Raft-Up: Laundry Day on Don Quixote

White Trash Boating
by toastfloats

"It's not that I don't love them," I muse while shifting roughly a million pounds of stinking, moldy, food encrusted clothing from the hulls into the cockpit. "It's that I would love them more if they did the laundry."

My husband apparently agrees, "They're old enough. Make them."

I am properly incredulous, "Make them." Make them. Wow. That's simple. Make three girls aged 9, 12, and 14, do something smelly, tedious, and hard. Okay. 

"You make them."

Proving that my daughters are not the only children on the boat, "No, you make them." 

I glare at my husband, hands on hip. "I cooked, I cleaned out the refrigerator, AND…" and here is the triumphal feather in my cap, "I rebuilt the starboard head." Firmly and without any hesitation, I consign DrC to hell, "You Make Them." And with that, I metaphorically wash my hands of the dish towels, panties, and shorts and head below to play World of Goo. 

The problem with laundry on a boat is that it's hard. It's laundry without a net. Actually, it's laundry without a washing machine, a dryer, or good quality, environmentally friendly soap. In fact, it's laundry without water since we start with nothing but salt water, a cranky water maker, and an attitude. The problem with laundry on our boat is that we have a lot of it.

I know people who put washing machines on their cruising sail boats. We call them weekenders. Real cruisers use their washing machines to store foulies or mangos or a replacement halyard. The chandleries sell little jokes called washing tumblers which are both too small and waste far too much water to provide a practical solution to the mountains of filthy clothing produced by three active girls and a pirate. 

I, of course, am laundry-less. While cruising, I live in an pair of hi-tech REI shorts (panties built in) and a sports bra, both of which I can wash with a bit of dish soap in a coffee mug and dry by waving them at my husband in a tauntingly sexy fashion. I don't believe there is such a thing as a boat under 100 feet  with a clothes drier. This is, of course, why safety lines were invented. It sure as hell wasn't to prevent you or your expensive boat gear from falling off the boat as we have repeatedly proven.

So. Washing on Don Quixote is an all day affair… at least. Sometimes several days. We pull out several gargantuan plastic buckets. Normal folk in the Real World buy these at WalMart to store things that they don't want but are afraid to throw away. They accumulate like drier lint in the back of closets and in garages and in attics. We fill the buckets about half full of water and a toxic Mexican laundry soap, then jam in every item of clothing we own, an indeterminant number of towels and several pillow cases. 

Then we wait. There is a theory amongst the DQ clan that if we wait long enough, the laundry will wash itself. Sometimes, this works… as in the time that the laundry was taken over by a desperate colony of thirsty bees who sucked the water out. Then there was the time it sat long enough that the smell made us dump the entire lot into the ocean rather than touch it to retrieve our belongings. 

However, mostly, the wait is for an hour or two and then the hard slogging work begins. Using a toilet bowl plunger or bare feet, we stomp the dirt out. It's like making wine the old fashioned way but without the production of palatable beverages. Then in three-man teams, we wring the sludge out using our hand crank Dynajet wringer. Load up some fresh water, repeat the stomp, repeat the wring. And again. And sometimes again because let's face it… we're filthy. 

Drying involves clipping a carabiner to each and every item of clothing. We used to use clothes pins but a 25 knot breeze one evening reduced our underwear stock by roughly 70% and took out my only push-up bra so now we clip everything to the lines in a fashion that would withstand a hurricane. Several hours later, we pull the fresh, hand-washed, line-dried linens off the halyards and sheets, completely faded of all color and with the elastic blown to hell but with the bright smell of chemical lavender.

Laundry Girls
by toastfloats

Only a short while passes while I take on the challenge of moving little balls of electronic, physics challenged goo from one location to another on my laptop, but no sounds of war upstairs is promising. DrC pops his head down into the cabin, and says, "Let's move the boat. We'll go to Bahia El Coyote."

My eyebrows go up, "What about the laundry?"

The pirate smile starts to creep through his beard, eyes dancing he says, "I had an idea." 

Twenty minutes later, we are steaming very slowly south to a new bay. Behind us, the dinghy is full of water, laundry, soap, and children, the mix gently agitating in our steady, bouncy wake. Sitting at the helm while my grinning husband drinks a beer at my side as the girls scream with laughter, I admit, "You're brilliant, you know."

Follow the Trail

Chomp It Up, Fuzzball
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

I look around the disaster zone which is my daughters' dorm room and ask my husband, “They're joking, right?”

He shakes his head: sad, frustrated, mad. “I don't think so.”

It's Sunday. Sunday at Chicken House is a Day of Work. We take this weekly opportunity to clean the house from end to end, load up the pantry with groceries, engage in serious, hard-core exercise, and study study study. I don't know that we ever consciously set out to position ourselves 180 degrees from our Christian neighbors and friends, but it's not an unhappy coincidence. There is an agreement that in addition to the toilet, shower, kitchen floor, and laundry, everyone is also required to straighten up their personal space with an eye towards removing every possible temptation to the local ant population. So DrC and I are standing, fists clenched tightly and propped aggressively on hips, to survey the results of their effort to achieve a Minimum Standard of Cleanliness.

DrC and I are not unreasonable in our fanatic insistence on cleanliness. Our concern is not founded in anything as silly as a fear of germs and bacteria; We actually welcome challenges to our immune system in the form of random strangers, poor personal hygiene, and water from suspect sources. The problem is Chicken House.

Chicken House is constructed on top of an enormous infestation of alien attack ants. These mutant black creatures have the ability to detect microscopic bits of pain au chocolate and honey drips, establishing a one inch wide trail stretching from the back door, down the hall to the living room, up on to the coffee table, over a casually draped jumper, and directly to a chunk of scone lodged in the starboard couch cushion. I sit down in the morning to finish my latte and grind my inbox down to zero. When I glance up a few minutes later, the kitchen counters are literally awash in a roiling mass of small dark invaders. They know our house schedule, architectural inadequacies, and eating habits with Google-level privacy invasion precision. If we wait patiently enough, I know eventually we'll catch the Ant Street View vehicles roaming the house snapping 360 pictures of everything we own. I'm hoping I'm not naked at the time.

