like really old boats, like those funny looking boats with the sails that had square sails and all sorts of stuff. And my dad actually, when he was 19, set to sea. He took set to sea as a

Jason Elkins (07:38.816)
Okay, what does a keen interest mean to you? I’m curious.

rob hamill (08:05.774)
which is a New Zealand registered boat. I don’t know who with, maybe, I’m not sure. So he was like a green horn and he went sailing across the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand and literally learning the ropes there as a 19-year-old kid. And he told tall stories of nearly dying and hanging off ropes in big storms and having to tie up sails and nearly losing his life several times doing that sort of thing. And then he went on to…

Jason Elkins (08:30.976)
And he thought, and he thought it was a good idea to teach you to sail. After all that.

rob hamill (08:34.69)
Yeah, that’s right. But he got through it okay, he figured well maybe my kids will too. So he did implant the sailing thing into his children. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (08:43.404)
Okay, so now I gotta know, now I gotta ask about mom. How did mom feel about all this? Because I’m sure those stories that you just kind of relayed, I’m sure she heard those stories as well. And was she supportive of his sailing? Was she supportive of you getting into it?

rob hamill (08:59.462)
Yeah, look it was a hobby of sport, any sport that for kids is a good thing, you know, whatever it is, whether it’s sailing, whether it’s rugby, soccer, volleyball, anything you know, it does in fact any activity whether it’s art and music or singing and dancing as long as you’re doing something you know, and it’s, and certainly my mother and father were very supportive of whatever you know.

And they were trying to expose us things, hence status. Expose me to the yacht, getting into a small yacht at a young age. Now, I didn’t carry on with it, but it then led into other things. And I certainly became very active in other sports. And I think, no, she was an arm chair sailor. Yeah, no. No, mum wasn’t active in many ways in that sense at all. She was the home giver, the home curer. She looked after the stuff going on in the background.

Jason Elkins (09:35.096)
Right, was your mom into sailing as well?

rob hamill (09:51.258)
And she was fantastic, you know, really. She loved hosting people and, you know, my friends and my siblings, friends all said that whenever we’d turn up at the Handlers’ Place, there was a guaranteed feast on the table, you know, they’d always be fed well and looked after and, you know, it’s a beautiful, wonderful home that they, that Mum and Dad created for all our guests.

Jason Elkins (10:13.328)
Sometimes it’s nice when you have that kind of grounded person in the relationship. Sometimes, you know, that can provide that kind of that home base and that sense of, you know, safety or whatever, which then allows us to go out and have some adventures as well. And as somebody who’s been traveling full time for the last couple of years, and you’ve been traveling, you know, full time, obviously as well. It’s, yeah, I can see that benefit.

rob hamill (10:20.098)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

rob hamill (10:33.676)
It’s.

rob hamill (10:37.804)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (10:40.664)
So you took some time away from sailing. You got involved in some other stuff. Life happened and how did you get back into it?

rob hamill (10:42.027)
Thank you.

rob hamill (10:49.562)
Yep. Yes, I think the seed was sown, I guess, from that age, but it was mainly sown through my brother, yeah, my father, obviously, but my eldest brother, he set sail. He’s been away, he’s been on, we call it OE in New Zealand, you have your overseas experience, and most elder teenagers and people, kids into their 20s maybe, will go overseas for a year or two or three or five, having their overseas experience. Kelly took off and his was in the form of sailing.

He bought a yacht up in Darwin. Just after Cyclone Tracy in 1974 wiped out Darwin, Kerry went up there and started a concreting firm to make some quick money and then get enough money to get them to buy a yacht, which he did so. And with a friend, a Canadian friend, and his girlfriend, he set off from Darwin for the adventure of a lifetime on a 28-foot Malaysian boat built

rob hamill (11:46.646)
BEDAR was the type of yacht that he purchased. And they set off, and this is back in 1977, where up into sailing into Southeast Asia, which would have been so raw and untouched and beautiful. And it still is. That’s a little more built up now. But they went into this country, the countries, yeah, for an adventure of a lifetime. And we followed. And the reason I say that is because, oh,

We as a family followed Kerry’s journey through his letter writing that he sent back to us in New Zealand, which my dad would read out aloud and we’d all sit around, you know, and live vicariously by his adventures. And boy, that really, that really sowed a seed for me. Not super consciously, but certainly subconsciously. And actually, in my conscious, I thought, oh, yeah, I’d love to do that or something like that one day. But it didn’t sit at the forefront of my thinking.

Jason Elkins (12:20.895)
Mm-mm.

rob hamill (12:43.914)
other stuff in my life took over and I went on to other passions and activities. But it sat there.

Jason Elkins (12:49.02)
Sure. And something you mentioned there about just the letter writing and you sitting down and listening to your dad read the letters and just thinking how different that is compared to how you’re sharing your stories now. I mean, we’re sitting here having a podcast talking about your story and you’ve got a, I think, YouTube channel and Instagram and that has definitely changed. And we’ll talk more about that later because there’s a lot more to your story about your brother. So let’s stick into that.

rob hamill (12:56.642)
Hmm. Yeah.

rob hamill (13:03.722)
Isn’t it? Yeah. It’s such a good point.

rob hamill (13:17.687)
Hmm.

rob hamill (13:20.962)
Sure, yes. Well, what happened was he was sailing for nearly a year up through Indonesia, and we were getting these amazing stories of what was happening there. And he went up into Malaysia and then Thailand, Phuket, Penang, he walked various places that we have just been sailing through ourselves. And then went down to Singapore and up the East Coast of Malaysia to Kuala Trangganu. And that was the last…

last letter that we received from Kerry was written from that city port. And he was planning with his friend, his girlfriend got off the boat just prior to that to go and visit her parents. And his friend, a Canadian, Stuart Glass, and along with a paying charter, an Englishman, John Dewhurst, set sail for Bangkok. And this is in 1978 now, a year or so later.

They got blown off course into Cambodian waters and ended up taking shelter behind an island called Koh Tang Island, about 50 kilometers offshore. Little did they know on the other side of that island was a Khmer Rouge naval gun base. This is the era of Pol Pot, the Pol Pot regime of the Khmer Rouge. And that night, they were attacked by a gunboat out of the blue, shot fires, shot the shots.

out of the blue, were rained upon their little 28 foot wooden vessel. And Stuart was shot and killed at that time. And my brother and the charter, John Dewhurst, were taken prisoner back to Torsling Prison in Penampen, where they were kept for two months. They were tortured and forced to sign confessions to being CIA.

and then when it were executed. And yeah, well, and at that time, you know, we had no idea what had happened at all. You know, the letters just stopped and we had, as time went by, you know, my parents became more and more concerned and in the end very desperate to find out any news they could from.

Jason Elkins (15:19.728)
Wow.

rob hamill (15:43.302)
Anywhere, ports in Southeast Asia, and they wrote letters all over to friends who may have heard from him, and there was just nothing. And then, you know, the worst, we thought, maybe pirates or shipwreck. But never did we ever think for a moment what did happen, happened until about 16 months after that last letter was received. We heard through the media what had happened to my brother.

Hmm.

Jason Elkins (16:13.592)
So it took 16 months for this to get out and the media to pick it up. And so he’d been gone already for over a year. I mean, as far as what had happened, it happened, you know, wow. Yeah, that’s gotta be tough. Yeah, that’s some.

rob hamill (16:15.819)
Yeah.

Yep.

rob hamill (16:24.29)
Yep.

rob hamill (16:28.862)
His history, yeah. Yeah, so it was a pretty bad time. I mean, and obviously, Kere was taken and unspeakable and unimaginable, what he experienced and what John Dewhurst experienced is just, you just cannot comprehend, the isolation, the loneliness and the terror. And then to, yeah.

So my parents, when they heard the worst possible news, they had to, you know, deal with that. And then, you know, they had three other children to deal with. Sorry, four other children to look after. On one of five kids, three brothers and a sister and.

Jason Elkins (17:13.31)
How much older was Kerry than you are or than you were?

rob hamill (17:15.434)
He was 12, about 12 and a half years older than me. I’m the youngest in the family. Yep, yep. And he was 27 at the time. And I was 14 when he went missing and I just turned 16 when we heard the news. Not long after.

