Aquaholic Gets Deep: Influencer Interview at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show

Denison interviews an industry celebrity–YouTube star Aquaholic.

At this year’s Fort Lauderdale Boat Show, we spent the day with an industry favorite: Nick Burnham, better known as Aquaholic. Between tours aboard a number of our yachts on display, we took some time aside to sit down with him and ask the questions we’ve been dying to know. Read on to discover Aquaholic’s answers.

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What is your history? How did you get started within this industry? How did that form into the YouTube channel and everything that you’re doing now?

It’s a very long story, so I’ll keep it as brief as I can. I’ve been obsessed with boats for as long as I can remember. I can remember being probably seven years old, going to bed with all my cuddly toys and I’d be under the covers pretending it was a boat and we were on a cruise. I don’t know where it came from, the obsession, because it’s not particularly a family thing, but there it was, and it’s been all the way through. I used to read all the boat magazines and get all the boat brochures.

Then, when I was about 20, I saw a job advertised as a trainee yacht broker and I thought: well, that sounds fantastic. It was in Torquay, close to where I lived. I applied for it. I wrote an application, wrote a CV, and I actually went in and put it on the guy’s desk and said “I want the job”…and he gave me the job. And he said the reason I gave you the job is because you came in, put it on my desk, and told me “I want the job”.

By the time I was 26, we had gone into the ’90s recession, they got rid of some people, I ended up running an office and it was just me. It was a small office, doing brokerage and I did that then maybe for another 15 years. Then, we had another recession. In 2009, the company changed hands and I got made redundant. Nobody was taking anyone on in sales because 2009 everything was flatlined. So I had to find something else to do. And I’d started about three years earlier writing a column for a magazine, just for a bit of fun. I’d seen the column in a motor boat and yachting magazine called the Mystery Skipper, about a guy who was a charter skipper and the adventures that go along with that. So I approached their rival magazine, Motorboats Monthly, and said do you guys have a mystery salesman or yacht broker? And so they said that sounds fun, write a small column and if we like it we’ll carry on. And they liked them and I did that for three years, secretly. I was writing all about the boat industry from the inside, so it was about maybe tricky customers, or sea trials that went wrong, or just those kinds of behind-the-scenes stories. When I got made redundant, I approached that magazine and said “Listen, I want to try and get into doing some writing stuff” and they said that would be great, and then nothing. Then I contacted them again, saying I’d really like to do this and they’d say that would be great, and then nothing. And it went on like that for about six months. In the end, I tried to find other jobs, there was nothing in boat sales at all. Eventually, I landed a job selling cars because it was the only thing i could find. I was selling Ford cars.

Almost the week that I got that job, I had a message from the editor of the magazine saying can you do a used boat test for us? I was like: oh god, no, really, now? And I nearly said no and that that ship had sailed, but I thought no I can still do this, I can do it on my day off. I did the boat test. Did some more boat tests. Did other things for them. Then I got offered a job when the yacht brokerage started to improve, as an area manager for a company that was trying to expand into the Southwest. I took that on, it was still a rubbish time to be a yacht broker. So I was a yacht broker then, doing a little bit of writing, and over the space of about three or four months, I segued into a writer doing a little bit of yacht brokering. It changed over that time. Because I was freelance, and there were other freelance writers, I realized that if I could do photography as well, then I would be in a really good position to get work, because no one was doing writing and photography, they were doing one or the other, not both. So if I could do both, companies could pay less and their expenses halved. So I got some camera gear and I got to a reasonable professional standard with photography. So when I started doing both, that was great–they loved it and I got a lot more work. Then one day, they said can you start doing video? And by then, I was writing pretty much exclusively for Motorboats Monthly, I was writing about a third of the magazine every month. It was really flying. Can you do some video? Christ. Yeah, alright, I’ll do some video.

The early videos were absolutely terrible, I was so nervous. The first video I did was actually with a photographer, because this was before I was doing my own stuff, and the dealer was there and we were with this boat and I had to say to the dealer, listen do you mind going somewhere else? I can’t do it in front of you; I was that nervous.