Do not under any circumstances protest that ants are not sentient. If you can say that with a straight face, you've never lived with ants. Ants know all, see all. They are more clever and more ubiquitous than any omniscient deity. Like human babies, they can defy physical law and pass through openings that are considerably smaller than themselves. Ants are adaptive – block their entrance with poison gas or paprika, chewing gum or bait traps, and your average ant community will reroute faster than Internet backbone servers.

Ants are also stubborn, even more stubborn than teenagers. Our ants – and I say “our” with no small degree of irony – refuse to give up their basic contention that Chicken House and all its contents belong to the Ants. Like college roommates, what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine. It's not enough that we carefully compile all our vegie scraps into a bucket and pile it in the backyard for composting providing an endless source of food. No, it's also necessary to drink our last beer, eat the last batch of microwave popcorn, and borrow our last clean towel.... ant-iphorically speaking.

Alien Attack Ants
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

All winter long we've waged urban warfare against the ants, attempting to create safe zones within Chicken House. While conceding to the complete lawlessness of the kitchen wherein we just hope to eat our meal fast enough that it doesn't get carried away, we have been able to fight the ants back in the parental bedroom, my office, and the rooms which serve the bath, toilet, and shower. The living room and kid dorm, however, are a standing source of extreme familial strife. On the one side are parental edicts: no eating, no dishes, no candy, no cookies, nothing edible period no exceptions ever. On the other side is childhood rebellion.

So the ants are winning.

Decommissioning Don Quixote for the Summer

Regurtigating Crap
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

We're leaving the boat for at least six weeks in Santa Rosalia. During that time there is a small but finite chance she'll have to ride out a small hurricane without us. Even if she doesn't, Don Quixote is going to sit for many weeks in the blazing sun all by herself. No family. No cat. No friendly mechanic to pat her diesels and soothe her ruffled rigging. She is going to be alone, lonely, solo.

In preparation, DrC and I put together a list of Things to Do Before You Leave the Boat, a.k.a. The Decommissioning List. Okay, technically it was two lists. DrC is big on grabbing the nearest pulp product – whether it be used envelope, napkin, paper towel or cruising magazine – and having at it with a handwriting style which combines the frenetic pace of a homicidal, crack-addled race driver and the manual dexterity of a toddler. I, on the other hand, discuss the issues at length, type the notes into iGTD, organize the tasks into contexts and projects, prioritize and date each unit of work, assign resources, and create online links to related materials. After which I print the results and they rot in the same bacteria-laden, sodden pile in the corner of the salon in which you'll find DrC's notes scrawled. It's a Thing We Do.

Before DrC left, he preemptively translated the majority of his own list into action. We took down the jib and all the running rigging, washing them in Woolite before storing them off the boat in a room onshore. He conditioned the diesels with biocide and prepped the outboard for a long stretch of quiet. While he was here, we cleared the bulky items out of the lockers, took care of the electrical, and completed all the heinous annual maintenance required on both holding tanks. Then he left.

Ever since, the much reduced crew of Don Quixote consisting of good ole me and two moderately unreliable little girls have attempted to complete our Decommissioning List. All this work seemed daunting when the waves were gently rocking the boat and the cool breeze was spinning us gently into new vistas every hour or so. Now at times the list feels insurmountable. I can hardly contemplate buttering toast, let alone scrubbing out the bilges.

We have been considerably hampered by the weather. The temperature has ranged from a hot 98 to a heinous 106 during the day and has only once gone below 85 at night, usually hovering in the low 90s. The humidity dips to 45% when the wind blows from the west but spends most of its time in the 65 to 75% range. The Santa Rosalia weather site cheerfully reported this morning that was only 36C but “it feels like 43C.” That's 109 people. That's insane. Several mornings I've sat naked in the salon in front of a fan using a bag of frozen fruit to cool my head while I watched the fog roll in. I hate fog at 90 degrees.

Nevertheless, we manage to chip piece by piece at the incredibly comprehensive list I created while sitting in lazy splendor sipping rum punch in Animas Slot. With only a week or so left before V-Day (the day we put our lives into the van and head north), we are close to the point where the only tasks left are those that must be done on just about the last day: cleaning and shutting down the refrigerator and taking down the bimini, for example. I can see the light at the end of this long, effort-driven tunnel.

After living on the boat for two years, it is simply astounding how much grunge we have accumulated. As we empty out each locker, scrub it down, wipe it out, spray it with vinegar water, and reload, we daily watch the water line rise. For an awkward few weeks, the bows were six inches up and driving the transoms down as we started from the front of the boat and worked our way back. As we near completion, Don Quixote is beginning to resume her trim. I think that by the time we're done, DrC and Jaime will return astonished to our lean, mean, trim sailing machine. Whereupon we will promptly fill her with dirt, cat hair, kid crap, cheap plastic shit, and Costco bulk food items.

Purging Pleasures
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Mera, Aeron, and I are just about done in, though. We're ready to spend days driving here and there. We are definitely ready to be off the dock and away from Santa Rosalia. I don't know how long we'll spend in the States; We've been hearing horror stories from cruisers who proceeded us up there into the Real World which suggest it's not such a fun and happy place.

At least we'll know that when we get back, our boat will be ready to go. At least we know that just about anywhere we go in the States will be cooler and more comfortable than here.

One Bite at At Time

You Want Me to What?
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Believe it or not, cruising is not a vacation. It feels like it should be, but it isn't. After all, we're on the Mexican Riviera in the middle of winter while everyone else is slogging through sleet and snow. We enjoy pleasant company, great surfing, and wonderful weather. And we don't work for a living. Which is the problem. We're not working.