Jason Elkins (17:19.072)
Okay. All right. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

Jason Elkins (17:35.632)
So how did that, I’m just going to ask. I’m curious, because I can imagine that can impact your life. And someone says, well, how did that impact your life? What’s, what’s your answer? What are you willing to share with us? Because I’m sure it could be a lot of things.

rob hamill (17:35.842)
Yeah.

rob hamill (17:42.315)
Hmm.

rob hamill (17:50.143)
Look, it shaped our lives as a family in many different ways. I mean, for me, alcohol took over a little bit for me, I was 16, 17, 18, pretty vulnerable years to that sort of behavior and I certainly took advantage of that and I had some close friends who were very much in that same line of activity. But fortunately we all…

Jason Elkins (18:03.897)
Hmm?

rob hamill (18:14.23)
loved sport. And, you know, when I wasn’t wagging from school or, well, if I was wagging, it was often if the surf was up, I was into surfing. But mainly I was into volleyball. And if I wasn’t doing that, then I was drinking at night with my mates. But volleyball was a big deal for that period of my life, at my school life. And then later on, when I left school, I took up rowing. I played rugby for a while, got beaten up every Saturday.

Jason Elkins (18:32.508)
Mm-hmm.

rob hamill (18:44.29)
playing rugby, most Kiwi boys have a go at rugby at some point, and I played rugby for a few years. And it was a great sport, mate. It’s such a good sport. But you’d end up bloody hobbling around all week at work and then just getting just enough time for the next game Saturday, you know. And I took up rowing and discovered I could thrash myself, absolutely go hammer and tong. And you could do it again next week or next day, racing hard as you possibly could. And with that…

Jason Elkins (19:09.712)
Mm-hmm.

rob hamill (19:12.458)
risking major injury or someone kicking you in a rock. So that was pretty cool.

Jason Elkins (19:16.708)
Yeah, I’m thinking a combination of rugby and drinking with your mates pretty hard on the body. Yeah. I vaguely recall some of them. Yeah.

rob hamill (19:23.37)
Hmm. Yeah, it’s pretty tough, but you’re young and bulletproof, aren’t you, Jase? You know those times, you know, we all do. We all get through them. Yeah, vaguely. Yeah. So that was, you know, that was my kind of thing and sports saved me. And rowing became very quickly became a real passion for me and my sort of, well, I started when I was 19 going 20, but in my early 20s, I decided I really want to have a crack at it. And, you know, went on to reasonable success in the sport.

Jason Elkins (19:51.128)
Yeah. Tell us, tell us about some of that because, um, you’d, one of the things you’d mentioned last time was the Atlantic rowing race. I’m just curious about this. Cause I see on social media every once in a while, someone that’s, you know, rowing across a large body of water and it looks, it looks pretty incredible. So I think our listeners and myself definitely would like to learn a little bit more about like what goes through your mind when you get in a boat and start rowing these long distances.

rob hamill (19:52.139)
Yeah.

rob hamill (19:59.65)
Right.

rob hamill (20:05.942)
Sure.

rob hamill (20:11.437)
True.

rob hamill (20:17.098)
Yeah, well look, it all started when I was at the Olympics actually, in Atlanta Olympics in 1996, part of the New Zealand rowing team there, and I saw a flyer. So just before we went into Atlanta itself, we were training in Charlottesville. Georgia? Charlottesville? What state is Charlottesville? North Carolina, yeah! Yeah, that’s right, it’s in the Carolinas. That’s right, I think it’s North Carolina. Yeah, yeah.

Jason Elkins (20:34.964)
North Carolina, it’s in the Carolinas. It’s in the Carolinas.

rob hamill (20:41.774)
and I saw a flyer on the notice board of the rowing club we were training out of preparing to go down to Atlanta and it said Atlantic Rowing Race and this was a concept and it was the first ever rowing race across the ocean for rowing boats and it was to be crewed by two people and uh and I thought mate

What an amazing, because I was thinking about retiring after the Olympics, I was going to move on to something else. I thought what a perfect thing to transition into, from the Olympic rowing thing into ocean rowing, what a, it might be okay at this kind of thing. I thought, I made a decision to have a crack at this thing, you know, and the sense of adventure and the challenge and a race, you know, it was just perfect. And so I made this call to have a crack at it then. Next thing I had to do is find somebody out there, a couple of egg white short of a path to join me.

course, so a couple of tools missing from the toolbox who were keen to join me in this. I went to my Olympic teammates and no one was interested and I ended up coming back from the Olympics to try and get someone to help me row because it was crews of two. And I went to the media and a couple of people came out of the woodwork and a guy called Phil Stubbs did so and he was a perfect teammate for the job. We turned up.

I was about 18 months later for the start of this first ever rowing race across an ocean. The cruise of two in these 23 foot plywood rowing boats, you know, with eight mil ply between you and the ocean. And it was so exciting. Oh my, far out. It was an amazing feeling sitting there. There were 30 boats lined up, 60 athletes lined up for this first ever rowing race across an ocean. And

Jason Elkins (22:17.436)
Wow.

Jason Elkins (22:30.14)
I’m curious what else is involved because obviously I heard you say you needed to find a partner. I get that you’re an Olympic athlete so you’ve got some credibility I’m sure that but then do you need to go find a sponsor? What all had to happen in order for you to actually start this race?

rob hamill (22:43.306)
Yeah, I skipped over that. Oh man. You could argue getting to the start was bigger, a challenge than getting, than the race itself in some ways, because it was such a big call. I quit my job. I had a little apartment at the time and I topped up the mortgage on the apartment and started looking for money, to more money. Cause I couldn’t, I just didn’t have the dough to make it happen. And I, um, uh,

Yeah, just sponsorship. Went and talked to as many people as I could in our local community and bits and bobs came in. And look, we got to the start, but just, you know, I mean, financially it wasn’t in good shape at all. But we got to the start and we trained our little hearts that would, you know, oh, sorry, I should say that all the entry, all the entrants had to buy a kit set boat off the organizers. It was a slab of plywood, 23 sheets of plywood, eight more thick ply.

was a pre-cut design, you stamp it out and you stick it together like a jigsaw puzzle. And then you add your character or your set of skills or whatever your beliefs and how you’re going to make this boat as fast as possible to get you across as safely as possible across the Atlantic. And of course, you know, everyone had this basic shell, but they had very different takes on how to set it up for rowing, for example, how to…

provision for food, how to set up water, all sorts of things. And it became a very different ballgame. And that became very evident once we got to the start line and actually started rowing, how different people’s approaches were.

Jason Elkins (24:10.438)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (24:16.7)
Because everything, everything that went with you had to start with you, right? There were no supply drops in the middle or anything like that. You, you got the boat and you stayed in it until you got to the other side, right?

rob hamill (24:21.182)
Yes, absolutely. No, that’s right. Yeah, so you had to make your own water. Yeah, it was about 22 and a half thousand miles of open ocean from Tenerife and the Canary Islands to Barbados in the West Indies. Yeah, so you had to be, I mean, there was a safety boat. There’s one safety boat following the fleet and we saw them on day two and that’s the last we saw of them.

Jason Elkins (24:37.98)
Wow. Okay.

rob hamill (24:48.898)
But the boats were scattered all over the ocean. You know, they were all over the place.

Jason Elkins (24:52.036)
Yeah, I’m imagining one, one safety boat. You’ve got, you said 60 athletes. It was 30 boats, 30 teams. Yeah. And I can see how after a couple, a couple of days, everybody’s spread out. Yeah. And where were you? You were spread out. You’re, you were near the, near the front. Weren’t you? Tell us more. How did this work out?

rob hamill (25:02.018)
Yeah. Absolutely.

rob hamill (25:10.114)
Well, it was funny because, yeah, well, yeah, we did actually pretty well. We won the race in the end. Sorry to back that to you too quickly. I should have held onto that. But we did. We won the race. And it was just incredible. But we never knew how we were going during the race because we didn’t have the communications on board the race on board with us. We chose not to take the sat phone communications with us because at that time it was very heavy piece of equipment, SSB.

Jason Elkins (25:16.523)
Yeah.

rob hamill (25:36.85)
and all the battery power to run that and extra solar panels to charge. No, we’re not going to take that. And a lot of other crews did have that on board, but the compromise of that was extra weight. And, you know, one of the critical things, you know, there’s like any project, you know, you kind of go through the lists of critical kind of categories, I suppose. And, you know, you try and get all the skills and all the factors up as high to 10. If you mark them out of 10, get them all as close to 10 as you can. You will not get any of them to 10.

Hopefully you’ve got a few sevens, eights, maybe a nine, and you don’t want to go below six or five or four, hopefully, in any of them. But what I mean is, you know, food, navigation, rowing set up, pretty important. The boat structure, the safety stuff, you know, all these categories, and you want to get them, as I said, as close to 10. An example being you could row the fastest boat in the world, but if your navigation’s off, you’re going the wrong direction.