So, I started doing video and built that up. Then that magazine, a couple of years later, I got a phone call from the editor to say: “I’m really sorry Nick, they’re closing the magazine down”. Advertising numbers were going down, they were losing money. The company that owned it just killed it dead. That’s how I went from hero to zero overnight.

I had some videos that I’d done and I thought I’ll just stick them on my own YouTube channel, which I did. And then I started picking up other work with other magazines, not to quite the same degree. I was down in the South of France doing some boat testing, and it was lunchtime. I went up to get some lunch, and I’m a really, really fussy eater, and there was nothing there that I liked. So I thought, well, okay, I’ll just go hungry. I wandered back down to where the boats were and there was a Prestige 630S on the dock, it was a new boat then. And I had a GoPro in my hand because I was doing some filming of the boat testing I was doing for the magazine, so I wasn’t doing anything with this 630. So I thought, I should do a yacht tour, just walk around it and film it. And I put that on my YouTube channel, it didn’t do terribly well…but that was the very first yacht tour. Then, I did some more, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Do you remember what that first viral video was?

Yeah, well there’s a slightly funny story to that. I had done an article for Motor Boat & Yachting magazine about a new boat that was out called a Dynamiq GTT 115. It was literally only a half-page or a page article about it. The guy said to me–it was in Monaco–if you’re ever down this way, come down and have a look at it. And I said I’d love to, that’d be great. About six months later, I had a week off and I thought I’ll just go down to the South of France for a couple of days, jump on a plane, cheap flight, get an Airbnb, have a poke around Cannes, and maybe out to Monaco and I thought about this guy. I emailed him and said: listen, I’m down in your neck of the woods, can I come down and have a look at the boat, I’d love to see it. And he said yeah, of course you can. He was a nice guy, a guy called Bogdan, he now works for Bering. He’s really into social media and all that kind of stuff. So I said great, I’ll do that, I’ll come down. I was going down there anyway. Bear in mind I was self-employed, freelance for that. And I certainly thought if this is a business trip and not a holiday, I can claim this as an expense. So I rang this guy back up, and I said when I come down, can I make a video of the GTT 115? And he said “Oh, I don’t know, I’ll check with the boss” and he came back and said yeah okay, we can do it. And it was great because I wanted to see it anyway, so I took my camera down and said now this is a work trip. And I still had a couple of days to look around and all that. So I went down there, filmed it, and that was the first superyacht I think I ever filmed. It wasn’t a great video, we didn’t do the engine room. That video had over a million views. It was a Porche design, and I think it got a lot of buzz from the car world. That was certainly one that really went in a big way.

I’ll tell you another thing that happened with that. I got contacted by LADbible, and they said can we run that video? We’ll edit it and chop it up and make it the size we want, we only want it to be about three minutes long. And I said yeah, as long as you mention me, help yourself. So they did. That brought in a load of subscribers. And they did it again with a Sunseeker 131 yacht.

How has your channel evolved over the years?

I think I realized what works. And what works is big, expensive boats. And it’s quite funny because I get lots of comments from people saying you should put up cheaper boats, people can afford to get more of these…no. Fully the opposite, because I have put up cheaper boats, I try to do a broad range, but it’s the big stuff that gets the big views–always.

I try to put some of myself into the channel, so my boating experiences and I do some videos where I meet the owners of boats and chat with them about them. So I try to get a bit of variety in there. But without a doubt, it’s the yacht tours. And I could just do yacht tours, but I want to do more. I feel like like I’ve got a core audience that enjoys me and enjoy the stuff and a sort of outer ring of people who just casually dip in. The outer ring is the yacht tours, superyachts, big news, but I want to keep the community. The community on Aquaholic is really strong and I want to keep those guys sated and coming back because I think that’s important.

How do you maintain a sense of community on your channel and for the brand?

