Life Onboard!

First, we want to thank everyone for their messages on our website, and private messages they send us. We enjoy the feedback on our blog, and really enjoy connecting with you all while we’re cruising, so please keep it coming!

Second, we often receive questions from people regarding our lifestyle and what it’s like, day to day, living on our boat cruising around the world. This post will try to give you a feel for it. Let us know if you have other questions!

Making coffee or tea in the morning is almost exactly like what we did in our land life, with a few exceptions. We use the same counter-top electric kettle we used on land, plugged in to the same kind of outlet we had on land. Our galley sink has 4 faucets, and we use the tall skinny one for drinking water and cooking.  The tall skinny faucet is connected to our Seagull filter (its 0.4 micron filter removes microbiological contaminants). The remaining 3 faucets are described below. We have two large freshwater tanks onboard that provide us with 155 gallons of water for drinking, cooking, flushing heads, and washing. When we’re being liberal with our water use, the water lasts about 2 weeks. By liberal I mean that we take showers onboard, wash our dishes with freshwater, and flush the heads with freshwater. We could switch to salt water for some uses, take fewer showers, and preserve our freshwater for only the necessities. I digress….we were talking about morning coffee and tea!

Cooking on board is similar to land life, with a few extra steps. Our refrigerator and freezer are top-loading and they are below the galley countertop. Finding something you haven’t used in a few days often requires pulling out multiple layers of food to get down to the bottom shelves. It is also a good idea to pull everything out of the fridge that is needed for a meal since the lid of the fridge is generally used for food prep. We do not have much spare counterspace in the galley. We no longer have a wood block for knife storage, and we probably don’t have to explain why a bunch of loose knives on the countertop are a bad idea on a sailboat. We found a good spot for them in a vertical holder below the stove. We cook with gas or electricity. If using gas, we have to first switch on the propane shut off valve located at the nav station. Once that is on, our three-burner range works just like the range in a land kitchen. We also have a propane stove. It fits a 9×13 inch tray. That means we can make 12 muffins at a time, bake a fillet of fish, make a tray of roasted veggies, or bake a loaf of bread in the dutch oven. When we’re done cooking, we switch off the valve. The valve is a piece of safety equipment that cuts off the flow of propane into the vessel. If hoses or fittings leaked, and we had no shut off valve, we could easily accidentally fill the living space with propane. Cooking with electricity is either in the microwave or on the induction cooktop. We don’t have the induction cooktop secured for use offshore, but we’re brainstorming on how to do it. For now, we just set it on the counter and plug it in when we want to use it while at anchor or a dock. We have tons of storage for dry goods on board, in cabinets, under seat cushions, and under floor boards. It’s not as convenient as a pantry, but it works! Cleaning up after a meal is pretty much the same as land life. Someone gets to wash the dishes and we typically let them air dry before putting them away. If we’re underway, we will dry them with a towel and stow them asap so they don’t slide off the counter as we heal over. We have a hot/cold faucet at the galley sink that can pull out and has a sprayer function. When we want to save freshwater, we also have a foot pump that pulls salt water directly up into the sink from below the vessel. We can wash the dishes with soap and salt water and then do a final rinse with freshwater. We also have a foot pump for freshwater that pulls directly from the tank, skipping the water heater. This is for use if we’re trying to save electricity or if our electric system is down.

When it comes time for a shower, there are a few extra steps. First, it’s important to check the water level in the tank. The pump that draws water from the tank into the shower can be damaged if it’s pulling in air from an empty tank instead of water. We have a convenient manifold in the passageway next to the shower where we can check which tank we’re using and how much water is remaining via the tank tender. We switch tanks by rotating the yellow handle you can see in the picture below. Once you have a tank with sufficient water selected, it’s time to turn on the water. The shower is similar to a land shower with a rotating handle to increase or decrease the temperature. Our hot water heater works really well. The drain in the shower floor is connected to a pump, so you have to switch that on before your shower too. It’s located in the head, so it’s convenient to switch on just before you get in the shower, and switch off when you’re done and the water has been pumped out. We also like to use a squeegee to wipe down the shower walls. When we were up north, we were trying to keep the moisture level low to decrease the chance of mold. As we move further south, this is less of an issue because the walls dry pretty fast on their own.

We’ve mentioned water in almost all the sections above, so wanted to share where our water comes from onboard. As mentioned, we have 2 freshwater tanks. When we are at a dock, we typically get our water from the marina. We hook up our hose to a spigot on the dock, attach a filter to the other end (just like filters people use with RVs), and then we fill our tanks. As we stay at the dock, we’re pulling water from our tanks for all the uses described above. When we’re offshore and need to refill tanks, we run our watermaker. This system is a gamechanger and it’s what makes our cruising lifestyle much more feasible and flexible. We don’t have to go to shore to replenish our freshwater. It’s a reverse osmosis system that desalinates sea water to fill our tanks with freshwater. It makes about 30 gallons per hour. To fill both our tanks from near empty would take about 5 hours. That being said, we typically run the watermaker as soon as one tank is near empty with the other tank still full. I would hate to have two empty tanks and only then find out that the watermaker is broken. So, we’re typically running it for 2-3 hours. (Make water early and often!) The system needs electricity to run which we can get from our house battery bank or from electricity generated by the alternator when running the engine. We like to take advantage of the “free” electricity from the alternator and will try to time making water with low wind when we know we will be motoring. As mentioned above, we use the Seagull-filtered faucet for our drinking water. The water in our tanks has already been filtered (via RV-style filter or watermaker), however things can grow in water tanks over time… We’d rather be safe than sorry, so we use the added protection of the Seagull filter. That being said, we both brush our teeth with water directly from the tanks using the sinks in the heads, instead of doing it in the galley.

What about exercise? We get some exercise by sailing, but not a lot. It takes strength to raise the sails! We can squeeze in a floor mat in a few spots on the boat for yoga or pilates, and we have a set of resistance bands onboard too. When underway, getting cardio exercise is pretty tough. When we’re at anchor or a dock it’s much easier. We can swim, kayak, row the dinghy, hike, walk, jog, etc.

What about entertainment and the internet? We have Starlink, so it’s pretty much like land life when it comes to internet access. There are different plans and prices available based on how close we are to land and what part of the world we’re in. Basically, internet service is available, we just have to decide how much we want to use it, taking into account the cost for different use (like the old days of cell phone plans). When going offshore more than 10 miles, we have to switch Starlink into a different mode, and then we pay for each gigabyte we use. It’s not too expensive to get the weather information we want while offshore because it doesn’t require much data. If we don’t switch the mode, it will stop working. We have books, FM radio, a CD player, cards, boardgames, puzzles, an ukulele, and nature to keep us entertained. And yes, we do stream movies and shows when we’re close to land (offshore we don’t want to pay for the data).

We’ve been in a marina in San Diego all month, working our way through a number of boat projects, and buying supplies we believe will be hard to find in Mexico and the South Pacific. We’ve also had multiple visitors and spent time enjoying some highlights of San Diego. It’s been a busy month! We visited the zoo and beach with family, enjoyed another beach and night life with friends, and spent a day soaking up maritime history at the USS Midway Museum (an aircraft carrier) and the San Diego Maritime Museum (tall ships, steamboats, and a research submarine). We’re shifting now into departure mode. It’s time to fill up the diesel tanks, top off the water tanks, clean the boat, strap the dinghy to the bow, chart our course, and watch the weather.

Next Stop: Ensenada, Mexico, and beyond!