Jason Elkins (26:13.469)
Mm-hmm.

rob hamill (26:36.49)
You know what I mean? That’s not gonna work. And so you kind of had to, you had to just somehow, you know, we knew our strengths. I mean, my strength was obviously rowing and actually setting up the boat. We set the boat up as well as we possibly could, given the parameters we had with this boat. But, you know, my weakness wasn’t particularly being sea savvy. And so my teammate, and I chose him specifically, he needed to be good at rowing. He did surf boat rowing, but he’d also been to sea. He’d spent a lot of time at sea.

Jason Elkins (26:36.707)
Hahaha!

rob hamill (27:03.838)
and he had the navigation skills and that sort of sea-savviness that goes with that. So we were kind of coming up in that closer to seven, eight, you know, a net mark, you know. The food stuff, we were, you know, we were really hard on ourselves about how much food we took with us. And as we were going, we were making…

Jason Elkins (27:04.068)
Mm-hmm.

rob hamill (27:28.546)
good progress on day five, we were going better than we thought we would have at that stage in terms of distance covered. So we dumped 20 days worth of food because there’s a lot of weight we could save. Yep. So we had 70 day packs. We had 70 day packs, which we extended, the organiser said, you’ve got to have 90 days worth of food. And we justified the scrutiny and well, 70 days can be 90 if we ration it out. And so they accepted that on that basis.

Jason Elkins (27:39.069)
Oh, OK.

Jason Elkins (27:54.94)
Hmm?

rob hamill (27:57.014)
We probably had less food already than anyone else in the fleet, I suspect. And on day five, we threw 20 days worth of food overboard thinking that’s going to help us go even faster, you know, because we were, we were, again, this is another category, you’re, you’re mixing, you’re, you know, you’re taking calculated risks and that’s, you know, I mean, that’s life, you know, sometimes you’ve got to take a bit of a risk to get the, get to the other, you know, your desired goal.

Jason Elkins (28:00.077)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (28:23.106)
Right.

rob hamill (28:24.298)
Now at that time, of course, the next day the weather changed. We didn’t know the weather system. We didn’t have any weather reporting. The weather changed. We had seas coming right on the nose and we started going backwards. After doing, you know, 50, 60 miles a day for the first three or four or five days, we started going backwards straight after throwing the food overboard. And yeah, it was just a ridiculous scene. And we’re going, oh boy, that was a little bit hasty, I feel, yeah, mate. And so, you know, we…

Jason Elkins (28:43.758)
Oh, geez, yeah.

rob hamill (28:52.302)
It came good again and off we went. And look, we actually did finish with food left over, but we were pretty careful what we did with our food from that point on. But to me, it was, you know, sorry. 41 days, 41 days. Yeah, yeah.

Jason Elkins (29:02.028)
All right, so how many, how many days then? How many days did it take? 41 days. So it’s 41 days in a little plywood boat with this guy that you’ve known for a little while, but not very long, presumably.

rob hamill (29:17.354)
Yep. Didn’t know Phil from Barisoke. And he, my hero is tough as old boots Phil. Best team mate for the job, even though we didn’t know each other. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (29:27.429)
Yeah. Okay. What did you give me? One big thing you learned about life from that experience. I know there’s more than one.

rob hamill (29:37.15)
Yeah, you know, here’s the thing at the Olympics. You know, I went to my four Olympic teammates saying, Man, have you seen this amazing concert? Can you imagine? And maybe it was the slightest bit interested. I couldn’t believe it. I thought this is just like the perfect thing. And I guess that’s the thing. And actually, when I went to the media, I thought I’d be inundated with. You know.

really willing and excited contestant teammates. And I think I had three people contact me. I was like, what the heck? And it just, what it tells you is that, you know, when you feel something that’s right. And for me at that time, I thought, fire it. This is so friggin awesome. You got to go with it. I mean, there’s something telling you there because it’s not telling anyone else. You know, it wasn’t telling any of my mates.

So there’s kind of a reason for that, I think, and it wasn’t certainly that for me at that time. And I think there are always at some point in your life, there are things that tweak your big time and nobody thinks it’s like no one. In fact, they’ll think you’re nuts. That’s probably a sign that you should look into it further. I reckon. Yeah. I mean, the first, yeah, that’s true. I mean, I think you’ll look back and think of things that you perhaps wanted to do at some point you thought was absolutely a hundred percenter.

Jason Elkins (30:50.856)
I love it. Great advice.

rob hamill (30:59.702)
and you get all these nice eyes and it can easily sway you off your track.

Jason Elkins (31:04.764)
I bet everybody, I’m just guessing that pretty much everybody that’s listening to this, I know it resonates with me, but how many times have you know, have we had this idea, this passion, this desire to do something and everyone around us told us, no, you’re crazy. No, you can’t do that. What is wrong with you? Why can’t you just be more like your brother? Why can’t you be more like your sister, your mom, your dad, whatever? And yeah, and most of the time.

rob hamill (31:22.271)
or you know,

rob hamill (31:26.543)
Yeah, yeah. What about you, queer?

Jason Elkins (31:34.84)
We just say, okay, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. That’s silly. And every, every once in a while when, if, and when we push through and, and go do it, then we have that opportunity to look back and, and now describe it the way you’re describing it, you know, and you’ve got an amazing story. So very cool.

rob hamill (31:37.758)
Yeah, it’s a bit silly. Yeah.

rob hamill (31:45.102)
Hmm.

rob hamill (31:50.13)
Yeah, absolutely. And actually just to put an extra, some extra context here to the bearing in mind, 20 years earlier, I’d lost my oldest brother to the sea, to the sea gods, if you like, to the sea. And you can imagine what I was, you know, when I was planning this adventure too, by the way. Do you think I could tell mum and dad? No way. I couldn’t tell them what I was planning. Yeah, no, I could not tell them. So.

Jason Elkins (32:00.764)
Yeah, yeah, to the sea. Yeah, yeah.

Jason Elkins (32:14.28)
Oh, good. Yeah, good point. So when did they find out you did it?

rob hamill (32:19.478)
Yeah, well, so I was believing I’d been working on it for about a month after coming back from Atlanta and I got the mortgage. I hadn’t quite quit my job at that time, but I was about to and I thought I got it. Yeah. And I was, I was going to the media to looking for a teammate and so yeah. And so I got spoke to dad on the phone and he said, look, this is what I’m planning. Yes, it’s great. I’ve got three.

Jason Elkins (32:37.316)
Yeah, I was curious how you could go to the media without worrying about your parents.

rob hamill (32:48.722)
First did a rowing race across an ocean and it’s a little rowing boat and it’s gonna be, you know, oh, it just fits, you know, we were all right. And he was sort of, he was quite receptive to it because, you know, he knows the ocean and he didn’t seem to be, then I spoke to mum briefly. I can’t remember what we said, but she didn’t seem too negative on it, you know? She was sort of neutral. And we ran off and I thought, oh, that went all right. And then half an hour later, the phone rang, I said, hello, Rob speaking, and that’s mum.

Jason Elkins (33:08.548)
Yeah.

rob hamill (33:18.426)
And I thought, here we go, Flamin’ Act, and she’s gonna let Rob. You know what she said? She said to me, she says, Rob, you go for it. She said, this could be the making of you. Clearly, clearly the Olympics hadn’t impressed her at all at that point. But it was kind of, yeah, it was a pivotal moment because it just said so much obviously about mum and what she had been through.

Jason Elkins (33:32.476)
Oh.

rob hamill (33:47.65)
and that she had the courage and love and support. And it wasn’t the most beautiful thing that a parent could do to release the reins.

Jason Elkins (33:56.588)
I think what she did, not to compare it directly to what you were doing or what you did, but you used the word courage, the courage to release the rains. Because I have a feeling for her to do that was probably just as scary for her as it might have been for you that day when the wind shifted.

rob hamill (34:10.359)
Yeah.

rob hamill (34:17.727)
Oh man.

Jason Elkins (34:21.1)
You know, the day after you threw away 20 days worth of food and you’ve got that fear and you know, she’s your mom, right? You’ve got kids, you’ve got a wife, you know how moms work, you know, you know, it’s like, um, yeah, yeah. So that’s pretty cool. And you weren’t married at that time. Did you have a girlfriend at that time that you were trying to answer to any crazy stuff going on there?

rob hamill (34:21.282)
Hmm. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. I know now. I know now, Mosa, I know now. Yep.

rob hamill (34:44.038)
Yeah, yeah, no, she was right. Yeah, she was very supportive. I will add another little detail. That’s not such a little detail, actually. And this is in context of what my parents, their mindset could have been and perhaps should have been given this news I was just giving them. One bit clock back to Kerry. And when we lost, when we heard the news about Kerry,

rob hamill (35:11.986)
Eight months after we heard that news, my second eldest brother John took his life, committed suicide. And they were very close. They were only sort of separated by 14, 15 months, I think, in age, and very close, very tight. And so my parents had this double whammy with an extended period of unknown in the worst news and then this double whammy. The second son takes his life. And you know.