I try and do stuff that’s real. Like, my own boat is about 50,000 pounds’ worth, it’s about 17 years old. It’s very much an everyman’s boat, it’s something that anybody who’s doing alright could afford. It’s not a millionaire boat and I think people can relate to that. Even if it’s something they can’t afford today, they think it’s something they could do. That certainly brought a lot of people in. So I think that’s important.

The other thing I do–and this is mostly out of my own interest as well–is I read every comment. Every morning, I wake up, I rake through, I do it before going to bed. I’ll do it during the day, I do it at the office, I’ll read every comment. I answer some of them. People say “I love the channel, I love what you’ve done.” I really enjoy reading through. At the very least, I’ll give it a heart, like I love this comment. And I’ll comment to people “I’m really glad you enjoyed it” or “Thank you for your comment” or whatever else. I think people like that. There’s a channel I went to, it’s no bigger than mine, and I quite like his stuff, and I put a couple of comments on there and I watch his stuff all the time and he’s never, ever responded. It’s like I don’t exist. I think it’s important; if someone appreciates you, appreciate them back.

Your comments are always positive, and rightfully so. Have you ever had a situation happen with a video where you received a critique that made you change the format?

I have had negative comments. I’m very conscious that everyone is entitled to their opinion. So, if somebody says “I don’t like that boat”–it’s too slow, it’s too big, it’s too small, it’s too expensive–that’s fine. I don’t mind if people say I don’t like the fact that you open all the cupboards because I’m going through everywhere. What I don’t like is when people do insults. So they’ll say “Oh, the bloke who bought that must be an idiot”, then they’re gone and I’ll get rid of that because there’s no room for that sort of thing. But I have had some very, very amusing comments over the years and I wish I could remember them. Somebody said that we should write a book of them all. But the one that always sticks in my mind, just out of pure amusement, is…I always start the video with the camera pointed at me and I say “Hi, we’re here looking at a new Princess Y80” and then I swing the camera to the boat and I walk the boat and I talk about it and at the very end of the video I swing it back to me and I say “that was the new Princess Y80, let me know what you think in the comments, thanks for watching, and we’ll capture another one.” So you have maybe 20 seconds of me in the beginning and 20 seconds at the end. Somebody put in a comment and he said: “We don’t want to see your clown face, just show us the boat.”

What new trends are you seeing within the boat walkthrough video landscape?

I think the biggest trend at the moment is–quite simply–more people trying to do it. All the time you’re seeing a new channel, a new channel, a new channel. I think people look at what I’m doing and think: well it’s easy and fun–which it kind of is–and I want to have a go at that. And I always find that a little bit frustrating…obviously, it’s an absolutely free world, free market, do what you like. I’ve got no more right than anybody else to this space, but it’s slightly frustrating when somebody literally copies exactly what I’ve done and they’ll literally take my format–right down to using the same kind of equipment. I’ve only seen that once or twice, but that’s a little bit frustrating.

Also, what I’m seeing is you’ll get somebody who has a certain boating topic, it might be like a liveaboard and this is life onboard or whatever. And suddenly they’ll think, this guy with the yacht tours does much better, so let’s do yacht tours just like him. It’s the same sort of thing, you think you were okay in your own sphere. So many people are pivoting and doing what I’m doing. But, it’s a free world, they have as much right to it as I have. Good luck to them.

I have been around boats now, in a professional capacity, for 35 years. Before that, in an enthusiastic capacity, for maybe another five years–reading the magazines and going to boat shows. So maybe 40 years. So I’ve got a pretty good idea of which end is the front and which end is the back. But there’s a second element to it, which is a hard thing to fake, which is that I am so passionate about it. I love boats. People say: you don’t criticize boats, you don’t say anything bad about them. That’s because I love them all, I think they’re fantastic. Any boat, any day out on the water is great. And that’s the thing that I get in my comments the most. People seem to like my excitement. And I think people like the fact that I’m not trying to be a professional. And I’m not, I’m genuinely not. What I’m doing is saying: “come on, look at this, it’s brilliant.” I think people tune into that.