See what happens is this. You leave your home port after many years of preparation. The boat was at the dock while you outfitted, prepped, primped, polished, and laid in fifty cans of diced tomatoes. Then you left the comforts of home and started cruising. Which is great, mind you, but cruising is hard on the boat. Mexico is really super dirty. Children and cats and husband notwithstanding, it is fair to say I could be down here on Don Quixote all by myself and the boat would be covered in grime from bow tip to stern step in grime within a month.

And did you know the ocean is salty? And full of sand?!

Every day you live on your boat something gets worn down, dinged, scratched, or a little dingier. Every day the salt water gradually eats away the finish on the metal shiny parts, and the Mexican dust scrapes away at the plastic buffed parts. One day the dinghy oars scrape down the side of the starboard hull. Another night, the cat gets hold of a rug and tears it to shreds. Two weeks ago, every thread on the sail cover decided to simultaneously self-destruct in a puff of reinforced DB-92, sun-resistant dust. The electronics randomly quit, not always permanently but more or less in a fashion to render them useless as reliable tools. The sail locker builds a layer of mud and ocean gunk which ripens in the hot sun to a stench that rivals the kitty litter. Your children forget to use a cutting board one day and leave scratches on the counter top, your husband doesn't wipes his hands when changing the oil and leave stains all over the stairs. A pin box explodes and scatters pins everywhere which subsequently rust leaving long pin-sized shadows in odd locations in the cockpit like the outlines of murder victims etched into the white fiberglass floor.

The only way to combat this inevitable, inexorable process is with an equal, sustained maintenance effort. Every day, a little here... a little there. But no one does this the first year. Actually, there are a few who do. Beach Access does. His boat looks new. I don't know anyone else in their first year of cruising, however, who has managed to get anything constructive done this season, let alone set up a regular, consistent maintenance schedule which fixes as much as the cruising life destroys.

No... we're all dreadfully far behind. The world is fast destroying our floating homes. We're watching them literally shake themselves apart under our feet and now that the end of the first season approaches, panic is starting to set it. Because frankly, there is no effing way any human alive can catch up. We're in the 14th week of a 16 week semester, and we haven't read any of the course list. We talked the graduate assistant into giving us a passing grad on the mid-term then downloaded 95% of the contents of a mid-semester paper. We can barely remember from one day to the next what time the class meets. With two weeks left, we have to master the economic and political history of Western Europe from 1600 B.C. To 1950 A.D., and we can't remember if the Black Plague came before Joan of Arc or after the invention of the printing press.

Except it's worse. This floating monstrosity is not only our home; It represents roughly 50% of our net worth. With the market for yachts presently about as active as the market for the toenail clippings of dead fat white guys, we can't sell the boat to pay off debts, revert to a land based life, or otherwise escape the nautical trap into which we dropped our sorry asses. Cruisers who fail to adjust to the reality of their self-destructing floating investments, lose them. The boats sink. This is not a metaphorical literary device to induce sympathy. It is a literal truism.

I'd rather not go down with the ship, so after hyperventilating, screaming in my pillow for an hour, and indulging in a good cry, I set us up with a schedule. The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. The way to get Don Quixote back in trim is to do a little bit more than a little bit every day. Just as we spent nearly a year not doing enough, we're going to have to spend nearly a year doing just a little bit too much. Mathematically speaking, this should result in a fine cruising vessel with functioning equipment and decently maintained deck by roughly this time next year.

Better At A Distance
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Our first week of what I think of as Routine Maintenance Plus went very well. DrC changed the oil and oil filters, fixed the water maker, replaced a fitting on the starboard traveler, and installed the dinghy wheels. I decided to recover the cleanliness and “beauty” of the boat first through reinstituting our “Make It Light” program. The purpose of Make It Light is to both improve boat performance and trim while also controlling crap. Each and every locker and cubby on the boat is periodically emptied, wiped out, inventoried and reorganized. All the tasks in my iGTD Make It Light project were roughly six months over due, but this week I made inroads. I purged and cleansed the medicine cabinet, pantry, under and behind stove, navigation table, salon center seat, under galley sink locker, and master cabin. I also scrubbed the starboard hull since the bottom paint has basically cried Uncle on its attempt to keep the hull free of grass and barnacles.

It's a start. We can not afford for this renewed maintenance energy to go the way of similarly well-intentioned New Year's Resolutions. It's okay be fat and drunk. It is not okay to be fat, drunk, and sinking.

Editor's Note: After writing this post, DrC and I got a super deal on a boat cleaning in La Cruz. All the crud was gone in a spasm of work by the fantastic team of Remington and Crew. All hail Manuel Labor! This allows us focus on the real "fixer upper stuff" for the next few months instead of cleaning cleaning cleaning.

Hair Hair Hairay!

Growing Up Too Fast
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

I’ve read any number of cruising books with photo inserts. The people are all tan, half naked and the hair flocks in 60’s chic down backs, off chins and out of handsome smiling noses. The boating crowd of the early cruising boom apparently didn’t own a pair of scissors. And why should they? Part of getting back to nature, getting in tune with the inner dude, is to let those locks go! Let the hair hang down! Oh yeah!

Oh no. Oh no you don’t. Not on my boat. I swear to god I’m going to shave everyone naked crisp bald. Including the cat. Then I’m going to seal all hirsute portions of anatomy with candle wax. Maybe I’ll seal it with candle wax first and do the spa treatment on all the hair everywhere. Maybe I’ll buy one of everything at the Farmacia Similar and start experimenting with a cocktail that renders everyone hairless, witless, and immobile.