They just went through absolute hell and yet, and yet, they were prepared to let me go and have my adventures. I thought that was amazing.

Jason Elkins (35:52.676)
Rob, I’m just curious, and we don’t need to discuss this. We can edit it out if we need to, but I’m gonna ask you, do you think that what happened to your two brothers, I’m gonna, I just don’t know what else to say. Do you feel like maybe you had a little bit of a death wish when you set out on this journey across the Atlantic? Was there kind of a like, I don’t give a crap what happens because…

rob hamill (36:00.242)
Mm. True. Mm.

rob hamill (36:21.911)
Boom.

Jason Elkins (36:22.264)
I’ve got these things going on, which would be completely normal to have going on in your head. I’m just curious if you think that drove you to do some of this stuff.

rob hamill (36:26.594)
Hmm.

rob hamill (36:31.926)
Well, look, here’s the thing, and I’ve learned since that in the formative years, in those teenage years, that bulletproof that we just said earlier, we are bulletproof at that age, we think we are. And when you have that acute grief in your life, there is a, there is a, it’s a, it’s a, some sort of research has proven that you definitely have a sense of trying to prove your…

I don’t know, am I getting this wrong? To try and prove that you are not immortal. Okay, look, I’m not sure. No, I haven’t got my head around this right. It takes it to really answer your question. But I do know that whole mortality thing. As a bulletproof teenager, having that grief has a big impact on that. Suddenly you realize you’re not immortal. And that may have played a role later in life.

Jason Elkins (37:21.532)
Mm-hmm.

rob hamill (37:25.202)
and some smoldering. Definitely not consciously though, Jason. I wouldn’t say that in any shape or form. I was consciously setting out just to test that mortality thing. For me, I think it was, I don’t know, who knows?

Jason Elkins (37:34.316)
I think, yeah, I mean, there’s just so many different things that, you know, cause the brain is a complex thing. And when you look at a family that went through what your family went through with losing, you know, your two brothers. I mean, we could imagine a variety of different directions. Anybody could go with that. Um, one is become an Olympic athlete and be the, you know, be the quickest one to roll a boat across the Atlantic ocean. That’s one option.

rob hamill (37:43.342)
Yeah.

rob hamill (37:50.498)
Hmm.

rob hamill (37:55.894)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (38:04.196)
which it sounds like that’s the option you took. So I’m just, yeah. Yeah, no, it’s…

rob hamill (38:06.844)
That’s not a bad option. Yeah, it’s a funny thing. I’ll be most interested in if any of your listeners, Jason, have any views on that actually, or theories. I’d be very interested to hear feedback on that.

Jason Elkins (38:18.136)
All right, cool. Well, I appreciate you sharing it with us and anybody that’s listening to this that has some insights, you’ll be able to connect with Rob to discuss that. And then we can come back and have another conversation because I’d be curious to hear about it as well. All right, so that was pretty cool. And you said you were, so how old were you when you went across the Atlantic?

rob hamill (38:31.498)
Sure, yeah.

rob hamill (38:36.174)
Thank you.

rob hamill (38:42.546)
I’ve been, uh, 34, 33-ish, 33, yeah, 33. 1997.

Jason Elkins (38:48.592)
33. Okay. Were you, were you kind of, well, and then you went to the Olympics. I don’t remember what your Atlanta was, but 88 or something like that. Nine 96. Okay. I’m curious. Did you feel like kind of one of the older guys in that sport? At their in your thirties.

rob hamill (38:56.102)
96, that was the year before. 96, Atlanta. And the Atlanta race was the following year, 97.

rob hamill (39:09.894)
Oh yeah, so I was sort of getting into that, yeah, I was getting into the age of, you know, absolutely, yeah, I mean I was, I hung in there for, you know, and I stayed in the sport after the Atlanta Grace II for another few years through to 2000. And so yeah, I was definitely in the geriatric stage then. I mean you can, I could have kept going even longer than I did in the end, but yeah.

Jason Elkins (39:13.353)
I don’t know anything about that sport. I’m just curious.

Jason Elkins (39:29.486)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (39:35.024)
I, I can, um, yeah, it’s just, I don’t know enough about the sport. I, I’ve got a friend who actually she was part of gold, wet gold medal team in Atlanta. I’m sure it was Atlanta. And I think she was like 18 there. I think that was just kind of the norm in her particular sport. Um, so yeah, it’s, it’s kind of interesting. All right. So your mid thirties, you won this grace. Did you was the

rob hamill (39:46.568)
Ah, yeah.

rob hamill (39:52.805)
Wow. Yeah.

Yes.

Jason Elkins (40:01.936)
there a financial reward involved with winning this race? Were you able to recoup all the money back into your mortgage and all those costs and expenses, or was it just a, a pride thing or what did you get out of that? Well, we discussed some of the stuff you got out of it, but I mean, I’m just curious.

rob hamill (40:06.486)
No. Yeah.

rob hamill (40:13.286)
Yeah, no, what a… Yeah. Oh, look, what happened when I got back was suddenly people wanted to hear about the adventure and I was getting calls, say, would you come along to this function and that function and he’ll pay you, you know, a thousand bucks or what. Yeah, I know the podcast I’m filming, but no, so I ended up doing speaking. I mean, I quit my job, as I mentioned earlier, and I ended up becoming a professional speaker, motivational speaker, telling…

Jason Elkins (40:27.952)
podcasts and

rob hamill (40:41.014)
telling my story and I ended up doing that for, and still doing it to the last 30 years. It’s crazy, only 25 years. And I’ve done that, you know, that was sort of a full-time thing for most of that time up until COVID actually. COVID lost a lot, well, it sort of slowed it right up to a standstill. Cause I couldn’t, cause I stepped forward a few years, quite a number of years to

Jason Elkins (40:49.829)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (41:03.91)
Mm-hmm.

rob hamill (41:10.814)
and then decided to go sailing. And what I would do is every six or eight weeks, I’d fly back to New Zealand for a speaking engagement. And I was also an event director of some sporting events that I put together. And well, suddenly I couldn’t fly home. And so that just shut down completely and lost most of our income. So we’d set off to circumnavigate the world on our sailboat with our family based on my…

continued ability to earn a living speaking and doing event directing work. And it came to a grinding halt. So anyway, we went on to this whole YouTube thing. And that’s what we’re doing now is trying to make that work. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (41:53.976)
Okay, so it’s shifted from going back to New Zealand or, you know, in-person events to have these conversations to kind of the social media influencers, right? It’s kind of what you’re, what you’re now.

rob hamill (42:08.714)
Yeah, sort of. Yeah, and look, that’s right. I mean, we’re just, I don’t know, influences the word, but certainly having adventures and showing what’s possible out there in the big old world and learning, sharing and learning things along the way. And I’m doing, I do Zoom talks every now and then now, but nothing like I used to do when I was there in present, you know, in the flesh and blood.

Jason Elkins (42:19.356)
Sharing, yeah.

Yeah.

Jason Elkins (42:32.824)
Yeah, no, I get it. And I don’t, I don’t like the word influencer. Um, myself, I threw it out there, but I, I love how you came back and said, no, that’s kind of like, I’m just, we’re just sharing, we’re having adventures, inspiring people sharing. Um, there’s other people out there call themselves influencers that are not necessarily inspiring people to do amazing things. And, um, I mean, as somebody who. Go ahead.

rob hamill (42:38.958)
Hmm.

rob hamill (42:43.426)
Yeah.

rob hamill (42:50.185)
Yeah.

rob hamill (42:53.93)
I tell you what, I will say actually, it’s an amazing, it’s a really cool thing that the number of people are not influenced by us, but they share the journey and they live vicariously by us. In the adventures we have, they literally, I mean, seriously, people really join in through

the medium of YouTube. It’s incredible how, yeah, we had a lot of contact with people to this, to that end that, you know, they can no longer sail, or they’d always wanted to sail, but they never will now. But just joining our journey in the things we do and see and the people we meet and the mayhem and the mishaps and the bulls ups and the, yeah, and all that stuff and the challenges and they just, they love it. They seem to really love it. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

Jason Elkins (43:49.516)
And it’s so cool though with the technology that we have, just the fact that you and I are able to, you know, I was in Malaysia last summer, you’re there now, I’m in Columbia and we’re having this conversation, we’re looking at each other on a video screen and you can do your YouTube episodes and people can follow your journey. And basically kind of like when you rode across the Atlantic, you had sponsors, right? You went out and got sponsors.

rob hamill (43:58.626)
Oh really? Ah. Yeah.

rob hamill (44:13.591)
Mmm. Yep.

