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Y'all, the alligators are coming right up to the boat. He's right there. Okay, this is pretty freaking awesome. Terrifyingly awesome. But I know that everyone out here knows what they're doing and I don't. So, I'm just scared of everything, you guys. We had a bit of a problem. Our winch stopped working, but we tried to turn on the anchor and sparks jumped out of this whole thing. So, I guess we got no anchor now. You guys, we decided we cannot stay here tonight. There are gigantic spiders crawling on this water. All right, I think I'm back to disliking boat life. No way, man. We're having a blast. As long as we don't crash.
Good morning, adventurers, and welcome to Louisiana. We are going to be spending the next 3 days on this adorable little house boat called the Swamp Tuna. We'll be navigating through narrow waterways and bayou that are literally infested with alligators, not to mention huge spiders and so many other creepy crawies. And when we find a spot we like, we're just going to drop the anchor and spend the night right in the middle of the swamp. Neither of us have ever driven a boat like this. And we know absolutely nothing about living on a swamp, but uh we're just going to dive right in. But not literally, because these gators will eat you. That is true.
Yeah. If you caught our last video, we went out exploring the Florida Everglades and we got up close and personal with some alligators, but that's kids stuff. Now, we're going to live amongst them. This rig just might be the slowest vessel on the water, but this little boat should have everything that we need to live that swamp life. All right, it's time to officially become swamp tunas. Woohoo! That's it. This is literally as fast as she goes. We're getting our first look at the uh house boat. This thing is sweet.
It's like a real freaking house. My gosh. I think it might be bigger than our tiny house. Yeah. Oh my gosh, you guys. This thing is so adorable. All right. This is rad. It's got like a whole front porch area. So, I wasn't sure how this thing was going to be built, but it all looks like it's just uh raw metal, baby. All right, we're going to get to that. All right, we're not driving yet. I'm ready to go. All right, let's see what our swamp home looks like. We're going to be living here for the next 3 days. Oh, woo! AC! It's nice and cool.
This is surprisingly spacious in here. Look at this. Oh, man. We've stayed in such smaller places than this. I mean, the ceilings, they're really high. You know what that means? I'm going to be doing BURPEES IN HERE. HEY YO, I won't do it cuz I'm not in a perfect clothing. That's her microphone right there in case you're wondering what that means. Sorry, I'm trying to keep it. I don't know. We're using these mics. I'm not used to it. But they are so much better. Hopefully they're so Wow. This thing has everything. It's like a real house. It's like a cabin in
the woods that you would go hunting from or something, but in a swamp in Louisiana. You guys, I absolutely love it. I'm having so much fun already, and we haven't even left the dock. Do we have to leave the dock? Can we just stay here and not have to worry about driving it? Well, considering we're both terrified to drive it, that is an option. You'll notice that there's an AC unit right over here. When you're at the dock, you can plug in and that powers the AC. So, if you want to be on the swamp, but not have a swamp in your pants, stay here at the dock. That's pretty good, right? That was a good one. That got to be good. We can all relate to that. Come on.
Well, first of all, this is probably the most well stocked rental we have ever come across in all of our years of travel. Look at this tower of snacks and goodies that they left for us. I mean, what the heck? It's dangerous cuz I am confirmed hungry. I guess the water is so chill and the boat is so chill that you don't have to stow any of this away. It just sits right there. Yeah. This is very much not like um RV life where everything has to be like you could never leave this while you're driving. It would all be broken.
