Effort

We spent the holidays visiting friends and family in Texas. The number one question asked was, of course, “How’s it going?!”

Fresh Water

At the dock

We spent a good amount of time at the dock for the first part of our liveaboard life… mostly due to summer heat and our need to not die from it. With dock life, fortunately, we had an unlimited supply of water. Always available for a rinse down of the boat. Able to fill tanks whenever we want. However, we never planned to spend our days at the dock – too expensive. We wanted to anchor out and/or catch a mooring ball after the weather cooled. So what does that mean? 

“On the Hook”

Living “on the hook” means we have to monitor our water constantly. Our 600 liter tanks will usually last us around nine days. We use the fresh water for washing hands, dishes, brushing teeth, cooking, and drinking (pets included.) We mostly try NOT to shower on the boat. For one, it requires use of water, and two, it requires power to heat the water. Both of which are limited. So we almost always shower in the marina showers. And if you’ve read any of our Facebook posts, you might realize that we don’t do that very often. 🙂

How to get it

Because we know we can go for about nine days with full tanks, we have to plan for our next fill-up so that we don’t run out of water. In Sarasota, we could leave the ball and go to the fuel dock to load up. In Key West, we were able to fill up when we hauled out, and again when we fueled up at the fuel dock. In Marathon, however, getting to the dock to fill up is not really a great option. So, we’ve purchased jerry cans (3 – 20L) which is about a day’s worth of water.

Fill ‘er up

When we go ashore to the marina office, or to the park, we have to bring three jugs with us in the dinghy. Fill them up at the sea wall. And then take them back to the boat. Matt, then pours them into our tanks. And then we need to do it all again the next day. Lucky for us, we were at a marina for the holidays, and we loaded up before we left. It has only been five days since we filled the tanks, but we should probably start filling jugs again before we get too low.

Filter it

One more step in the water planning cycle – we filter all of our drinking water. We pour water from the faucet into our Brita and wait for it to filter before filling our water bottles and/or cooking with it…

Make it ourselves

Once we start sailing the big ocean blue, island hopping through the Bahamas and Caribbean (OMG – can’t wait!)… we can break out our watermaker that came with our boat. We haven’t used it yet, mostly because we know we can get fresh water pretty “easily” right now, with a little “effort.” Plus, the water in marinas and harbors isn’t the nice clean water you get when you get offshore.  When we do use the watermaker, it will be able to take seawater out of the ocean and create about 40L of fresh water every hour, but it needs POWER to do so…

Power

AUGHH!!! Power. So. Yeah. Power.

Solar

When we are not at a dock, we have to rely on solar panels to charge our “house batteries,” which, in turn, powers our plugs. Just so we are on the same page, our solar panels suck. Well. I’m sure they are fine. But they suck for us… we are energy hogs. Matt’s work laptop, my laptop, the boys laptops, ipads, iphones, sonicare toothbrushes, fridge, freezer, and an ice machine that desperately wants to be used… our poor system just can’t keep up.

Batteries

So, we basically watch our battery levels like stalkers. The boys know how to look at our volts on our battery meter… And if the battery level drops too low, we have to break out the portable generator. The generator does a pretty good job getting our batteries charged, but it takes all day. And it is loud. And it uses gasoline which we have to keep stocked up for both our dinghy motor and generator. (And if you are curious, getting gas is much like getting water – we either take our jugs via dinghy to a fuel dock, or we have to motor over to a fuel dock with the big boat.)

Generator

The one good thing is that when the generator is going, we can charge everything directly (instead of having to go through batteries) – so we get to use our ice maker!! 🙂

Free Power

So, what do we do for power? We often go to shore – either a marina lounge or a library. We plug in everything and work while we are there and come back to boat fully charged. This helps to not drain our batteries on the boat. Free power is the bomb. But the drawback is that we have to load up our dinghy with four backpacks and go ashore and sometimes walk up to a mile to a library. Or we are working at little desks. Or there are people all around and it is loud and hard to work. As much as we like free power, we’d like our boat situation to work better for us, providing enough power to keep us charged as needed.

More Solar

We are now in the market for more solar. We currently have 400 watts of solar and 660 amp hours of battery storage. (If you don’t understand the difference between amps, volts, and watts – welcome to the club! NEITHER DO I! Luckily, Matt knows the difference.) We need to increase our solar so that it matches our battery… problem is… we have nowhere to put more solar panels. We can’t add any more weight to our dinghy davits that hold our current solar panels. We’ve considered flexible solar panels to put on our canvas bimini, but we’ve heard mixed reviews. We’ve considered a wind generator – but not sure where we’d put one of those either, and have also heard mixed reviews on effectiveness.

Basically, we are trying to figure out how to keep our boat powered, so that Matt can work, the boys can do their online homeschool stuff, I can write really long-winded blog posts, and we can make ice. All things we never thought about when living in a house on land. Effort.

Speaking of working and schooling online…

Internet

Oh sweet, sweet, internet. How do we love thee? Let us count the ways…

1. We love how you connect us to our loved ones and friends we left behind. Through Facebook posts and email and skype – we are able to “see” people thousands of miles away.
2. We love how you connect us with new sailing friends through Facebook groups and pages and other social media. How else would we learn about homeschool P.E. classes in a new town, or the best library in a city we plan to visit?
3. We love that you allow Matt to keep working (and me to do freelance work) from the boat so we can keep funding our cruising kitty (well, Matt may not ‘love’ that… haha.)
4. We love that you provide a platform to do homeschool online. The boys learn way more than I could teach them. It is amazing the number of resources available on the world wide web for homeschooling kids.
5. We love that you entertain us – with podcasts and audiobooks and sailing video bloggers and sailing blogs and books to download.
6. We love that you provide resources to everything from bread recipes to meteor shower announcements. We can find local happy hours, museums, a dinghy motor, or pretty much anything else we need on Amazon.com.
7. We love you so much. And we are really sad when you are not around.