Jason Elkins (44:15.456)
And those sponsors sponsored you not because they thought they were going to make a lot of money out of the deal. It’s because they were just, they just thought it was cool. They’re like, yeah, I think it’s cool. I, this guy, I, I enjoy what he’s doing. I’ll give him some money, help make it work. He can slap a sticker on the side of the plywood boat or whatever, but they weren’t really sponsoring you because of thinking, oh, we’re going to get a great financial return. And I’ve seen with a lot of stuff.

rob hamill (44:20.63)
That’s true. Hmm. Very true. Thank you.

rob hamill (44:32.408)
Yes.

rob hamill (44:40.438)
Hmm.

Jason Elkins (44:42.848)
social media and YouTube, it’s kind of same thing. I see people that are going to do an amazing stuff. It’s like, okay, yeah, I’m happy to support that in one way or the other, help get the word out, share it. I’m sure on your YouTube videos, it’s like, hey, like, subscribe, share, whatever. And so there’s ways that people can kind of pitch in and then they’re part of it, which is very cool. And just the fact that we have the technology to do that is very cool.

rob hamill (44:47.65)
Hmm.

rob hamill (44:52.024)
Mmm.

rob hamill (44:58.166)
Hmm, yeah, I heard you.

rob hamill (45:03.71)
Mm.

rob hamill (45:10.019)
That’s right. Yeah. And that other, that other, well, what’s levered from that for us is the Patreon, you know, for the arts, the crowdfunding, crowdfunding for the arts. I mean, whether you’re a musician, an artist or a video producer, you know, people can chip in on that platform. It’s amazing. And it’s, no, I mean, we’re not sustaining what we’re doing yet by any means, but jingoes, it’s helping us a big deal. And, and, you know, I hope, I do believe we, you know, if we keep pushing on, we’ll be able to.

Jason Elkins (45:15.448)
Hmm?

rob hamill (45:36.511)
not into our savings any further. That’s the plan. That’s the plan.

Jason Elkins (45:40.921)
Hopefully so I get that completely. So let’s I really, really want to touch on how on earth did you get your teenage boys to do this? Was that an easy thing? Because I could see that going a few different directions. I’ve got a 17 year old and I can’t even imagine you know, so tell us.

rob hamill (45:49.646)
Hmm.

rob hamill (45:55.048)
Oh, you didn’t know it.

rob hamill (46:01.214)
Yeah, timing is important and timing is everything often, isn’t it? And we left at a time when our eldest was 11 going 12, our youngest was 8. And look, I wish we’d left a couple of years earlier, still again. But that was the key. We still had this captive audience. You know, we’re saying we’re doing this, we’re doing this, you know. And if we waited two or three years later, might’ve been a bit more challenging, you know.

Jason Elkins (46:22.347)
Mm-hmm.

rob hamill (46:30.102)
But no, we did it at a really good time. The kids were just, they just lapped it up. You know, this big adventure. We first bought this boat back in 2014. We sailed out of Whangarei heads, didn’t know what we were doing. I remember going out through the heads and there’s a standing waves from current versus wind. And the boys out on the bow and we’re going up and down. The front of the boat was diving into these waves. The kids are getting taken out. It was so dangerous and so full hearty. But they loved it. Yeah, yeah.

Jason Elkins (46:56.284)
And this was your first outing? Like we just set sail. Oh my gosh.

rob hamill (47:00.606)
Yeah, well, we were just motoring into it actually. We couldn’t set sails at that time, but yeah, we just got to this part. Yeah, it was just, but there was lots of stuff. You know, the kids lapped it up. They absolutely lapped it up. And I’m so proud of them because they were so enthusiastic. And that first year, because we didn’t know anything about what we were doing, we would go out as often as we could. And then mid winter in Auckland, we took the boat down to Auckland, big wonderful harbor for sailing there, Harareke Gulf.

Jason Elkins (47:05.229)
Okay.

rob hamill (47:29.882)
and had the Miracus Cup there and everything. And we would go out midwinter, you know, as often as the weekends and there’d be no one out, you know, the only ones kind of sailing around in the Gulf and around into the islands and you’re in Anchorage would be during summer, there’d be a hundred plus boats all crammed into this Anchorage and we’d turn up, there’d be no one there midwinter because it was kind of just bleak, but we loved it. We loved it. And, you know, so it was a big, steep learning curve. And then, you know, about…

Jason Elkins (47:51.472)
Okay, right.

rob hamill (47:56.59)
12 months, 10, 12 months after we bought the boat, we set off on our first ocean passage up into the South Pacific.

Jason Elkins (48:03.288)
Wow. Now, do you still maintain a house in New Zealand, a home? Is there?

rob hamill (48:08.561)
Yes, we still have our home and we have that rented out, yeah, paying the costs.

Jason Elkins (48:12.3)
Okay, so you’ve got that rented out like long term like it’s not a you can’t just go home anytime you want and set up camp because you’ve got renters in there right.

rob hamill (48:15.724)
Yep.

rob hamill (48:19.77)
Uh, yeah, no, we all went back there recently and just stayed, hung out with friends actually. So yeah, but no.

Jason Elkins (48:28.013)
Okay. All right. Very cool. And I’m curious the psychology behind to keep. So when I started my, my full time journey, my financial situation, I’m sure it was different than yours, but I was, I couldn’t necessarily afford to maintain a home back in the U S and do my journey. So some of the decisions were financial, but other parts of the decision were just like, if I don’t have a home to go back to, I’m more likely to just keep going.

It’s kind of like the phrase burn the boats that I’m sure maybe as a sailor, you’ve heard, I guess the story is that was it when Cortez was out conquering, you know, parts of South America or whatever they landed on an island. And he turned to his men and said, okay, men burn the boats. And they were like, why? And it was like, well, if we burn the boats, there’s no other option. We’re going to conquer this island. We’re going to take this island because the alternative

rob hamill (48:58.134)
Sure. Yeah, right.

rob hamill (49:09.579)
Okay.

rob hamill (49:14.049)
Seriously?

rob hamill (49:21.59)
Yeah. Well.

Jason Elkins (49:23.22)
There’s you know, we can’t just jump back on the boats and sail away. So I’ve heard that term or that story used. I have no idea if there’s any truth to it. I kind of doubt it. But but when I left Arizona to start my journeys, you know, and I sold all my stuff and gave up my place. And there was definitely this like burn the boats moment. Like I don’t have anywhere else to go back to other than my mom’s house. And as a middle aged guy, I don’t want to rely on living with my mom as my plan B.

rob hamill (49:31.562)
Yeah.

rob hamill (49:44.077)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (49:53.068)
So it’s like, okay, I’m going to go make this digital nomad thing work one way or the other. So I was just curious, um, if you kept your place, was it, well, this way we have a place to come back to if we want to, or was it just, Hey, no, we’ve got money invested in. It’s a good financial investment. So we’re going to keep it and run it out. So what thought process did you guys go through when it came to that?

rob hamill (49:57.474)
Good on you.

rob hamill (50:05.082)
Hmm.

rob hamill (50:10.891)
Yep.

rob hamill (50:15.078)
It was purely that we were able to, we didn’t have to sell it to do this. I mean, that was the long and short of it. We had enough in the bank to sustain the outgoings and the income from the thing was going to cover the mortgages and the outgoing costs there. So we just literally didn’t have to sell it. I think if it came to shove, we would have done that too. But so we’re very lucky in that sense that we have got a plan B to go to.

kind of fall over for whatever reason. But that’s.

Jason Elkins (50:47.908)
But anybody that’s listening to this that’s been thinking about sponsoring their journey, just forget that he said that he has no plan B. Keep keep them going. You don’t want to we don’t want it to be the not the cruising Kiwis, the homeless Kiwis. So anyway, it’s pretty cool.

rob hamill (50:59.017)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, we don’t, we’re certainly not planning to go back anytime soon.