“Where does all the hair go in the real world?” is what I want to know. I want to know how the hair fell from our heads and drifted around our house and somehow escaped my attention. Alternatively, please explain why every single hair from eye lashes to pubes, from kitty whiskers to toe nail fuzz manages to fall from its source and adhere itself to the fiberglass of my boat. It doesn’t float away, it doesn’t biodegrade, it doesn’t get eaten by an army of dust mites. The hair sticks.

Our Lawn
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

To everything.

To every surface and nook, to every cushion, brush, and cloth. It collects in corners and bunches in hatches. It bonds like dead bread dough to sponges and melds with the area rugs. There are long hairs tan hairs from Jaime and short blonde hairs from Aeron. Sticky pokey wirey black old lady hairs and soft silky dark brown hairs gleaned from Mera’s mane. There is hair in the sink, on the floor, and in the refrigerator. There is hair on the salon windows making odd traceries that provide distraction and amusement, and there is hair clogging the bilge pump on the port side.

I can not wax sufficiently poetic about how much I hate hair. Where is Shel Silverstein when you need him.

In my next life, I’m going to birth a family of jelly fish. Slimy but at least they’re hairless.

Drunken Stupor Observations

Enrique's
Uploaded by toastfloats.

Actually, I’m not as inebriated as I’d like to be. If I were, I suppose I wouldn’t be able to feel the tips of my fingers and typing would become impossible. On the other hand, maybe as a technical writer, typing has become so integral to my existence that I can accomplish the task in any mental state. You hear of musicians, for example, who are capable of feats of tremendous virtuosity even when high on all sorts of illegal substances. So too might I, a technical writer, be highly capable of producing wit and grammatically correct prose after consuming multiple alcoholic beverages.

Alternatively, spellcheck is saving my ass.

Without sober reflection, here are my observations on the cruising life:

I really want a bath. I miss bathing. I miss the little ritual of asking DrC if I can take an hour to bathe, heading for the bath, locking the door. I would turn the spigot on hot hot hot, drop in half a Lush bath bomb, and sink in. I’d take a good book, preferably one with very little character development and a great deal of hot, uninhibited sex on moors, in closets and pressed on the stairs to the second floor. My flesh would turn pink, then red, and my head would spin as I stepped out of the tub. DrC would be ready with a cold glass of water, knowing I’d spent too long in the hot water, dehydrated, and was about to pass out. Then I’d flop like a stranded fish on my bed, too hot to cover myself with clothes or bedding, the cool night air chilling my heated skin while my head swam and spun in delicious slow whirls until I’d fall to a limp, warm sleep.

I’d like my boat better if it didn’t move all the time. When you’re slightly drunk and your head is two sips short of a complete spin, it would be nice if the ground didn’t move. The movement, the sloshy sounds, the honking of the sea lions on the nearby breakwater, combine to make me feel considerably more intoxicated than I should be forced to feel after such a small quantity of wine and large quantity of tasty pork and vegetable curry.

I’d like my family better if they stopped arguing with me. There is a Rule. It’s like the Rule of Three, I suppose, a guideline for better living. Not like running a stop light... more like shutting off the lights before leaving the house. The Rule is that if three or more people have the same problem with you, the problem is you not them and you need to fix it yourself. So I have a really big problem with my family which causes me to yell at them all the time. The problem is that I want a clean, healthy, safe environment, and they want to live like pigs with a self-immolation complex. The whole place would smell like a Saturday morning bacon fry if I let them live like they apparently want to. This is my problem. I must fix it. I think a good start would be to adopt a more carnivorous approach to life.

Spore is not an educational game no matter how much we want it to be so. I’m sorry; As a homeschool parent, you can not justify the purchase of this game as an educational expense. It’s a great deal of fun, and I recommend it highly, but we all need to stop pretending we’re learning more about evolution and societal development by playing it.

I shouldn’t miss friends I’ve only known for a few weeks, but I do anyway. I miss s/v Wish and s/v Carasan. I want to spend more time with s/v Walking on Water and s/v Tango. I miss Ted and Sue of s/v Indigo so much it hurts. I miss s/v Rubber Duckies, with their great attitude and wonderful children. I miss Laureen and Jason and Behan in a way that strikes to the heart of what I am. There are boats ahead of me with more wonderful people, but part of me is afraid to meet them. I am not sure I’m cut out for this love ‘em and leave ‘em approach to friendships. In the real world, I made friends by the decade: Joe and Alex in one, Jim and Keet in another, Kristina and Joann in a third. Now I make them monthly, but it’s hard to feel right about the transient nature of these relationships. DrC was probably right: I’m ideally cut out for monogamy. I didn’t believe him at the time, but 20 years and counting suggests that once again he was right and I was wrong.

Finally, I have decided not to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. Last year, I used it as a grand excuse to write “go look at my prior great art” posts. I think that would have been acceptable had I simultaneously either produced a great work of fiction or -- alternatively -- merely spun out 50,000 words of drivel for future use on this blog. Since I did neither, it was a complete cop out. This year -- starting October 1 -- I started pounding out 50,000 words of blog content with nary a pause in the delivery schedule. Never mind the why, I don’t plan on changing the delivery schedule to the blog any time soon.

And with that, I get to sign off. 923 words later, I feel as though I’ve not only exercised my wine soaked demons, but also made significant progress towards my 50,000 word objective.

My Posse
Uploaded by toastfloats

Cruising World July 2008 Photo Contest

I won I won I won!! Woot! Thank you Jody for encouraging me to submit my laundry photo for the monthly photo contest on the Cruising World web site. I'm at Walter's Cove with basically no services so I'll add the photo to this blog entry later. In the meantime, please go check out the article and picture at Cruising World.

Doing More With Less - Bathing

The boat teaches many lessons in conservation. This is the third in a series of posts about how we boaters do more with considerably less. The tips are valid for land based life as well, though, so hopefully folks can use some of these ideas.

