From restoring a hurricane-damaged Lagoon 450 Catamaran to sharing global adventures on his YouTube channel ‪Parlay Revival, captain Colin MacRae shares his journey, hard work, and passion for sailing around the world.  In this episode of the Li-MITLESS Energy podcast, Denis Phares sits down with Colin at the Annapolis Sailboat Show to dive into his 10-year career as a superyacht engineer, the challenges of boat repairs, the unexpected growth of his YouTube channel, and how his time on reality TV brought newfound attention to Parlay Revival.

Powering the Adventure | How Lithium Batteries Transformed Parlay Revival

As a super yacht engineer by trade, Colin MacRae has always been passionate about sailing and life on the water. After stumbling across a hurricane-damaged lagoon 450 catamaran six and half years ago, Colin decided to make his life on the water a reality. While documenting the extensive repairs required to get the boat operational, Colin shared his journey on YouTube. Despite struggling to gain traction initially, his YouTube channel, Sailing Parlay Revival, took off following a stint on the reality TV show Below Deck. With substantial exposure from the show and increasing interest in the sailing lifestyle following the COVID-19 pandemic, Parlay Revival has become one of the most well-known YouTube Sailing channels.

In this episode of The Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast, Colin shares insights into his sailing journey of transforming a sunken, damaged catamaran into a seaworthy vessel. Early on, Colin faced limitations with his initial 800-amp hours of lead-acid batteries, providing only about 400 usable power. Given the demands of charging multiple cameras, computers, and other equipment needed for the channel’s content production, this restricted power capacity was challenging. Eventually, he upgraded to 1,000-amp hours of Battle Born lithium batteries, which he describes as “life-changing.” The switch allowed him to power his entire sailboat and charge his gear efficiently, which was essential as he acquired bigger cameras, drones, and more powerful editing equipment. Colin discusses how the upgrade enabled smoother day-to-day operations and freed him to focus on creating high-quality content for his expanding audience.

Listen to the full episode on YouTube or wherever you stream podcasts, and follow along with Parlay Revival’s upcoming travels to remote areas of the Pacific on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Podcast Transcript

Denis Phares  0:10

Welcome to The Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast here in beautiful Annapolis, Maryland, for the Annapolis Boat Show. And it is my pleasure to welcome Colin from Parlay Revival.

Colin MacRae  0:21

Cheers for having me, man.

Denis Phares  0:23

Thanks for being here. So, Parlay Revival is a pretty popular YouTube sailing channel.

Colin MacRae  0:28

I guess so. Yeah.

Denis Phares  0:30

You think so?

Colin MacRae  0:31

Yeah, a couple of people are watching these days.

Denis Phares  0:32

Yeah. There’s a couple of people. Yeah, a couple people are interested. And I think you put a lot of interesting content out there. And how long have you had this channel?

Colin MacRae  0:43

I started it about seven years ago now, maybe six and a half years ago. It’s a hurricane-damaged lagoon 450 catamaran, so it required a ton of work to just get it floating again. But we did a whole bunch of fiberglass work. And in the hurricane, it sank on the port side, so I had to redo all the electronics and everything in that hull.

Denis Phares  1:07

Where was it?

Colin MacRae  1:08

It was in Tortola, in the BVI. And rebuilt the engine and everything like that. One side was dry and one side was wet. But, as you know, boats have so much wiring that it was just an absolute nightmare to… I wanted to redo all of the wiring, but luckily, the battery bank was on the starboard side, still is, but that didn’t last me very long, or they were lead acid and 1000 amp hours, sorry, 800 amp hours, so only roughly 400 usable. And then we changed to the Battle Borns at 1000 amp hours of lithium. And it was, honestly, life-changing. And I’m not just saying that. It was such a big improvement for us to have that much battery capacity. And being a YouTube channel, we’re charging phones and cameras and computers the whole time, so we’re really power hungry. So, 1000 amp hours has been pretty good, but now we’ve beefed up the production. We’ve got bigger cameras, bigger laptops, and everything, so I think we’re ready for the next upgrade which we’re a bit more [Inaudible 2:18] really.

