Armchair Admirals Predict Doom for SV Seeker

REDDIT — Doug Jackson of the youtube channel SV Seeker spent ten years building a 72 foot steel sailing ship in his front yard to one day fulfill his dream of sailing around the world. But sometimes, dreams can turn into nightmares.

In his latest video, Doug is suffering from severe seasickness, on the verge of dehydration induced hallucinations as he wonders why riding in an airplane never made him sick. This is Jackson’s first extended sea voyage, a guest of Captain C-Money on the Sailing Vessel Osprey.

After suffering weeks of never ending seasickness, Jackson is questioning not only the radical do-it-yourself ethic that he’s preached for so many years, but also if he can complete the voyage alive, having gone four days without food or water. But in the backdrop is his unlaunched ship, still sitting on pavement after six months at The Tulsa Port of Catoosa in Oklahoma.

SV Seeker is largely a completed ship, but insurance companies have refused to underwrite the untested, idiosyncratic design. SV Seeker has a structural, or monocoque style hull that isn’t supported by typical internal bracing. Many of its vital systems are salvaged off of a retired school bus, or built from parts available at the hardware store. The ship’s sails are rigged in an Ancient Chinese fashion and its bow is adorned with the most hideous fiberglass mermaids to ever show their breasts. Mockeries of Chinese dragons sit on each side of the bridge. Seeker has been unable to launch due to Jackson’s failure to insure the homemade vessel.

Jackson moderates his youtube comments with an iron fist, banning so-called “Armchair Admirals” who question his boat design decisions or safety precautions. His defensive and hateful treatment of critical viewers culminated in the perpetrating of an elaborate hoax involving pyrotechnics, paid actors, his partner Betsy, and a doctor with fake X-rays showing the extent of Jackson’s head injury. After days of maintaining this fiction, Jackson was unrepentant and told upset viewers if they couldn’t take a joke he didn’t want them on his crew.

The SVSeeker subreddit is where Jackson’s banned commenters discuss the ongoing shipwreck that they call ‘SVSinker’ and now, ‘SVScrapper’, since it may never launch. The forum is curiously moderated by the user u/Doug_Jackson, who has recently pinned a notice to visitors that the sub is “toxic” following the deletion of a link to the Internet Chronicle. However, Doug_Jackson stands behind his otherwise free speech moderating policy, and also denies that he is Doug Jackson or his partner Betsy.

Commenter proto57 responded to SVSeeker’s latest dehydration video, seeing it as an easy ‘out’ for Doug:

Or maybe he is exaggerating his sickness because he sees it as a valid excuse. I mean, who can argue with his statements in this video that he doesn’t mind being sick, but if he cannot eat and cannot drink for days, he cannot be at sea?

 

Rather than face the inability to launch the boat because of his own failure (lack of insurance), he can therefore dodge responsibility and say it is because he cannot sail without eating and drinking, and seasickness is NOT his fault. It is a way of shifting responsibility.

Opcn noticed Jackson’s hallucinatory imagery of airplane stalls, writing, “Sounds like he wants someone else to sail it from port to port for him and he will fly there and use it in port.

Fans of SV Seeker were reminded of the late era of Pure Living for Life, a defunct homesteading channel that became an airplane flying channel when an elaborate self-built mansion proved to be too great of a challenge to complete.

Will Doug Jackson’s ship sink, like so many home-built ships of the past? Will it be scrapped before it ever touches water? Haters and fans alike wait with bated breath as the world’s slowest shipwreck, SV Seeker, edges ever closer to the shores of Tulsa Oklahoma’s Port of Catoosa captained by a great man with a fatal case of seasickness.