* * *

Gratuitous Daffodil Shot
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

I'm an American, not some Eurobabe sexpot with long dark hair in all the right places and a godz given right to avoid soap. We Americans fear the smell of sweat. We are terrified of oily skin, lanky hair, and well stewed underarm odor. Our poop don't stink, our breaths are treated with a myriad of pastes, gums, and curiously strong candies, and we have a pathological* need to wash our hands with antibacterial soaps.

Well, I used to be a squeaky clean American. That was then. This is now. Now, I stink.

So do my children.

We don't want to talk about my husband.

You can blame it on the lack of water and soap. That's a good place to start, actually. It provides at least the beginnings of a reason, if not a fine excuse for poor hygiene. But the truth, as is so frequently the case, fails to reflect well on reality. And the reality is that I'm lazy.

With my family and my boat, there are so very many battles I can wage. We can argue about learning stuff, fixing holes in the boat, putting things away, and whether or not Nora Roberts is appropriate reading material for a 9 year old. We have been known to come to blows over where to put stinky shoes and whether or not to wear even wear them. There are screaming fits about mud and sand, dead animals, and the endlessly overflowing boxes of hardware sitting in the cockpit.

So when you get right down to it, I'm too exhausted – too mentally beaten to maternal pulp – to force my husband and children to clean their bodies on a regular basis. As long as the really intimate parts cannot be distinguished from the background smells of diesel, BeanPod candles, and last night's dinner, I figure I'm ahead.

Yet, there is a reason why boaters tend to be a scruffier lot than landlubbers. The reason is quarters. I mentioned this months ago in The Quarter Quandary, but in case you did not understand my profound frustration at the time, let me repeat myself. It costs money to get clean. It costs a lot of money.

In the Northwest, you arrive at a marina with a shower only to find that your $40/night docking fee does not include hot running water unless you dump in two quarters every two minutes. You also learn quickly that the first round... sometimes even the second round... comes out of the tap at approximately the temperature of an orange flavored beverage dropped from a soda machine. Just as the tiniest hint of warmth enters the stream of water, the damn thing shuts off.

This is your cue to soap up. Frantically. Presumably to reduce the growth of mold, fungus, and homeless people, the showers are extraordinarily well ventilated. Read, the shower stalls are wide open at the base, inevitably there are windows at about head level which haven't closed since World War II, and some clever state maintenance project manager has installed an industrial strength fan which automatically turns on with the lights. Every erg of warmth on your skin disappears instantly, leaving you to create soap foam on a ridge line of goose bumps. Male anatomy disappears in protest of the conditions, and little girls start screaming when you attempt to detoxify their hair with shampoo (which admittedly has roughly the texture and temperature of a slushy).

Back On the Water
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Once soaped at great cost to ear drums and health, you add quarters to the machine. However, you can hear the marina or state park supervisor's wicked laugh as the water blasts out at the original, slightly frozen gradient. You are starting over, people. The only way to keep the warmth coming is to keep feeding the damn thing quarters until you've taken out a second mortgage on your boat. Worse, your children are now slippery as eels and pissed off to boot. They are agile, evil little animals with viciously piercing voices and malevolent looks. It requires a towel snapping cattle prod, a firm grasp of advanced middle school vocabulary, and arms of steel to get them under the glacial stream before the two minutes are up.

And for what? Odds are that they'll be covered in sand, shore mud, and indescribable organic smutz within an hour.

So I am taking a stand in defense of the environment here and foregoing bathing for the next five months until we get to Mexico. It's just not worth it.

* True statement. You need to stop washing with that sh*. All you're doing is ensuring the breeding of super bacterial bugs that nothing can kill.

Doing More With Less - Water

Copious Water While Washing Dishes
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

The boat teaches many lessons in conservation. This is the first in a series of posts about how we boaters do more with considerably less. The tips are valid for land based life as well, though, so hopefully folks can use some of these ideas.

* * *

Water, water everywhere but none of it fit to drink. Did you know that the American household consumes roughly 70 gallons of potable water a day? Did you know that our water tank only holds 80 gallons? This is a mathematical conundrum we must solve before we can credibly live aboard for any length of time.

We debated adding a second water tank. On the plus side, it would be nice to have more water. On the down side, water is heavy and catamarans do not do so well with extra weight. Water weighs a lot more than you think. In fact, our full water tank weighs considerably more than a Yanmar engine and slightly less than the family's laundry pile at the end of a particularly busy week. When you stand ashore on a windy day watching the surf flip your dinghy around like plastic toys in a bathtub, the thought of shlepping hundreds of pounds of water from shore to ship is a daunting one.

So while another tank is probably inevitable, we also committed to investing in a water maker. Typically, Dr C doesn't want to just outright buy a water maker. That's way, way too simple. Instead, he's been accumulating the parts for a water maker in the space beneath our bunk like outsized, electronic lint. Sometime over the next year, he and the girls will undertake “Build a Water Maker” as a class project. This is, more or less, an outstanding idea. If you can build it, the water maker costs roughly half as much as store-bought. And when it breaks – as it will inevitably – there will be at least four persons on the boat who know how to fix it.

The problem with water makers is that you are essentially converting fossil fuel (diesel) into water at a 1 to 3 ratio. Some are more efficient, some less. This is probably not the best way to get water on to the boat. It's also not particularly environmentally friendly, and it costs a fortune. Never mind. This alternative is moot for at least a year until Dr C and the students of Don Quixote Academy actually build the thing.

In the meantime, we work diligently on reducing our water consumption. The following are my water conservation tips:

Enjoy Dirt – Why do we feel compelled to be so clean? I'm not sure I ever truly bought into the OCD-like insistence on sanitizing and disinfecting everything so prevalent in our country, but now I find it utterly baffling. “God made dirt and dirt don't hurt,” is a phrase to live by on a boat. If you can't get clean by swimming in the ocean or stealing time quarter by quarter in a marine shower, then stay dirty. Swipe a damp blue cloth over the really smelly parts every day or so, and get used to smelling bad. Incense and fragrant candles help.