Denis Phares  2:19

Well, I hope so. But so six to seven years ago, this is pretty early. This is pre-COVID. In terms of the world of YouTube sailing channels, you guys are pretty early, right?

Colin MacRae  2:32

We’re kind of early. I was inspired by Sailing La Vagabonde. One of their episodes popped up on YouTube, and it was, I guess, one of their very first ones. They had no idea what they were doing and sailing around the world. They explained what Patreon was in one of their videos, and I was like, “Well, this is a feasible lifestyle if you are interesting enough.” Luckily, our story was interesting enough because of the hurricane-damaged boat. No one had really done that, now there’s a few channels that are doing hurricane-damaged stuff. But yeah, it’s been a roller coaster. The first year was just no subscribers, no followers, no nothing. It was just a labor of love, just sort of hoping that the idea would take off.

Denis Phares  3:18

Was your thinking that it had to take off by a certain amount of time where you couldn’t sustain it?

Colin MacRae  3:24

I’m a chief engineer on Superyachts, so I always had that safety net. So, if the YouTube wasn’t generating enough money and I had to go back to work, I can fairly quickly earn enough money in like two or three months to last another two or three months. And then, a television show called Below Deck picked me up from the YouTube channel, and I ended up doing three seasons of that TV show which helped get us through.

Denis Phares  3:52

So, did that appearance help your channel? People started recognizing…

Colin MacRae  3:55

Yeah. The show’s got a pretty scandalous reputation. It’s a reality TV show about, yeah, working on a super yacht. So, I was reluctant to do it, but I spoke to a friend of mine who had done a season previously and he said, “You’re crazy if you don’t do it because it’s such good exposure for whatever you want.” And so, I went on there, I was wearing Parlay Revival, T-shirts, and hats, and stuff, to the point where the producers were getting really annoyed with me because you meant you’re going to these five-star restaurants and everything, and I’m dressed like this. So, yeah I was there for a cause, and it helped a lot.

Denis Phares  4:32

How was it scandalous?

Colin MacRae  4:34

It’s based around drama, so it’s who’s sleeping with who, and who’s fighting with who. You can be the greatest yachty in the world, but that’s boring. So, it’s the scandals that they’re like.

Denis Phares  4:49

Got it. Did you add to any scandals?

Colin MacRae  4:51

What’s that?

Denis Phares  4:51

Did you get into any scandals?

Colin MacRae  4:53

I had a flawless… Two seasons were flawless. I had a girlfriend at the time, I stayed out of all of that stuff. And then, I went back for my third season, and I was single, and I got involved a little bit.

(Laughter)

Denis Phares  5:09

A little bit of scandal in the third season. Okay. Well, at least it launched you into the Parlay Revival channel. And what happened as you launched this channel, and then the pandemic hit globally? How did that affect things? It increased your viewership?

Colin MacRae  5:29

Absolutely. Yeah. We were just watching the subscribers just grow and grow. At that point, we were in Panama, about to cross the Pacific, and that all got put on hold when we found broken bulkheads in the boat, which brought us back to the shipyard for another year and a half. But yeah, COVID was interesting for us because that’s when we had our biggest growth. It was my first season of Below Deck. We had just discovered the bulkhead issue, which people found quite fascinating, I think. And the pandemic was meaning people were watching more YouTube, I think.

Denis Phares  6:03

Since then, since the channel grew, how has your content changed?

Colin MacRae  6:07

We’ve just gotten better and better. My girlfriend, Brooke, does most of the editing now, and she’s been with us for nearly two years, and her editing is just phenomenal right now. She’s just got so good. We’ve come up with our own sort of style of voiceovers, and editing and stuff, and we got better cameras and everything now as well, we’re not just running around with a Handycam. So, yeah, at the start it was GoPros and GoPro, and now it’s pretty nice drones, and Sony’s, yeah, the production has gone up a fair bit, I think.

Denis Phares  6:41

Yeah, it’s a great channel, by the way. What do you like to do? Is it more the technical stuff, or do you just like going to cool places and showing off where you are?