Are we going to want to become boat life swamp people after this? I was just about to say, did you notice this is a like a rectangle? Everything's a right angle. You could just build one of these, plop some buckets underneath, throw it out in a swamp. Done. Yeah, that's how it works. So, we've got a full-on kitchen area over here, complete with a gas burner cooktop. No oven, but that's okay. We don't need it out here. They have a big old dual sink, which is great cuz no dishwasher, so we'll be doing everything by hand. Oodles of supplies, real cutlery, cups, all the condiments in the entire world. I mean, this is so sweet. This really reminds me of camping when I was a kid, going to like family cabins and stuff
like that. Just all the pots and pans out. I mean, they have soups and snacks galore. Everything you could possibly need. So, right adjacent to the dining room is the little sea shell themed bed. And I actually just noticed right above that is more provisions. Look how cool. This is so rude because Eric and I are actually doing P90X 3. And none of this stuff is on that diet. But I think we might have to sneak some snacks anyway. Well, if it's free. Mhm. I'll just do a few extra push-ups. It'll be fine. Also, this might look like a deep freeze, but this is their refrigerator. This puts the one in Clementine to shame. You guys, look at how huge this is. Half of this stuff
they provided for us. They do have solar panels and they charge like this huge battery array that they have in the closet there. So, yeah, it can run this bad boy, guys. They got bunk beds. It's not a true cabin if there aren't bunk beds, I don't think. But uh that means you can bring friends, family, kids, animals, meet some strangers out on the swamp, make a pet alligator friend. And we have read reviews that people have done that. They come and bring their whole family out for like a week at a time. How cool would that be? That's a memorable family vacation. Come on, you guys. The bathroom is faking huge. Check this out. Pretty cool, huh? And you'll notice they have an entire bathtub and a shower over here. But
everything in here is super simple. They have a little sink over here. And then this is a compost toilet. If you don't know how these work, look it up. I'm not going to explain it again. So, this is their little utility closet. Looks like a hodge podge, but everything is in a working order, I believe. But this is the cool part. It actually sucks water up from the bayou. It filters it and then puts it into this accumulator pressure tank thing and then shoots it out into the system. We have unlimited water in here. That's cool. Which is in there. I thought I showered real good. But I got all the bits and bobs this morning cuz I didn't think we were going to be able to out here.
Well, at least it's good to know your bits and bobs are clean. Oh, for once. It's sparkling. So, this is it's slick. Did you just die? What I was trying to say is this is the back deck. It is also very metal. And when it gets wet, which it is in a permanent state of wetness, I believe it is very slick. Back here, you're going to see this big old water heater unit that they have, which is awesome. This is propane, I believe. So, he must have a propane stash on the ship somewhere. Then over here, this is part of that mini split unit that you saw on the wall. So yeah, this only works when
you're actually on the shore under power. Okay, we've officially gotten all settled into the swamp tuna. We got the lay the land, took a bit of a tour, but we wanted to come by and scope out all the stuff that they had and see what the kitchen was like. And I think what we're going to do is hop in the car, run to the store real quick, grab some provisions. There's a store just down the road. Then we're finally going to take this sucker out. To get here, we hopped a quick flight over to Louisiana, and then we picked up this cute little white car on Turo. By now, you all probably know that we love renting cars on Turo, and we wanted to give them a quick shout out for partnering with us
on this video. Turo is the world's largest car sharing marketplace, and we have actually been using them for over 10 years now to rent cars, and they make the rental process so much easier. Yeah, we just landed in New Orleans. Skip the car rental counter, no waiting in line, no dealing with paperwork. You can just walk up to the car, unlock it, and drive away. And for anyone out there traveling soon for spring break, Turo is available at over 170 airports across the US and Canada, we cannot recommend Turo enough. It is our absolute favorite way to rent a car. And if you'd like to try Turo for yourself, you can just click the link in the description or
scan the handy little QR code that's on the screen right now to go check it out. All right, y'all. The moment of truth. We are about to uh leave the dock. We got a little bit of an orientation from the owner and uh I guess now we're on our own. I guess so. because I mean we've we've driven tuk tuks and mopeds and crazy big rigs, but for some reason this little dinky boat is scaring me more than all of those things. All right, let's do it. Yeah. All right, you guys. I backed up from the dock and I did it too quick and panicked and didn't hit record.