Use Salt Water First – Just about everything you need to clean, you can clean first with ocean water and reserve fresh water for a last bit of rinse. The notable exception is your teeth.

Use Less Soap – This is actually a post for this series all by itself. There are literally dozens of ways to use less soap. The important issue in water conservation, however, is that the less soap you use, the less water you need to get rid of it.

Catch Rain – We haven't started doing this yet, so I'll hold off relating how successful the technique will prove to be. Our research tells us that it should work pretty well as long as you are someplace that rains. So the strategy will probably work well next spring in the Desolation Wilderness but fail miserably down in Mexico. Also, you need to let it rain long enough to wash the salt off your rain catcher before you start capturing it for rinse and drink water. Otherwise, you might as well be pulling a bucket up from the side.

Okay, we need less of this...
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Drink Beer – We could generalize to wine or rum as well, but calorie for calorie, I think beer is includes more H2O. We've also learned that beer is cheaper than water in many Mexican coastal towns.

* * *

Water is not free. In truth, it never actually was. It always came from somewhere, and taking it out of the water cycle to use on our clothes, cars, and faces on a grand scale didn't do anyone any favors. Our record thus far is ten days on eighty gallons plus one trip to a shore bound laundry mat. Take the Don Quixote challenge and see if you can do the same in your house.

Where's the Shovel?

Arboretum
Originally uploaded by brainswax.

A scream of pain rose from the starboard hull. Children have many screams. The smart Darwinian money is on those parents capable of quickly distinguishing between the “cry wolf” style screams and the Real Thing. This was the Real Thing, no question. Based on volume, pitch, and sincerity, this one involved physical injury to my youngest.

Mama Bear sprung into action. I levitated out of the bunk and up the companionway. Then I dashed across the salon, grabbing a blue cloth en route. I never go anywhere without a clean blue cloth. I threw myself into the children's hull and rammed my way into the girls' cabin, from experience simply leaping over the pile of detritus that litters their cabin floor.

Aeron, still mid-scream, was holding up a rather bloody paw. The story revealed much later is that a lose, metal catch on her art box had finally given way, and she had gashed out a good chunk of her left palm. Unfortunately, I couldn't get to her. She was huddled on the back wall and twitx me and thee were a veritable herd of stuff animals, pillows and blankies.

In full Mega Mom Mode, I started brutaly tossing precious dolls on to the cabin floor. A confetti of beanie babies, throw pillows, and Build a Bear sweater and pants sets flew into the air as I forced my way towards my baby. Getting close, I reached out, grabbing Aeron by her uninjured arm, and lifted her out of cacoon of bedding and into my lap. I slapped the blue cloth onto the wound, put pressure on it, and then held up her hand to slow the bleeding. Aeron is a trooper. Things were definitely in hand now, literally, so her screaming subsided to a choked, indignant snuffling as I craddled her and explained to her that everything would be okay. We would put some stingy stuff on, wrap it all up carefully, and she'd be back in business in no time. We just needed to get the first aid kit and Daddy.

I shifted her to start making our way back to the salon when I recognized my serious mistake. The cabin floor was literally hip deep in bedding and toys pressed firmly against the door. Jaime was pushing against the outside, asking if we needed help, but she could barely move it. Like a landslide on a major interstate, it would take a crew of hundreds and some heavy equipment to shift the load out of the way of traffic.

Aeron in a Good Mood
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Aeron and I simultaneously came to the same conclusion and looked up. The only way out of there was through the ceiling hatch. Still gripping Aeron's hand to staunch the blood, we each reached our free arms up to undog the hatch. I went up first, then helped her out just as Dr C boarded the boat. There are times when he earns his sobriquet as Dr and this was one of them. He immediately grasped the situtation, scooped up a now giggling Aeron, and whisked her off to do his professional medicine man dance to heal her hand. Ever the diligent sailor, I redogged the hatch and went to wash my hands and pour a glass of wine.

At some point, I'm going to have to face the challenge of getting back into that cabin. I might write it off as a dead loss of space, given over to a herd of rampaging giraffalopes and cackling furbies, but I can't. I think we left Mera in there.

Every Nook and Cranny

Just One Corner
Uploaded by toastfloats

Until Dr C had a mid-life crisis, I hadn't cleaned a toilet since 1985. It was Berkeley and I was a sophomore. Thanks to rent control, I found a three-bedroom apartment near the campus with a total monthly rent less than my latte budget and two resident room mates: a lesbian fashion model and a Turkish gigolo. As they both considered themselves far too beautiful to actually do dishes, I instituted a cleaning tariff. If they wanted me to take over the domestic chores, by dogs they would be pay me to do so. In turn, I would hire people for that.

This is actually a surprisingly satisfactory solution to room mates. When Dr C, my once and future husband, moved in, I saw no reason not to continue the practice. Jaime's arrival cemented my conviction that life was not worth living without Merry Maids. And so it goes.

As part of our cost-cutting measures when I quit my job in 2005, we cut out all the expenses that made a two-income, upwardly yuppifying household possible: day care, private school, lawn service, housekeeper, manicurist. Come to think of it, we cut out hair dresser, vet, and doctor as well substituting them respectively with a large pair of sheers, a dead cat (old age and it was truly tragic), and the Canadian prescription drug industry.

This left me with a large, old bungalow, three children, and a male. They are disgusting. This entire conversation should be predicated with the phrase, “I love them but...” because they are just filthy creatures. I swear those girls can merely walk through a room to convert if from a neat, Lemon Pledge picture of Betty Crocker magnificence into a scene out of Martha Stewart's worst nightmares. And my husband? Let's just start with aim -- and the inability of men to do so -- and move on from there without further detail.