Jason Elkins (51:09.66)
cool. And I know you’ve got you’ve shared some stories already with us, but I’m curious about like, you know, with this, when we spoke, you know, a little bit earlier, you were talking about the cell phone, like leaving the cell phone somewhere. And, and I know that when I travel, there’s always like, there’s certain things that keep coming up. It’s like, finding an ATM that’s working on that day that, you know, or a laundromat to get my clothes cleaned, or whatever, I spend so much time doing these things that are so routine.

rob hamill (51:22.708)
Yep.

rob hamill (51:30.873)
Oh yeah, yeah.

rob hamill (51:35.522)
Hmm.

Jason Elkins (51:39.256)
when you’re back home, you know, living in a place. I’m sure you have that on the boat and I’m curious, I guess maybe what’s the what’s the one or two things that come up the most that people that have not done this need to know before they think about doing it.

rob hamill (51:56.556)
Hmm. Yes. Look, we still eat like everyone else does. Yes, in theory, there could be more fish involved in the diet, but we still have to get the daily, you know, whatever daily rations is, whether it’s your rice and bread or whatever, but you know, meat and veg and all that stuff, and fruit in particular. We eat a lot of fruit.

But we can’t go any of that stuff here. So we have to rely on supermarkets like anyone else does. Just that when we do go shopping, we do big shops and we shop for a week or a month sometimes at sea. And so that’s the similarity, but the difference is that it can be big shopping things and you do run out of stuff at sea sometimes. What else? I mean, I’m not sure.

Jason Elkins (52:45.692)
That’s a good point because that is a good point because sometimes I’ve drawn this parallel between kind of the RVing lifestyle and the sailing lifestyle. But that’s one big difference with an RV. It’s not that hard to just physically, you know, if you’re in a park, it’s probably not that hard to just walk over to a market or whatever. And when you’re in a boat, that’s a little bit more challenging. OK, what else?

rob hamill (52:55.006)
Right. Yeah.

rob hamill (53:04.066)
pull into, yeah, yeah. But the beautiful thing is with that though, is the different supermarkets I suppose we get to see and this is different cultures that we visit and the amazing markets that we go to and the people we meet and the food we get to try and consume and I’m like so amazing. I mean, it’s just.

We love our food, everyone loves their food, you know, and different ways of cooking, preparing and eating it and different ingredients. And it’s been incredible.

Jason Elkins (53:42.604)
Well, and you’re a part, you’re in a part of the world right now. That’s like the most amazing. I spent some time on Penang, which is just south of where you are. And, oh my gosh, the food was, I was there with my 17 year old son and I thought the food just blew my mind and he just wanted to go to McDonald’s and burger. It’s like, yeah, can we go to, I think it was just McDonald’s. I’m like, we’re on Penang. We’re not going to McDonald’s. And now he’s like, yeah. So we, there were a couple of times he just went out.

rob hamill (53:49.706)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

rob hamill (53:55.354)
Oh great. Yeah. Oh. Heh. That’s so typical. My.

Jason Elkins (54:10.86)
went without dinner because I was like, I’m not going to take you to the McDonald’s on Penang. You’re welcome to come down and have some of this curry, curry stuff or whatever, some noodles or whatever. But yeah, it was, it was an interesting experience. So.

rob hamill (54:14.302)
Yeah, good on you. Yeah.

rob hamill (54:22.826)
Well there’s a curry called the Penang curry, isn’t there? It’s named after that island because it’s such a specialty, yeah. Beautiful.

Jason Elkins (54:26.092)
Yeah. It’s like this. Oh, yeah, it was it was an interesting thing. I love my son. He is he is adventurous. But sometimes I think it was just for him. You know, we’d been together for two months, travel around and. He’s a little bit more of a homebody than I am. So I think he just misses some of those things from back home. So.

rob hamill (54:43.031)
Yeah.

rob hamill (54:48.886)
You’re exposing him to different things and he’ll come around later. He’ll come around.

Jason Elkins (54:53.096)
Yeah, well, he will. It was actually really cool. I don’t know if you’re familiar. I’ve mentioned this on a few episodes of the podcast, but there’s this Game called GeoGuessr that you can go online and go to geoguessr.com or whatever it is and What they do is they drop you kind of randomly onto a Google Street View. So you know how there’s Google Street Views of all the different streets, pretty much in the world, I guess. And they randomly drop you someplace and

rob hamill (55:16.874)
Yep.

Jason Elkins (55:22.712)
You don’t know where you’re at. And the idea is that you got to look around. You can navigate using little street view navigations. You look around for clues to figure out where you’re at. And then you can drop a pin on a map for where you think you are. And the closer you are to that spot, the more points you get. And sometimes you spend 15 minutes and you’re like, I’m pretty sure I’m in Southeast Asia somewhere. And you just kind of take a guess. You drop the pin and then it comes up and you’re in.

rob hamill (55:25.096)
Oh.

rob hamill (55:32.032)
We are.

rob hamill (55:36.587)
Yeah.

rob hamill (55:40.825)
Interesting.

rob hamill (55:47.659)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (55:51.492)
You know, the Caribbean or something. But it might it might be. I mean, you guys are out seeing it. I don’t really play it that much, but my son really, really likes it. And I remember a few months ago, he’d sent me a message because we communicate a lot by WhatsApp, you know, on a day almost basically a daily basis because I’m in Colombia and he’s in Arizona right now. And anyway, he was playing GeoGasser and they dropped him right in front of Pedaling Street, Mark Pedaling Street in Kuala Lumpur.

rob hamill (55:55.21)
No! What a great…

rob hamill (56:02.893)
Yeah.

rob hamill (56:09.814)
Yeah.

rob hamill (56:14.155)
Cool.

rob hamill (56:22.078)
right i know that no way yeah

Jason Elkins (56:22.224)
And he’s like, Dad, we stood right there. Like he didn’t have to navigate around. He just like the minute they drop him in, you see the screen. And he knew exactly where he was. It said Pedaling Street and he and we had stood right in that spot. And he was so excited. He just thought that out of all the places in the world, they would drop him. And it was it was a moment of like, that’s pretty cool because he’s seeing these places, he’s recognizing them. He’s he’s getting excited about it. And it’s not just the game. I like to think that he was.

rob hamill (56:33.386)
Roooyy!

rob hamill (56:40.708)
Isn’t that brilliant?

rob hamill (56:45.375)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (56:52.116)
also excited about being on Pedaling Street when we were there. So anyway, I’m so.

rob hamill (56:56.854)
That is wicked, that’s way cool. That’s amazing actually, you think about the size of that little rock and you’re getting into that one spot. Cruel.

Jason Elkins (56:59.739)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (57:04.312)
Yeah, yeah, it’s pretty cool. So anyway, thanks for letting me share that. I’m more interested in your stories because I think when you’re traveling and seeing these things, your kids are constantly seeing these new things. That’s pretty exciting. Are they still as excited?

rob hamill (57:17.478)
Yeah, in fact, our youngest is hassling us to move on and head on because we’re thinking about, we’re talking about right now heading west into the Indian Ocean. All that because we haven’t spent nearly enough time in Southeast Asia, so much we have not seen. We’ve been here since October 22. We arrived in Indonesia, sailed through Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia.

rob hamill (57:45.678)
following the letters he wrote and where he said he was traveling. He had traveled to… Anyway, and then we got up here, do we stay in front of the air and see what we haven’t seen? We’ll try to, or head west. And I was like, come on, you want to see if I can navigate, Dad? You’ve got to move on. You’ve got to move on to the next big destination, you know? You’ve got to keep moving. So, yeah, you’re right. OK, so we are looking in the next week or two.

to sail to Sri Lanka, maybe India, mold leaves, maybe Seychelles, and then to Tanzania. And then decide whether we go up through the Red Sea, past a certain war zone, or head south under South Africa, and then off to Brazil. So we’re sort of deliberate. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (58:27.782)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Oh, what horrible decisions you have to make. Those are horrible. I don’t know how you deal with that. I’m curious because of your story, you know, with Gary, I’m did you go to Cambodia?

rob hamill (58:49.426)
Yeah, so part of our, pretty early on when we set off from New Zealand, actually right at the start, we thought if we get into that area, wouldn’t it be great to follow Kerry’s journey up through Indonesia. And as it turned out, we arrived in Australia, we were planning to stay in Australia November 19 for six months. We got hit by lightning the next month, December 19, 2019. And then while we were hauling out,

this whole COVID carry on arrived in 2020. And we ended up staying, well, after we repaired the boat from lightning strike, we relaunched and ended up circumnavigating around Australia for the next three years. We stayed in Australia when we had planned to get up into Asia much sooner, but that was amazing. Circumnavigating that huge continent. What a great time we had there. It’s extraordinary. And then we ended up in Darwin, which is where Kerry set off from.

Jason Elkins (59:32.801)
Okay.