The owner was there watching us and it was a little hectic, but we are in the middle of the swamp now. Woo! We're driving. All right, full speed ahead at about uh what do you say? 5 miles an hour. Yeah. What is that in knots? Not very much. I do not know. Little nautical humor for you. Yeah. So, if you look at the bird's eye view, there are many little shoots and channels and bayus that you can enter. Some of them are bigger like this. Some of them are a lot more narrow. But basically, the rule of thumb that he told us is to stick to the middle because channels like this, they kind of they're really shallow on the edges and
then they slope down in the middle. So, we don't want our motor to hit the like soggy bottom. Is that a no, brother? everywhere at that reference. Making a lot of references. What's that? Is that an alligator? Dude, are we going to see some alligators? There should be a ton of gators in these waters, you guys. That is what I am fully expecting and hoping. I'm on a boat in my flippy floppies while you at FedEx straight flipping copies. I'm on a boat, brother. Don't you ever forget.
You can say. I'll just blink it. Bleep it out. I'm on a boat, mother. Don't you ever forget. You guys, I might be wrong, but I think we have our first alligator sighting. Yeah, I think it's an alligator and not a log. I'm trying to look through the zoom lens, but uh it's a baby. If it is an alligator, there's nobody else on this water but us. Except every once in a while, a boat comes flying by and Allison's been really nervous about it. But I know that everyone out here knows what they're doing and I don't. So, whoa.
I'm just scared of everything, you guys. Oh, we got a little wake. Oh, shoot. Oh, no. Assume the position. Wait, actually, get that. I was like, oh, yeah, the water's so calm. My camera's not going to fall over. Don't recreate the Pharaoh Islands, babe. Yeah. All right, so here is the plan. Let me just zoom out a little bit. So, this little star at the bottom is where we picked up the swamp tuna. And our plan is to follow the bayou north all the way up to this part that snakes
around. And apparently that should be a lot more calm and there should be less boats driving around. So we should be able to find a little channel to have to ourselves where we can actually sleep for the night. Oh shoot. I just photobombed my own self. Idiot. The sun is setting and it has been a beautiful sunset. I think we are almost to our spot for the night or where we're hoping is our spot, but this ride has definitely taken us a little longer than we thought it was going to. I really don't want my first adventure on a swamp with alligators to be in the dark. So, we're trying to get there, get anchored, and then we can finally hunker down, make some dinner, and chill. Live that vacation boat life.
That's what you do. All right. On a boat on vacation. We got to the little offshoot that I think we're going to stay in. It looks pretty dang wide. It should be pretty deep. All right, here we go. Home sweet home. So, according to the map here, there should be a big open space that uh we should be able to just drop the anchor and chill in. Okay, I'm going to attempt to drop the anchor. I think I remember exactly how to do it. Should be as easy as So, the idea is that we need to go 50 ft away from that. So, it's just Yeah, it's drifting us back and eventually I need to lock it. It said to let this thing drift 50 ft. How do you know? Okay, so is it locked? So, that's the anchor dropped right there. And the idea is you
drop it and then you drift 50 ft and then you lock the anchor, which I think that I've done. Then you should stay put for the entire night. This is freaky, huh? Just being in the middle of this swamp. Well, it's freaky cuz you told me you knew what you were doing and now it seems like maybe you don't. I figured it out. Well, I suppose this is where we are going to stay for the night. We've been here for about an hour. The sun has set. It is dark and very creepy outside. I think there are literally alligators surrounding us. before the sun went down. You can see their little heads poking out off in the distance. About a million freaking mosquitoes. You can't even step outside.
I don't know if you can tell how red I am. They just got me all over the place. But we'll have to show you the little precarious position that we're in the morning. I mean, I think it's okay. And I don't want to mess with it anymore if it's okay. I don't want to try to like reposition in the dark. So, I think we're going to be good. I'm probably going to be waking up every hour to check it. You guys, we were really nervous that we didn't have any signal. We were getting nothing up here. But all of a sudden, I got one bar and I ran a little speed test. Look at that. Pretty good for the middle of the bayou.