So for nearly a year, I've been looking forward to moving aboard the boat for the most simple and practical of reasons: less to clean. Our entire boat could fit into the family room of our old house. It has to be quicker, easier to clean. The application of basic mathematics compels this conclusion.

Unfortunately, that's not the way it happened. Essentially, the problems fall into three categories: things that grow, places you can't reach, and things that grow in places you can't reach.

Things that Grow – I now realize that every living creature is secretly a dreamer sailor, and they all want to live on my boat. Children, friends, family, seagulls, harbor seals, bacteria, algae, snails, rats, gecko lizards. If they can figure out a way to get aboard, they'll settle in for the duration and make a home out of it. My boat has yet to meet a cold climate mold spore it doesn't seek to bond with... more or less permanently. The problem with all this vigorous life is that it gets crowded, and most of these guests don't smell too yummy. Thus far, I've been reasonably successful in my attempts to kill them all with a combination of Simple Green, elbow grease, and country music.

Places You Can't Reach – The family room had four corners. I could largely clean the entire room with a fluffy duster, a bottle of orange oil, and a vacuum cleaner. When I was feeling particularly Spring Cleany, I would take a Q-tip and wipe that little tiny space in the corner that was otherwise unreachable. I think this happened once in recorded history. Mostly I put furniture in front of the corners.

Don Quixote, on the other hand, wouldn't know a straight angle if she met one strolling through Deception Pass on a fine Saturday morning with a sign on his forehead. This may be a by-product of her fundamental Frenchness. The French are apparently, as a cultural rule, averse to right angles. The result, however, is a boat with more corners than a game of Blockus. Which gets to my final burden...

Things That Grow in Places I Can't Reach
Uploaded by toastfloats

Things That Grow in Places You Can't Reach -- Every living thing on our boat that is smaller than a toy poodle prefers to live in a place I can't reach. In fact, for such a capacious vessel, I am routinely astonished by how many places are completely and utterly unreachable. My husband complains about the space under the starboard head and shower which is inexplicably blocked by a solid, plastic formed floor. My personal bitch is with the keels. They may only be three feet down but they are too narrow to get your hand into for a good, algae and stinky gunk removing scrub. I also hate all those corners – those thousands of corners – each of which is filled with the oddest combination of dead skin cells, sand, bits of hair, and trail mix, bonded into a matrix by human hair and distilled spit. Worse, I can't hide them. A dozen of them push themselves to your attention as you move around the companionway alone. Cleaning requires a jumbo box of Q-tips, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and the patience of Job.

So forgive me, my friends whose boats I visited and silently sneered at, lifting my supercilious nose at your grime and grit. Please forgive me. And close your eyes as you make your way up the stairs.

Turning in My Credentials

You Pay for the View
Uploaded by toastfloats

I like to think of myself as a post-modern feminist. Or a post-feminine modernist. Or just someone for whom busting gender roles is not really a calling so much as an inadvertent Truth. I am an unabashed computer geek in a sea of gamers for whom the phrase “Frost Shock!!” actually means something. My best friends discuss the relative merits of GTD applications over IRC, and purchasing my first Mac in ten years was close to a sexual experience. I don't own a lacy bra, I selected a birthing center based on the speed of their WiFi, and I get new clothes only when my mother buys them for me. It's fair to say, I've earned my butch chops.

The move to boat life, as a result, has been fraught with opportunities to fail in my endless non-effort to be a model of all that is 21st century woman. For one thing, I like to cook. I like messing with our gimpy oven and experimenting with two-burner cooking. I also like to navigate, communicate with our land-based friends, and provision the linens. In the sailing world, these are the Girl Jobs. Dr C in turn loves to mess with the engines, tear apart and rebuild the electrical system, and build a water maker from scratch. These are Boy Jobs. I teach school and take care of the children; he works at the office and brings home the cruising kitty. It's like we threw away twenty years of marital equality and stepped into an episode of Leave it Beaver.

So when it came time to purchase an outfit for my eldest daughter's Irish dancing competition, I dug in my heels. Just because I'm the girl doesn't mean I should have to do the shopping. I hate shopping. I hate clothes. I especially hate clothes shopping. He's the one that gave me three girls and no little boy sperm. It's his fault they want to wear something frilly and hop up and down like flower fairies with backbones made of pogo sticks. He could just take them off to Target and take care of this little matter while I read through the manual on our new SSB.

Unfortunately about a half glass of wine after they left, the heater kicked on and a strong smell of diesel began to waft up from the starboard cabin. Boats often smell like fuel, but whenever you append the word “strong,” you've got a problem. I flipped off the heater, grabbed a flashlight, and headed into the starboard hull to figure out what was going on.

And it wasn't good. The bilge was bright pink.

Now here's the thing about the bilge. Bilge water comes in an array of colors that would do a paint store proud, and each color tells you something about what you're going to spend your next thousand dollars to fix. For example, let's say the water is green. Green means you've had standing water in that bilge for long enough to grow algae. Look to your bilge pump as the culprit since either the pump, the relay, the electrical attached to the relay, or the sensor is busted, loose, or missing in action. How about clear and getting higher at a visible rate? Well that would be a hole. Holes in a boat are Bad. Brown? Let's just remember what always slides down hill.

But pink. Pink is probably the worst. Pink equals diesel. The brighter the pink, the greater the spill. This is not something you can just pump out unless you don't mind being held by your fellow mariners in the same esteem as the captain of the Exxon Valdez. Pink means pulling out hazardous waste buckets, oil-soaked clothes, and a pair of gloves that go up to your elbows.

It took some crawling around to figure it out. A fitting on the top of the diesel fuel tank for the starboard engine had worked its way partially lose. Fuel had splashed out and down. Lots of fuel. Enough fuel to coat the hull beneath the tank and overflow into the bilge. As long as we didn't move the boat, no more would come out. Unfortunately, boats move. It needed to be fixed, the fuel mopped up and disposed of in the proper receptacles and with complete compliance to all the relevant statutes, laws, and ritual sacrifices to the gods of marina purity. Finally, the fitting needed to re-affixed in a way that would prevent a reenactment.