Colin MacRae  6:50

Nah. So, as an engineer, I love fixing things. I honestly love it. I love repairing things, I like building things. And with a boat, as you know, there’s always something to work on. So, our channel quite heavily revolves around boat work, and we try to show all of the trials and tribulations together. And, yeah, try to keep it interesting because people started watching us because we were working on the boat, basically. So, we want to keep them interested still by showing them all the jobs that we’re doing. Yeah, having the lithium wasn’t very good in that perspective because we installed it and…

(Laughter)

Colin MacRae  7:31

If it failed every now and then, we’d have more content.

Denis Phares  7:34

Now you can put more drama in it.

Colin MacRae  7:35

I know, we need more scandals.

Denis Phares  7:39

So where is the boat now?

Colin MacRae  7:42

We’re in Papua New Guinea, of all places. It’s just above Australia. This is a place where cannibalism was still rough not very long ago. We don’t exactly feel safe the entire time that we’re there. We’ve got two dogs, which have been a saving grace, because one is a Pit Bull, and no one really wants to come near the boat. But it’s pretty wild down there, but also nothing that other cruisers aren’t doing at the moment. It’s just much more uncommon. So, we did Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and then Papua New Guinea, and next is going to be the Indonesia and then the Philippines. So, getting through some countries that you wouldn’t normally sail to, if you like, most people would go to Australia at the point where we’re at, but we’re skipping Australia all together and doing some more remote stuff.

Denis Phares  8:36

How do you decide where to go? Do you have sort of an idea of what stories you want to tell or you’re just like you want to be off the beaten path?

Colin MacRae  8:42

Yeah. We’re just literally going with the wind and getting a lot of information from other cruises that we meet. So, I think the best, most reliable source of information are from people who are out there doing it right now because you can jump on the internet and read things about Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands and that, and just be scared to death and never go. But we’ve got a big enough network of friends and stuff now that you can be pretty informed about where you want to go and informed about where you don’t want to go. So, we think, for this year, getting up to the Philippines is well worthwhile. And then it’s been a lifelong dream of mine to go surfing in Indonesia, it’s got the best waves in the world. So, we’re going to go back down from the Philippines and do that whole Indonesian coast, the Mentawai islands in particular, a world-famous surf destination. And to be there on my own boat, I’m going to be in heaven.

Denis Phares  9:39

Does Brett surf too?

Colin MacRae  9:39

Yep, she does. And Jamie does every now and then, but he does more sunbathing than surfing these days.

Denis Phares  9:49

So, I’m curious, when you say the community that you have, other people that you learn from, are they just sailors or are they YouTubers?

Colin MacRae  10:00

Yeah. I was mainly referring to just sailors. We just consider ourselves just one of the community out there. Where we are, there aren’t too many other YouTube channels anyway. So, yeah, it’s honestly just meeting other sailors and being part of that community. And, yeah, it’s amazing the amount of information you can get from a barbecue on the beach with a bunch of sailors. So, yeah, I’d say that’s our main source of information.

Denis Phares  10:31

Do they tend to know where you are, at least from…?

Colin MacRae  10:33

I would say so, yeah. More often than not, yeah. It’s a strange feeling to have people sort of know who you are. You sort of get used to it, but you sort of don’t. And being here at The Boat Show is the craziest time for us because a lot of these people here do watch YouTube channels, sailing channels. So, this would be where we are most recognized ever is the Annapolis Boat Show. Like I was late to this, it’s hard to get from A to B when people do recognize you. And you want to be humble, and you want to talk to everyone, you want to have a conversation, but sometimes you just do feel a little bit rude when you’re like, “I’ve got to go, sorry.” You don’t want to brush anyone off, it’s not polite. But yeah, it’s a very interesting experience being at the show.

Denis Phares  11:27

Well, thanks for taking the time to stop by here. I know you’re very busy here, so thanks for being on the podcast.

Colin MacRae  11:35

No worries, man. Thanks for the things you’ve done for us. Appreciate it.

Denis Phares  11:37

Of course. Colin, Parlay Revival. Thanks for tuning in to The Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on any of your favorite podcast platforms.

[End Of Recording]