In conversation with Damon Rust, who lived through Hurricane Milton on his sailboat.
As the state of Florida readied itself for what was to be one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded, adventurers settled in and took unsuspecting viewers along for the ride.
Damon Rust was one of these adventurers who saw his social media following increase almost overnight with just one video taken during Hurricane Milton. Damon, no stranger to adventure, was riding out the hurricane on his sailboat. In his first video about the hurricane, he showed the viewer how he intended to stay safe. As sea water and wind battered off his face, he began, “Living on a hurricane full time, I get asked a lot about hurricanes…” He looked directly at the camera, “with proper preparation though, you can make it through”! His tone was calm, cheerful and arguably disconnected from the voice of a guy about to battle mother nature.
I first found Damon when I was watching the hurricane unfold from afar. He had 36,000 followers, with an Instagram account littered with colourful pictures of his life at sea. He had all the markings of an influencer who was living through the hurricane and saw it as good content, and it was.
I listened intently to his videos, as he stared into the camera, directing me through what to do if I found myself in the middle of a hurricane. I mentally wrote down notes, made a checklist – don’t go to Florida during hurricane season, don’t stay on a sailboat, but learn how to anchor a boat, in case both of those points failed. Backup, backup, backup was a central theme running through Damon’s videos.
When I first got the chance to talk to Damon, I was struck by how relaxed and personable he was. He spoke about the past hurricane like it was nothing but a few lashes of a strong wind.
“Well, luckily, it wasn’t the worst of it here, but it was pretty windy, and especially where I’m at on the boat. It caused the waves to build with all the wind. But it was only about a day and a half. It could’ve been a lot worse.”
Damon followed his own advice and prepared, holding his boat steady with a large anchor and back up lines connected in case they fail, alongside another backup. I learned he decided to stay on his sailboat, half to ensure the boat didn’t drag, and half as a challenge to himself to see if he could.
I asked if he just recently started putting out videos of him on his boat, assuming he was an old hand at influencing due to how natural he appeared on camera, informative without seeming condescending, with all the spirit of a young daredevil, but with the sense of an old sailor. Damon replied,
“Well, I’ve been making YouTube videos for my friends and family ever since I bought the boat in December, to keep them up to date. But then the hurricane video, I think the first one, that was just for my friends, I think I had like 150 followers. Everyone had been texting me worried, so I made the video to show my friends and family, ‘oh I’m fine’. And as you saw, it really took off and now it’s got like 36,000 followers.”
Looking back on that first video, I wonder if Damon really was only talking to his friends, or if he was performing for this ‘other’ that he didn’t quite know were there yet. Just over the crest of the next wave, unbeknown to him, 36,000 faces eagerly awaited the next video to see this friendly face in the eye of the storm.
I shamelessly admitted to stalking Damon’s Instagram, taking a screenshot of his following when I first stumbled onto his page. It was at 35,900 (I was late to the party, I know!), within the next 4 days, it had grown to 36,500. I spoke to Damon a few days after the Hurricane had passed.
“Yeah, it’s crazy. Like I say, I didn’t intend for any of this to happen. I made the one video, but it just blew up. I think it’s at something like 2.5 million views, so I decided to make a couple more throughout the storm just because I was getting so many messages from people who were worried about me, so I thought I’d keep everybody up to date.”
I mentioned that I had read through some of the comments on his videos stating that if he didn’t leave, he would die. I asked Damon if these types of comments ever got to him, or if he found them to be great engagement for this new influencer life he stumbled across.
“I kind of thought both of those, so the very first video I did, I got a tonne of people telling me I was gonna die and they were gonna find my body on the news. Yeah, like I said, I’ve never had these reactions before, so all of a sudden, I get like a couple 100 of them. It definitely worried me at first, but the more I would look at them I realised it was people that lived in like the middle of the country”.
I asked Damon what he thought it would take to keep this new public interest in his life, was it doing more and more dangerous things? Sailing the Drake Passage on his 34 foot sail boat? Sailing with his eyes closed? Pledging to only steer the boat with his pinky toe into the eye of a storm?
Surprisingly, Damon offered an alternative,
“I think a lot of people would like to just see what it takes to kind of the day-to-day things. I think a lot of people think about living on a boat, but they’ve never experienced it, and I don’t think you hear about it a tonne. It’s usually like a very expensive boat and so I think I’d like to try to show the way I try to do it, really cheap and frugal.”
I joked that he’s the counter to Below Deck, attempting to show him my sailing knowledge. But I think this had the opposite affect and displayed my lack of sailing knowledge, pitting me as a normie.
“I think people definitely want to see that (dangerous things) but I personally think that’s about the most dangerous thing I want to do just for views on the Internet. As it was going on, I was always making sure I was safe and sometimes the way I videoed it, made it look a little more dangerous than it was. Personally, if there’s another hurricane coming directly here, the boat and I will be out of the way.”
I asked him what he thought about the people who were arguably using Hurricane Milton to garner views and, in some cases, money.
Damon mentions Lieutenant Dan,
“I think… he is the most famous through this past storm. Yeah so, I don’t know if he did it specifically for views, but he got a lot of views.”
I had reached out to Lieutenant Dan as he seemed to directly benefit from views on the internet, becoming famous for refusing to leave his boat. I was in touch with his ‘agent’, who wrote back, “The cost for an interview with the boat celebrity man can vary”. It seemed this hurricane influencer used his views to send him into the ‘celebrity’ stratosphere.
Damon and I discussed the future, he mentioned that putting new adventures online would give him a “purpose” for doing them. I picked up on that, interested to know if this was now his only reason for exploring.
“I think definitely half of it my own adventure… but I could maybe inspire people to go on their own adventure”.
Damon hopes to continue sailing, and I hope we continue to see him post videos of his new adventures, wherever that may take him.