Our Dancing Girls
Uploaded by toastfloats

And it couldn't wait. The repairs took two hours of slogging work soaking up fuel, scrubbing everything with Simple Green and salt water, power sucking out the water, and disposing of all the waste. Dr C and the girls showed up just as I finished, all in great spirits with a really cute outfit, ice cream cones, and babbling about their pleasant evening with their father.

To hell with feminism. I should have gone shopping.

Brighter Than a Thousand Suns

The word to describe a marina on a sunny day is “blinding.” The water is blinding. The sky is blinding. The boats are blinding. Everything is bright and shiny. In fact, boat owners refer to the trim on their boats which facilitate this property of blinding as “brightwork.” Brightwork is defined as any piece of wood trim or polished metal on a vessel.

Brightwork sucks for the very simple reason that bright is work. If you want to make it bright, you have to polish it. Or you have to sand and varnish it. In either case, every little turnbuckle, fiddle, or chrome plated navigational aide that makes your boat a showroom stunner increases your aesthetic maintenance time by a factor of one hour per square inch per month.

Nobody wants to talk about this when you are buying the boat. In fact, the opposite is true. The broker walks you around discussing the stunning teak deck, the shining handrails, the gleaming toe rails, wooden helm panel, and beautifully chromed dodger. Brightwork makes the boat feel richer, more powerful, more sleek... as if the polish and varnish and gleam will slide you more swiftly through the water. The boat speaks to you with its simple elegance and old world touches. And behind this beautiful candidate boat is an army of teenagers, most likely children of the owner or broker, who are paying off their first car by enslaving themselves to sand paper and brushes every weekend and all summer until the boat sells. After which, they'll be handed WD40, sandpaper, and chrome polish to start work on the next boat.

Maintaining brightwork is a Sisyphean effort comparable to painting the Golden Gate Bridge. A labor of love that starts every spring, proceeds all summer and isn't done until fall. You'll have two weeks of gorgeous Indian summer weather during which you attempt to invite every human being you know to visit the boat for cocktails or whatever. It's a brief window of singular beauty as your boat slices through the autumn chill, gleaming in the afternoon light like the sun kissed waves themselves.

Then the winter weather sets in. You winterize the boat and walk away, proud of a season well spent in improving the beauty and appeal of your floating investment. Six months later you uncover the boat to discover that all the varnish is peeled, all the chrome is pitted, and the fine teak decks are faded to a dull, dreary gray. Rather than spend the summer realizing those winter dreams of sailing around on a high performance work of art, you instead start planning, purchasing, and scheduling the annual maintenance ritual.

Or you don't.

An alternative is to buy a boat with no brightwork. We did. There are precisely three pieces of wood on the outside of our boat -- two toe rails and a very small teak fiddle on the helm. There is no getting around the cleaning, polishing, and sealing required of your exposed metal, but even there you can take the philosophy that “less is more.” We ignore our wood. It turns out that if you simply ignore it long enough, all the varnish peels off, the entire thing dulls to an even gray, and then there is no bright to work.

The fly in the ointment of this otherwise (un)brilliant solution to brightwork is that our boat is white. By not purchasing a boat with teak decks, we instead took possession of a white boat. A friend once told me that we have a French – production – plastic -- catamaran. It was my distinct impression that as a long term, old-school monohull sailor, he found it difficult to prioritize which of those four words was the most offensive. For the purpose of today's subject, let's take a look just at the plastic part. The white plastic part. Or actually, the entire white plastic boat.

White gleams and glows in the dark. It also looks great on the dock when you see boat after boat lined up. The truly blinding part of a marina is the glare off the hundreds of white hulls. I tried to search Google for the answer to the question: Why are boat hulls white? And came up with nothing. Nadda. There must be a reason. I'm sure it has something to do with making the fiberglass last longer. Also, I really can't imagine how hot the deck would get if it were a lovely chocolate brown or navy blue.

In any case, white is the most goddamn unforgiving color. You can see everything on it. I swear my girls just look at that big white hull and the thing starts to look like hell. Spots of mustard and spots of mud. Spots of pink diesel and tan engine oil. There are whorls and swirls of little girl hair and large chunky male foot prints. A fine slough of sand dusts the cockpit and peanut butter fingerprints rim the port hatch. Air pollution wafts down from the Seattle skyline, drifts on to our boat, and then runs in gray stains down the sides, while a more natural form of pollution in the form of large green and red (yes RED!) bird doo lands in great splats like an avian Pollack at work on the canvas of our deck.

Grime and dirt collect in pockets at the door which cannot be reached with sponge, brush or cloth. Fruit punch in a bewildering variety of artificial flavors and colors speckles the cockpit seats, combined with the richer reds of Cabernet, Merlot and Shiraz.

You can't clean it. Or you can try, but it doesn't stay clean. All the water in the world can't wash off all the grime. Hours of effort on hands and knees can reduce the sheer volume of dots, spots, and blemishes, but no one but the aforementioned army of indigent teenagers can actually get all of it. And this is one case where two hulls is actually a distinct disadvantage. I find that no sooner have I managed to whiten, brighten, and seal one hull, then I turn around to find the other side covered in lunch, Popsicle drips, engine rags, and crab guts.

The solution is, like the brightwork, simple. Give up. Take a pump and blast sea water over the deck and throughout the cockpit every other day to remove the basically unsanitary dead things and let the devil take the rest of it. What's wrong with floating around looking like the poor white trash of the cruising community? And unlike your home, it’s unlikely your mother is going to show up armed with a disappointed look and 40 some odd years of making you feel like a four- year old. You’ve already tipped her over just buying it. Who cares about the brightwork?