Jason Elkins (59:39.9)
That’s, yeah.

rob hamill (59:46.59)
And we hadn’t intentionally sort of planned to go to Darwin, we just kind of ended up in Darwin and thought, right, this is where we launched the real journey following his journey. We went up through Indonesia, some of the islands he went to and some of the anchorages, we stopped in the exact same spots, sometimes accidentally, I don’t know if it was on purpose. And then we went up into Malaysia and we were hoping to sail to answer your question.

We were hoping to sail to Cambodia itself, but our oldest boy, Finn, now, as I said, is trying for the New Zealand rowing team and he only had a two-week window at Christmas last year where he could come and join us. He really wanted to come with us to Cambodia. So we couldn’t work to sail, so we left the boat in Malaysia and we all met up in Phnom Penh. And we went through the prison that Kerry was incarcerated at, it’s a museum now.

Jason Elkins (01:00:32.058)
Hmm?

rob hamill (01:00:46.758)
It’s likened to the Ashwats of Cambodia, what occurred there, and Kerry’s photos there. I made a film actually about the whole, telling the whole story back in, oh aye, we, an amazing group of people, I produced this Creewell People directors, and telling Kerry’s story via my journey of discovery.

of what happened, the detail of what happened to Kerry and to the other victims of Cambodia. And I ended up testifying in the war crimes tribunal against the first person to be brought to trial, representing two to three million lives lost in the Khmeris years. And it was the person who ran the prison that my brother was incarcerated in, where he oversaw his treatment and torturing and murder.

and subsequent execution. And that was a pretty challenging time, you know, to sit in the courtroom facing this guy and telling him what I thought of him. And we made a film, Brother Number One, came from that period. But it was myself and my wife was there too to support me as we went there. But to take our children there was a different story. And now young adults too, you know, it was…

It was something else and it was very… Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:02:15.348)
only imagine. I mean that’s um so there was a picture of Carrie in the prison that’s now a museum and oh that’s

rob hamill (01:02:23.73)
Yeah. Yeah, there are, yeah. So there are only, there are sort of a handful of Westerners that were caught up in that awful time. And yes, and most of them, I think, are photos there somewhere in the museum as well.

Jason Elkins (01:02:37.932)
Okay, so where can our listeners find you said the name of the movie that you put together is brother number one

rob hamill (01:02:42.686)
It’s rather number one. I believe you can get it on Amazon Prime, but also the director has it streamed on her platform, which is op.co.nz. She’s the director. She’s produced a lot of human rights films from New Zealand and she’s amazing.

Jason Elkins (01:03:01.34)
Do you have a link through that to that through your website? Cause we’ve got your website. It will be listed in the show notes. Okay. So if someone goes that direction, I mean, it’s just, it sounds like that’d be interesting to interesting to watch. So, all right. Cool. Um, you, you hinted. Yeah.

rob hamill (01:03:07.381)
Yeah, sure, yeah. You’ll be able to get to it from there, yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure.

rob hamill (01:03:21.234)
And actually, I will just say quickly that period, obviously, could we do YouTube. And obviously, we filmed us, our journey to Cambodia and what occurred there. And it’s very moving. It’s very, it was an amazing time there. There were people we met, the persecutors and the persecuted.

And I think if anyone’s interested in that side of, you know, that bit of history, the film obviously is something worth looking at. But if you want something quick and easy to access, we have the episodes there, two episodes of Unspent in Cambodia on our channel.

Jason Elkins (01:03:57.176)
Right on your on your YouTube channel. Yeah, OK, very cool. You I know we’ve been chatting for quite a while. I I’m sure I missed some things I should have asked or forgot to ask. And there was one thing you’d hand to that just caught my attention because I’m into fishing and you’d mentioned something about fishing. Mayhem, disasters. I’m sure you’ve got I think you’ve got a story or something about something that happened.

rob hamill (01:04:22.468)
Oh.

Jason Elkins (01:04:25.74)
when you were fishing so.

rob hamill (01:04:26.218)
Well, I do recall in your… Yeah, I think you have interesting… You’re into fishing. There’s some I saw in your podcast. Yes, you had some fly fishermen on there and bits and pieces. Oh, well, God, I’m not much of a fisherman, but I have caught a few decent sort of fish, but I’ve been caught by fish themselves and more than lures on more than one occasion. And it’s happened to me twice. Well…

Jason Elkins (01:04:34.66)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:04:47.736)
What do you what do you mean by that? Help help me understand what when you say you got caught by the fish.

rob hamill (01:04:53.034)
Well, what happened was we had this Dorado, or we call them Mahi in New Zealand, and they’re, you know, the big, some people call them dolphin fish as well. But yeah, but we had this big, beautiful female actually on the line and we brought her in. I don’t know if you’ve ever baited one of these things, but when they get on board, they just go apeshit. They just go nuts. And, and this thing, we got on board the swapping wreck fish and it just started going crazy.

Jason Elkins (01:05:01.06)
Dolphin fish, yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:05:15.514)
Mm-hmm.

rob hamill (01:05:22.81)
And I was trying to control it and then I was controlling it. It let rip and the lure, one of those three barbed lures, went through my toes and three barbs went through three different toes and it came out through the other side and all sorts of, and then I was stuck to the fish and I saw I was barbed and then this fish was hanging onto me and I was flying around the boat and oh my goodness, it was horrible. It was a disaster. Then I ended up having to cut this lure off and yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:05:29.261)
UGH

Jason Elkins (01:05:49.837)
I’m.

rob hamill (01:05:53.002)
And that’s the second time that’s happened.

Jason Elkins (01:05:53.332)
Oh, I’m kind of wishing I would not have asked you about that. I wasn’t prepared for that. Yeah, OK. Jeez.

rob hamill (01:05:57.382)
Yeah.

rob hamill (01:06:02.058)
Yeah, and the stupid thing was that is the second time I’ve been lured by a mahi mahi. But the thing is, when you’re sailing too, you have lots of things that can go wrong. And you know, from sail disasters to ropes getting caught up on the rudders, and we’ve had to cut off ropes in the middle of Great Whites. You know, the west coast of Australia during the whaling, the humpback whales come up to carve and the Great White sharks follow them up.

because the calves are very vulnerable. We were right in the middle of the season, and we were sailing north up the coast, and it was about two o’clock in the morning, got caught on a crab pot and brought us to a halt. We had to go into the ocean, full moon, and we were very visible. You know, we were very, probably absolutely nothing wrong. We were probably safe as hell, but you know, to get in that dark water and knowing there’s, you know, but we were kind of becoming shark fodder and having to sit under there, cutting this rope away.

Jason Elkins (01:06:32.409)
Mm-hmm.

rob hamill (01:07:00.462)
It was kind of, but we’ve had so many difficult times like that, that just add to the whole adventure really, because we have beautiful times and all that stuff too. But those difficult, challenging moments that sort of stick in your mind, you know, it’s kind of what it’s all about in some ways.

Jason Elkins (01:07:21.196)
Well, and I suspect those, I suspect there’s other periods of time. Well, I don’t know. Are there periods of time that are kind of filled with a little bit of boredom? Does that come up?

rob hamill (01:07:32.278)
Oh, well, what we’re about to set off to is not any other passage. You know, we’re looking to do a potential well, the first page, you’d be about 1200 miles. It’s going to be 10, 12, 14 days, depending on the weather, 15 days. And it’s monotonous, but it’s lovely, too, because you’re sort of isolated from everything around you. There’s nothing you can do about anything outside the world. If things are falling, oh, well, that’s not my problem. I can’t deal with it here. You know, it’s quite lovely in that sense. But you get into a routine, a daily routine,

wicked too, but it is not monotonous. And you just think as you always, you’re always anxious that something’s going to go wrong because very things kind of do go wrong, you know, at some point. And you just hope that it’s not going to be that bad in your mid ocean that you’re going to have to, you know, it’s going to be more catastrophic or catastrophic, dare I say the word. You just.

Jason Elkins (01:08:15.588)
Yep.

Jason Elkins (01:08:26.448)
So it can be monotonous, but still kind of exciting at the same time, it sounds like. Yeah.

rob hamill (01:08:30.026)
Well, you don’t know what’s around the corner. You just don’t know what’s going to happen next. You know, there’s storms come out of nowhere or, you know, you hit a container or a whale, you know, just stuff happens, you know, and that’s the thing. And you’ve seen. Well.

