Sampson Boat Co: From $1 Wreck to 597K Subscribers

Channel: Sampson Boat Co   Who: Leo Sampson Goolden, an English boatbuilder and sailor from Bristol   Subscribers: 597K (as of 5 November 2026)   Niche: Wooden boatbuilding, traditional sailing, ocean voyages

In 2017 Leo Goolden bought a rotting 1910 sailing yacht for $1. Its name was Tally Ho, and 90 years earlier it had won the Fastnet Race, one of the toughest offshore races in the world. Leo spent the next seven years rebuilding it almost from scratch and filmed every step for a YouTube channel he called Sampson Boat Co. His viewers ended up paying for much of the work. As of 5 November 2026 the channel has 597,000 subscribers, 309 videos and more than 172 million views.

A shipyard apprentice who crossed the Atlantic alone

Leo grew up in Bristol in south-west England. According to High Country News, he was so fascinated by old boats that he skipped university to take an apprenticeship at a shipyard in his hometown. By the age of 25 he had repaired a single-masted Swedish sailboat and sailed it across the Atlantic alone, navigating by sextant after his GPS broke. After that he worked as a skipper on private yachts.

He was working on large classic yachts in the Caribbean when he saw an advert for Tally Ho. The Albert Strange Association, a group set up to preserve the designer's boats, had saved the hull from being cut up in a boatyard in Brookings, Oregon, and was looking for a new owner. In Yachting World, Leo wrote that he knew buying a crumbling wooden boat "was a terrible idea", but he was captivated by a 1927 photo of Tally Ho racing downwind under a mountain of sail. He wrote to the association asking whether they would let it go for a nominal price instead of the £25,000 they were asking. They agreed, because their priority was to save the boat.

Filming from the first day

Leo couldn't afford to rent space in a boatyard, so family friends in Sequim, Washington, let him turn their back garden into one. In spring 2017 the hull arrived on a trailer after a 600-mile trip from Oregon, with less than an inch to spare against the side of the house.

Shortly before he first saw the boat, a film producer Leo met in Antigua told him to record the story from the very first moment, and lent him a camera for the week. A friend had also shown him a popular YouTube channel run by a young sailing couple whose travels were apparently paid for by their viewers. "Surely, if they can do it…", he thought. Leo had dabbled in photography and music production, so he taught himself to edit and published his first video on YouTube. Many of the early comments said the project was a terrible idea. He later wrote that they were right, and that the comments spurred him on.

The boat was in even worse shape than he had expected. When he lifted it off its lead ballast keel, he found that the backbone timbers he had hoped to save were too damaged, so the whole centreline had to be replaced. His first real building job was to join two huge pieces of purpleheart, a dense tropical hardwood, into a single new keel. Leo wrote that the scale of the woodworking in that video brought in a lot of new viewers, and people began asking how they could help.

A rebuild paid for by the audience

From then on, Leo wrote, "the rebuild was powered by the generosity of its audience". By 2019 the channel had passed 100,000 subscribers and nearly 2,000 people were backing the project on Patreon, giving between $2 and $100 per new episode. Fans sent tools from an online wishlist, lent him a forklift and welding gear, and around 50 volunteers travelled to Sequim to work on the boat in the first two years. His Patreon page says becoming a patron doesn't unlock anything extra: it's simply a way to donate regularly, and the videos stay free on YouTube.

In 2021, after a dispute with the county over zoning, Tally Ho moved to the boatyard at Port Townsend. By then, Leo wrote, he was earning enough from his videos to rent indoor space and hire skilled tradespeople. The workload was heavy. He described working almost every waking hour and coming close to burning out, and said the positivity of the online community kept him going.

Tally Ho was relaunched in April 2024, seven years after the rebuild began. Leo wrote that the rebuild videos alone had drawn 120 million views. In July 2026 he and his crew sailed it across the Atlantic from Florida, passing the Fastnet Rock for the first time since 1927 after 26 days at sea and more than 4,000 nautical miles, before arriving in Baltimore in south-west Ireland on 31 July. The plan now is to race Tally Ho in the 2027 Fastnet Race, 100 years after it won.

What other creators can take from it

Leo didn't start with a big audience or a production team. He started with a hard, risky project, filmed it from day one, and let viewers see every setback. That gave people a reason to come back and a reason to help pay for the next stage. You don't need 597,000 subscribers for that to work. If your project, trip or build has a clear goal, even a few hundred committed supporters can cover materials, travel or time off work.

You can set that up in minutes. On Yaff you can post build diaries, photo dumps and extra videos behind monthly membership tiers, sell ebooks and guides, take tips, and talk to supporters in group chats and DMs. Starter is free with a 5% platform fee, and payouts go to your bank daily via Stripe. Start your free Yaff page and publish your first post, see pricing, or read how to fund your expedition with memberships and add Yaff to your YouTube channel.

More origin stories: From Oil Rigs to 2M Subscribers: Sailing La Vagabonde, From Lecturer to 876K Subscribers: The Beau Miles Story and From Plumber to 13M Subscribers: The Colin Furze Story.

Watch Sampson Boat Co on YouTube