You guys, we got the weekend playing. You probably can't hear it cuz we got our clipons, but it makes this girl dance. It's the freaking weekend and the weekend's playing. And I got wine and we're doing fine. By the way, his album Don FM. Very good. Underrated. You guys, we are literally surrounded by alligators. If you take the flashlight and hold it out there, you can see their freaking eyes glowing back at you. They're all over out here and all behind us on that side. It's so dark. I can't really get a shot of it. But those little glowing orbs that you see off in the distance, those are alligator eyes. And there's bugs everywhere. So, I'm trying not to stop moving.
They're they're covering me right now because I'm holding it still. This is what I'm doing to get light. And there's spiders coming down from every nook and cranny. Oh god, some of the creepiest spiders. It's a the wild west out here. I think we need to go inside to safety. Okay, ready? Get in there. Go fast. Let me in. Come fast. Hurry. These are some mean mosquitoes, you guys. This is one of like 10 bites that I have. Look at that thing. It's huge.
This is the kind you get malaria from, man. That's it. Jeez. It's like the size of a quarter. But luckily, we have this. This is called bite MD, but we called itch stick. And then we ended up calling it stick cuz it's a bite itch stick. So, yeah. Bite it. Makes sense, right? So, this is the stick. I don't know. Dinner is served. The Swamp Tuna kitchen is open and I made delicious spaghetti. Cooking in here really steamed the place up. So, it's like high humidity. There's fog on all the glass. We're either cooking in here or we're doing what Jack
and Rose did when they steamed up the car in Titanic. I will tell you guys, it is very weird being in here at night because you just forget that you're in the middle of a swamp just surrounded by nothingness. There's so much activity outside like bugs and wildlife and crazy sounds. I mean, just listen to it for a second. And not only that, there is the sound of someone just revving their engine over and over. I'm hoping that revving is not a chainsaw. Like somebody on a boat coming for us with a chainsaw. We're just going to like close all the blinds and pretend like everything's fine in here, right?
This is our own little world. And when we wake up and we've run around, that's tomorrow Eric and Allison's problem. They can sort it. We've got some paddles we can push ourselves out of the muck. But for now, it's spaghetti time and then bedtime. Well, we survived the night. I mean, I don't think we ran around to the shore, did we? It looks far away. Also, there are no alligators in here, so I'm going to say that's a win. All right, let's get up, grab some coffee, and then uh check out where we actually are. Y'all, there's a cute little alligator right over there that's just been hanging out with us all morning. Oh, shoot. There's another one over there.
Oh, baby. This is the closest that they've gotten so far. I think they're becoming very comfortable with us. How's it going, babe? Uh, not too good. We had a bit of a problem. Our winch stopped working. They don't have a crank, so we were going to pull the anchor up manually, and then our boat started drifting. I guess the anchor came loose, and we were in a bunch of reads. I didn't have time to get the camera. It was a very lovely morning and then just all of a sudden chaos. Eric's like, "Get out here. I need help."
Yeah. So, we ended up having to just tie the anchor off. We know nothing about how to tie a proper knot. So, that's what we did. Now, it's just dangling over the edge. Once the anchor comes up, you have to stay under power or else the wind just blows you right into the reads. There's a lot of wind and current in this thing. It's deceiving. All right, I think I'm back to disliking boat life. No way, man. We're having a blast. As long as we don't crash. Born on by you. Woohoo. It's the only line of that song I actually know. Isn't every night and day?
I think that's a different song. Oh, okay. Might be the same band, though. There is something so cool about being so up close and personal and in the habitat of these alligators. We just drove by and there were these the two tiny ones just sunbathing on this log. So freaking cool. So cute, you guys. And we saw bald eagles. Oh my gosh. I'm warming up to boat life again. Yeah, we might have had some anchor problems and the wind is making it a little challenging to drive. I think mainly we're just novice boers.