Jason Elkins (01:08:41.201)
And you embrace it. You’ve developed this personality and this style of embracing that, which

rob hamill (01:08:46.878)
And you have to, because the reality is, Jason, if you’re sitting there watching TV all day, probably not a lot’s going to go wrong for you. You might have a heart attack. Or you will actually have a heart attack. But while you’re waiting for that heart attack to arrive, there’s not much that’s really going to go wrong. Someone might break into your house and rob you, perhaps. I don’t know. That’s about as bad. But if you get out and do stuff, then stuff is going to happen. Great things are going to happen, for one. And you must remember that. Because that’s…

Jason Elkins (01:08:57.513)
Probably will.

rob hamill (01:09:15.266)
That’s the big challenges, wonderful things happen. You meet incredible people, you discover huge blocks of information that you didn’t know before, and it just furthers who you are as a human being. But things happen. And the more you do it, the more you, you know, it’s almost the hunter gatherer thing where the sapertooth is around the, you know, sitting in that cave, you become a little bit more aware of your worldly environment.

And that is hugely invigorating. Can be pretty tiring and exhausting as well. But that’s life. You know you’re alive when you’re feeling those emotions. You know you’re alive when you’re having that anxiety and you’re trying to prepare for the worst and you’re hoping for the best. You know, that’s life. Sitting in your room, watching TV or video games, that’s not life.

Jason Elkins (01:10:12.372)
I love that. I suspect that a therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist may have a different perspective than I do. But my biggest fear has really always been boredom. You know, for me, it’s like that’s the my living hell. My living hell would be just sitting somewhere being bored.

rob hamill (01:10:36.428)
Hmm

Jason Elkins (01:10:36.624)
the rest of my life or just the moments in my life when I’ve felt exceptionally bored. I’ve got a very, very strong drive to change that. I have a really hard time sitting still and the more stable and consistent my life is, the more depressed I get, the more down I get. So you know, a therapist might call that ADD, ADHD, any, any number of things.

rob hamill (01:10:42.166)
Yeah.

rob hamill (01:10:46.3)
Isn’t that great?

rob hamill (01:10:57.122)
Yeah.

rob hamill (01:11:00.455)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:11:06.3)
The more people I speak to on this podcast, the more people I’ve been in travel, the tourism business for a long time, adventure travel business for a long time. Most of the people I meet, I feel like I can resonate with that. Whereas back home in a more traditional setting and more traditional job, most of the people around me just kind of think, Jason, you need to sit still. Let’s calm down, settle down. Why do you have to be go, go all the time? So

rob hamill (01:11:13.516)
Yeah.

rob hamill (01:11:17.707)
Hmm, yeah.

rob hamill (01:11:29.387)
Yeah.

rob hamill (01:11:32.802)
Good on you. Look, I actually think that, well, actually firstly, and I’m going to take this back to the youngsters’ point of view, I actually try and kind of give it up. And sometimes I don’t bother so much, but certainly I enjoy seeing it, or enjoyed certainly when they were younger, seeing the kids when they did get bored.

and it makes them be creative and do what you do and get out and do stuff, doesn’t it? Seriously, that’s what it’s about. I think boredom is a feature of allowing you to think about, I’ve got to go and do something because I’m certainly getting bored. But here we have this, it doesn’t matter. That’s exactly what it is. And the problem is, though, we’ve got these screens that are causing massive, massive behavioral problems and loss of learning opportunities through sitting

Jason Elkins (01:11:59.672)
Ha ha ha!

Jason Elkins (01:12:08.004)
That’s true. It’s a motivator.

rob hamill (01:12:23.958)
distracting us through stimulation from external sources, not self-stimulated action to go out and proactively do stuff. That’s a real concern. And every family in the universe faces that problem right now with kids. So I empathize with that.

Jason Elkins (01:12:41.124)
That’s the no, you’re absolutely right. And yeah, very cool. Hey, Rob, we man, we touched on so many things. You’ve you’ve got a YouTube channel that you’re like constantly putting out stuff and doing things. I feel like you and I could probably do a whole podcast, just the two of us, like a whole series of them and discuss your journey and all that stuff. I love it.

rob hamill (01:12:49.216)
Thanks.

Time’s up.

rob hamill (01:13:06.384)
Oh man.

Jason Elkins (01:13:07.52)
And I’m curious, is there anything really important that I that I missed? I should have asked that you want to make sure our listeners here before we wrap it up.

rob hamill (01:13:09.234)
So much.

rob hamill (01:13:14.639)
Oh, look, there’s, I don’t know, look, no, look, there’s, you know, look, we’ve covered quite a lot there. No, look, it’s been really nice talking to Jason, I think. I don’t know. I mean, if anyone, all I can say is if you want to, yeah, I don’t know. We’ve had some great adventures, misadventures. Oh, look, you know what? I will say there’s one little anecdote I will discuss, actually, and it’s a pretty powerful one because it happened to us very, you know, almost broke into it in our first couple of minutes of this discussion.

And it was, it was, and I’m saying this because what came out of it was a massive learning for us. And I think, and it’s actually already proven to be so massive learning for anyone else who’s thinking about this. A lot of families going sailing with their families around the world, wherever they are, invariably get out of the boat and go swimming. And invariably at some point, not just snorkel around coral reefs, start doing free diving, you know, going down deep and getting deeper and deeper and mucking around and playing and having lots of fun.

and adventure doing that and it’s a wonderful thing and becomes a sport for some people and at the highest level they go down you know tens of dozens actually 100 meters plus freediving no yeah and our boys got into this recently and I mentioned early on that Finn came back from the world from the world rowing champs he won the silver medal actually at the under 23 world champs and then he turned up here

Jason Elkins (01:14:33.157)
Wow.

rob hamill (01:14:37.958)
and immediately jumped in the water with the two boys and started freediving. Now they’d been diving for about an hour and a half mucking around. I got in with them eventually started to muck around for a while too. And then we did this look this one dive. We got to 30 to 32 meters deep and the youngest boy Ivan who’s just over there actually made it. It was his personal record. No fins just diving down and then pushing up and kicking back to the surface.

Declan and I, Declan and Finn, the two others, to say, oh, we’ve got to have a crack at this too. They go down, and I go down with them, not the whole way, but I watch them push off the bottom. We get to the top, Declan gets to the top first. I look down, and Finn’s unconscious. He’s out. He is unconscious. He’s about six, seven meters down, and he’s like this, he’s starfish. Out, yeah, he’s gone. Oh, shit.

Jason Elkins (01:15:26.67)
Wow.

rob hamill (01:15:35.126)
Finn’s gone and Dave went straight after him. And I’d just come up from a dive, so I was pretty exhausted. And I wasn’t even sure I could get back down to him. Got to him, this dead weight. I mean, I tell you, I was then thinking, are we going to be able to get this kid back to the surface? The other two boys got down after me, and we did get him back. And we did CPR on the water, well, mouth to mouth. And he did come around. And.

Long story short, he came, he was all good, 100% all good. But we made some massive mistakes from that, massive mistakes that we didn’t realize we were making. And we won’t go into that at all at the moment, but from there we then interviewed a world champion, world record holder, freediver William Trubridge, held freedive world record for no fins, just bare human effort, 102 meters. And we had a massive learning experience on our channel.

that if anyone’s interested in that, they could go check that out. It’s about 10 episodes ago now. Yeah. So I just think that’s something, that’s something I just wanted to say that because, you know, you learn stuff. As I said, stuff happens and sometimes it’s not good stuff, you know? And that was a big learning for us.

Jason Elkins (01:16:38.893)
Holy shit.

Jason Elkins (01:16:43.746)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:16:50.424)
Well, I’ve yeah, I’ve heard like anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I do think there’s some truth to that. But yeah, as we know, we’ve had the conversation there. Been, you know, sometimes people don’t survive things. And that’s really that’s.

rob hamill (01:16:55.819)
Yeah.

rob hamill (01:17:00.482)
Yeah.

rob hamill (01:17:07.271)
Yeah, it could easily have gone bad for us.

Jason Elkins (01:17:10.412)
Yeah, that’s really tough. So thank you for sharing that. And I definitely am going to encourage everybody to get on to your YouTube channel, to follow what you’re doing. It’s pretty darn cool. And I look forward to following it and having another conversation with you at some point in the future, maybe actually in person. I’d love to see your set up. I just think that’d be really cool. So you mentioned Sri Lanka. That’s a

rob hamill (01:17:20.612)
Thanks, sis

rob hamill (01:17:32.964)
Oh, we had gifts and board.

Jason Elkins (01:17:34.948)
That’s on my list, so maybe we’ll meet there. So Rob, thank you so much and send your greetings to the family and take care of them and have fun.

rob hamill (01:17:39.234)
Okay?

rob hamill (01:17:44.234)
Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it. It’s been great.

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