Three years ago you said in a video your dream boat to do a video tour on would be 77-meter Silver Fast. Is that still your dream boat to do a video on or has that changed?

I think it probably is still the dream boat. I actually covered that boat for Boat International when I was doing the freelance writing. I went down to Abu Dhabi and I sailed on that boat to Dubai. We left at two in the morning and the sun came up, daybreak on the ocean, and then we sailed into Dubai it was an incredible experience on an absolutely incredible yacht. I’d love to do a yacht tour of that. It was just fantastic. I’ve seen the yacht since; we were in Palma and it was in there being worked on, and I said “That’s it, that’s Silver Fast!” So yeah, I would love to, but it’s major, major league. It was 77 meters, so I think it was about 77 million. It was a properly big-league boat. I’d still love to get on that.

How do you envision the future of boating as you’ve climbed aboard a more diverse range of boats over the years than probably anyone? What are trends that you’re seeing that you do and don’t like?

Weirdly, that’s kind of a double-edged one because some of the trends I don’t like are the trends that actually are working for the manufacturers, so you can’t blame them for it. I’ve been selling boats for 30 years and you do see things change. What boats used to be back in the ’80s and ’90s is that a manufacturer would build a boat–here’s a lovely boat, it looks lovely, it’s got a lovely hull and now we’ll fit it out with interior and we’ll sell it. And that was how it went. So it started on the outside and then it kind of worked inwards. What they’ve realized–and they’re absolutely right–is that it’s the space onboard that sells the boat, not the style, not seakeeping, and so they know that if theirs has got the extra en suite heads, or the bigger galley, or the super-sized flybridge, then they’ll get the sale that the guys that don’t have that don’t get. Now, what that results in is very big, fat, wide boats. I completely get it, of course, you’re going to build a boat that people want to buy and I also completely get that if you’re buying a boat you’re going to get a boat with that works best for you. For most people, it’s a floating holiday home. You’re not going offshore charging around or that sort of thing. If it’s rough, you’re not going to bother. And so the priority is that big galley and that extra en suite. So I completely understand it and I’m not criticizing it, but I think boats are losing their elegance because of it. So that’s the future–it’s space and it’s height. People want floating apartments.

I think boating is very evolutionary. You don’t see these big jumps. There are a few interesting things going on. Hydrofoiling is fascinating because they are trying to get electric motors which don’t really work in boats because boats are just too inefficient but hydrofoiling is getting the hulls out of the water and that’s making them more efficient, so that’s interesting. And that’s where I think we’re going to start seeing progress now is in the efficiency. People are demanding that in their cars, in their houses, and they’re demanding it in their boats. And that’s not a bad thing. It’ll be interesting to see what progress we make in that. The truth of the matter is if you really want efficiency and you want that whole eco thing–really, truly, honestly, it already exists and it has for a hundred years–buy a sailing boat. You hoist the sails and you sail. That’s the thing, all this–we’ve got hybrids and lithium batteries, and electric engines, and hydrofoils–you’re not bothered by a sailing boat is my feeling on it.

What’s your favorite boat you’ve ever shot aboard?

God, that’s a good question. I have to say, probably one of the first big superyachts I filmed was the Sunseeker 131 in the South of France and it had high-gloss woodwork. And that’s kind of old hat now and it’s one of those things that shouldn’t really have worked, but it just did. You walked in, the door slid open, and you just went “wow”. I think it was the decor, in terms of the upholstery and the artifacts that it had. That was a good-looking boat. That had the wow factor.

You’ve mentioned in videos that your other passion is cars, what do you think of the Aston Martin we have at the booth?

Oh, I love Aston Martins. I’ve always wanted one. I don’t think they’re the best car in the world, I think that’s probably a Bentley, but they are the most evocative. They are the car that you would never park and walk away from without looking back at it at least once. And that’s what Aston Martin is. It’s about the feel.

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We had a great time spending the day with Aquaholic and can’t wait until our paths cross again–on land or water!