Yeah. But the wildlife is more than making up for it. It is fantastic. I mean, look at this. This is freaking cool, huh? It is pretty cool. Yeah. Now that we're underway, we should probably tell you guys the plan. So, we are going to head down this channel to the south. It's a skinny little lane that heads to the town of Pierre Park, which is a weird name for a town, but it's the only town in the area. And apparently it's technically an island. All this stuff that you see out here, even though it looks solid, is actually not solid. The owner of this rig said that he'd meet us there and try to fix
the winch cuz this is what we got going on right now. Not ideal. You guys, there's this bridge that you have to go through to get into town. You have to call this number here. And then the guy says, "Hey, how's it going? Do you needed me to lift the bridge?" So I said, "Yes, please. And thank you." Oh, they're lifting it. Guys, we have no idea what we're doing. Oh, now it's lifting. Oh, it's like a little lever thing. Well, this is pretty neat, huh? You know, I've been through a lot of draw bridges and things, but I've never been the one that it was opening it for. All right, my first ever
drawbridge crossing. Nailed it. Whoa. All right, we are back underway. We just pulled up and then the owner hopped on board and met us. He just lives in town and uh he took one look at the winch and figured out exactly what was wrong. And I feel kind of stupid that I didn't figure this out. So, this is the winch here. These are the three little wires that go in there. And this wire was rubbing on there and they had rubbed each other off. Well, and the shielding had rubbed off on both and they were arcing from this wire to this wire. So, it was shortcircuiting it. So, we just tape these to isolate them. And obviously, he'll fix those better later, but it works now.
We're headed to a big lake. He said it's going to be very choppy. So, he's recommending going down into the little bayou. So, I think that is what we're going to do. Yeah. He said it should be very beautiful and lots of really chill alligators that should not care about our presence. No. But he did say there will be many of them and do not swim. So we will keep our fingers and toes on board. The canals have opened up into a much bigger lake and it is much choppier. You are living up to the swamp tuna name. And I just got completely obliterated by the waves. Get us out of here, Captain.
Going as fast as I can, which is 5 miles an hour. Well, the owner definitely did not steer us wrong. That lake was crazy choppy. You guys saw the water was like coming up over the front and drenching us. It was not a lot of fun. But as soon as we turned off down the canals, it got beautiful and quiet and very serene. And we have found this awesome little cove. It's tucked in this little nook. So, it might look super calm and chill out here, but our boat is actually moving all over the place.
You guys, we decided we cannot stay here tonight. We dropped our anchor in the middle of all this green stuff. And uh then Allison noticed something about this big crawling around on it. There are gigantic spiders crawling on this water. You guys, I already have to worry about alligators. I do not also want to mess with spiders all night. I'm more scared of the spiders. I mean, this thing was huge and vicious and crawled right under the boat. I cannot have that in my life. That's too much. Yeah. All right. A lot less green stuff. I like this a lot more. Drop anchor. Kind of deep here, you guys. It's like 2:00 a.m. and a crazy storm came through and the rain is just pounding. The wind is blowing. I'm
getting all nervous thinking it's going to blow us into the edge or something. So, I keep check checking the anchor every 2 seconds. I mean, there's this crazy thunder going on. There's been lightning strikes. I mean, so far it stayed right in the center, but I don't know. A lot of wind out there. Well, the rain finally stopped. Y'all, that was wild. It was only supposed to be a little storm at sunset, and it turned out to be an allnight storm until sunrise. Once we realized we weren't going to run into the shoreline, and we kind of relaxed a little bit, we actually slept pretty good.
Yeah, it was very soothing. It's like a natural rain sound. The real rain sound. Because of the rain, we've gotten a kind of a late start to the day, but we have a big day ahead of us. We're actually in this little channel that's just above this huge lake. And this is our final night with the tuna. So, to get back to the dock, we have to go all the way around, and then across the lake, go into this little channel, follow this waterway up back to where we started. It is a very, very long way. And you guys know we go very, very slowly. So, it's going to take a very, very long time. Yeah. Y'all, the alligators are coming right up to the boat. He's right there.