Here is how much effort we go through to get internet on a daily basis:

• We have a grandfathered unlimited data plan on our cell phones – two phones. We can’t tether to our phones, but for Matt and I to be able to get online via phone helps control the amount of data we need for other our other devices.
• We have a mifi through a Verizon corporate account. It is limited to 100 G per month, or we lose it completely (it doesn’t just cut us off or throttle, they will actually just cancel the line.) It used to be unlimited. Then it was 200 G, now it is 100 G. When we kind-of paid attention, we used around 120 G per month. Now that we are freaks about it, we keep it around 75 G. Which means we have to find other ways to get internet access.
• We use marina wifi at our slip/mooring ball when available. Not gonna lie – marina wifi is pretty much crap. All of them. I can only think of one marina where the wifi worked (Sarasota.) We even have a wifi booster on board, and sometimes it helps, but mostly – meh.
• We use marina wifi at the marina office/lounge – this is usually the best wifi, however, you are in a room with lots of other people. It makes it hard for Matt to be on a conference call with so much traffic around.
• We use wifi at the public library. We’ve had some good experiences with this (Sarasota) and some not so good experiences (Key West.) Even with the good experience – if we are going to schlep our stuff, we most likely will plan to spend a day there… which means I have to pack lunches, and plan for the outing every day. And we have to carry it all with us. Uphill both ways in the snow. 
• We have two other mifi devices – only 5g each – but they work for us in a pinch if we need some extra data.

Honestly, if Matt didn’t have to work full-time, we might be a *tad* less dependent on internet access – and maybe we’d worry more about the best places to go fishing or snorkeling.

Transportation

I have never felt more homeless than when I am trying to use public transportation. Yes, technically, I should really feel carless and not homeless, but that is crazy talk.

Exhibit #1: A recap of a bus ride I took from Key West to Marathon, FL after returning a rental car. Click here to read the Facebook post. 

P.S. In case you didn’t pick up on it… there were two modes of transportation mentioned – rental car and bus.
P.P.S. Well, technically, two rental cars and two buses if you read the post.

Exhibit #2: Do you really need another exhibit? That first one pretty much sums up what it is like to live without a car. However, I will say that we have been really resourceful with transportation. I recapped all of the ways we have found transportation in our Happy New Year blog post. Listed below for your reading pleasure:

We have ridden buses, rented cars, caught rides with friends, walked, Ubered, taxied, dinghied, trollied, kayaked, SUPed, golf carted, and biked (Matt) to: grocery stores, museums, aquariums, beaches, movies, West Marine (a zillion times), Home Depot (half a zillion times), restaurants (too many to count), educational programs, bars/pubs, ice cream shops, laundromats, libraries, airports, a fort, a national park, and a Christmas parade.

Here’s the deal, though… One time, we almost ran out of gas for our dinghy while we were away from our boat. Guess how horrible that would be? It is not like there are fuel docks on every corner. We would have had to row the dinghy to a dock to get gas. Transportation is always on our mind. How are we going to get there? How will we get back? What time do we need to catch the bus? Can we catch a taxi? Can we catch a ride? Should we rent a car for the weekend? If we have a car, what other errands should we run? etc.

Laundry

Ahhhh how I miss having a washer & dryer in my home. Mostly because having it in my home means I can be lazy and do laundry whenever I want. If the washer finishes and I wait, I don’t know, say… an extra minute or ten or 17 hours, it will still be there when I’m ready to move it to the dryer. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work so well in a laundry room with other people waiting to put their clothes in.

It is not the schlepping of laundry to/from boat to laundromat/laundry room. It is not even being tied to a timer that requires effort. It is more about the fact that there is usually not a damn thing to do near the laundry facility while waiting for the laundry to run its course. Well, that AND when a dryer doesn’t work and you still have wet clothes and YOU HAVE TO WAIT ANOTHER  40 MINUTES next to the lady who just stole the power outlet you were about to plug into because your phone is about to die and you thought you were leaving and now she just lit up a cigarette… sigh… effort.

Grocery shopping

The grocery store is one mile away. The grocery store is always one mile away. Why?!? Here’s the deal… walking a mile to a grocery store = No Big Deal. Walking HOME from a grocery store with a zillion bags of heavy groceries = REALLY BIG DEAL. [see Transportation above]

Loading up a dinghy at a calm dinghy dock with groceries and two kids and two adults and possibly four backpacks because we went into town to work at the library = Kind of a Big Deal. Unloading all of that while bouncing around over whitecaps and 18 kts wind = ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS.

Recap: Grocery shopping sucks.

Also – because we have the tiniest fridge (even though we tell people, “it is really way bigger than it seems” so that people aren’t completely shocked that a family of four live with a dorm fridge) – we have to go to the grocery store multiple times/week. [see Storage below]

Storage

WE HAVE NOWHERE TO PUT EVERYTHING ON THIS BOAT.

That pretty much sums up storage.

Should we get rid of stuff? Absolutely. Should we reorganize? YES. Is all of our shit still going to be on display so we can find it easier because our storage is impossible to get to and the reason why our portable air conditioners are still not put away and are sitting in our way in the cockpit even though we haven’t been at the dock for five days? ALSO, YES!

Also, tiny fridge.

In Summary

My advice: If you want to live on a boat, be ready for the effort.

You will be rewarded.