Wow, that's awesome. He's literally just watching us. He's so little and cute. Okay, this is pretty freaking awesome. Terrifyingly awesome. Alison's doing the honors of getting us out of the cove. I did a full spin. And I didn't hit anything. Well, I mean, to be fair, there's this much room for her to turn around in. So, don't make it look like there's only this much room. All right, full steam ahead. captain, you're the captain now. Yeah. Here we go. We have made it to the lake, y'all. And there is not another soul out here.
Not a one. Yeah, we have it all to ourselves. Probably because it's kind of overcast, but more importantly, the water is calm like glass, baby. Yeah, we were we thought we were going to have to like snake around the tree line cuz you said it should give us some shelter from the wind. We're just going to go straight across it cuz y'all, it's boring out here. It's just a lot of water. There's nothing to see. So, we are going to floor it and go that way. It's already flooring. Yeah, this is it. It's very, very slow.
I feel like I could paddle and get us going faster, maybe. But we didn't want to go back from where we started, you know? We wanted to make the loop so we could see everything. But so far, this whole day has just been boring lake. Yeah. Skip the lake. You could swim, I guess. But y'all, we have seen the biggest alligators of this whole journey on this lake. Yeah. So, we won't be getting a foot into this water. I don't want to. Like, no thank you. So, instead, now we're just staring at water forever trying to chase the sunlight. It kind of turned into a fiasco.
We saw this weird thing lying next to the shore and Alison was like, "What the heck is that?" That was an upside down dead alligator. We literally were just talking earlier today about what happens to alligators when they die. I was like, "And that's what I said. I said they just go belly up." And sure enough, confirmed. You were correct, sir. Well, hi. Yeah. Um, I'm in a house boat coming up your way uh from the south. I should be there in about 5 minutes or so. All right. Thank you so much. We have another bridge to cross. I just called them and let them know we're on
our way. You can just show up and apparently they'll see you and draw the bridge, but just in case, it's nice to give them a warning. Sunset is technically in about 20 minutes. Uh, and we have probably 40 minutes to the spot we're wanting to make it to tonight. So, yeah. And really, I mean, driving at night is no big deal. It's just we're wasting our entire day driving. We did not expect to do this. I mean, we left our spot this morning, I think, at like 2:00 p.m. We'll get to our site for the night at 7:30. Dang. 5 and 1/2 hours, y'all. That was a little too much. Okay, we found this little cove right across from the dock where we picked this thing up. We had to squeeze through
this tight little spot. We barely made it. Water's nice and calm. We're probably going to park up right over there. Should be okay. And it is 7:30 on the dock. All right, we actually managed to have a decent night. Nothing went terribly wrong and uh we are underway and the dock where we're going to park it is over there. So our time with the swamp tuna is come to a close. A maybe I feel like I'm an AI tuna now. An aiated. Yeah. Is that a step higher than Oh, from swamp tuna to Now, let's be serious. We're like sewage tuna.
All right, her time with little swamp tuna is officially done, y'all. It was a little stressful at times, not going to lie. But overall, it was a lot of fun. And I'm realizing that alligators might be one of my favorite creatures. Yeah, they're kind of cute. They're so cool. I don't know. There's just something. They're so stoic and mighty and just a lot of fun to watch. But we came. We experienced the bayou. I think we've had enough of it. We're going to stay on dry land for the time being. It'll be nice tonight to actually sleep through the night and not worry if we're like getting dragged away by the alligators. So, that'll be good. All right. But we have tons of adventures coming up, you guys. Some that we are
very excited about. Some very silly, Well, they're all silly, actually. Sillier than this. Believe it. Some are going to be sillier than this. All right, I guess with that, goodbye adventurers. We'll see you on the road. The road because we are done with the water for now.
