5 Suggestions for Living Aboard

A recent thread on the REC.BOATS.CRUISING newsgroup asked for liveaboards and cruisers to list 5 suggestions they would give to "wannabees." Below is a listing of the responses to date. We will add to this list as more responses appear.

I'm a career woman, sailor since the age of 14, did a couple of deliveries as crew in the years leading up to going cruising, did sports in high school and college. So I never thought of myself as the home and hearth type. But I need a LOT more home and hearth than my crewmate. I found that, with my gas stove and pressure cooker, I could make some really good meals. And that was very important to my morale, when I got tired of "camping out" for years on end. Also important was having responsibility for some aspects of boat maintenance, and sailing expertise -- that way I couldn't get stereotyped as "the useless woman" (especially when I had a heavy stainless pressure cooker in my hand! ).

Beth, shorebound and loving it, but I've still got the boat!!!

This answer is geared toward women, and cruising aboard:

1) Forget tampons with cardboard applicators. They get damp and lose their stiffness. You can't flush them, anyhow, as all marine heads were designed by/for men . Which leads to:

2) Learn about the head. Learn how to maintain it. Make it your friend. Remember, if/when it breaks, your sailing companion will only be inconvenienced once a day; you will need it more! (Try to make him do the really gross parts...I was usually unsuccessful with this, as John is a licensed wastewater treatment plant operator, and knows how very gross it can get!)

3)Get a nice, expensive European pressure cooker. Better yet, do what I did-- get 2! (one is frying pan size) They are made of high-grade stainless, and they just plain feel a lot more solid than those Presto things. Yes, they cost $160-$200, but mine look and work just as well now as when I bought them in 1991, and spent 2 years on liveaboard galley duty. I did replace a gasket a couple of years ago. They don't heat up the boat.

4) To prepare for meals aboard, pretend you are a housewife in the '50's, at the dawn of the convenience age...try all those strange dry package things on the supermarket shelf. Lipton's pasta dishes are pretty good. I learned to buy Kraft Parmesan instead of the real thing. Canned beans are very useful, as is New England clam chowder. A baked potato is a great meal during a passage...soothes the stomach, needs little attention while cooking.

5) Ahhh, this is too long already! How about, lock your dinghy to the boat with cable or chain when in Bequia? (someone "rescued" it for us, looking for a "reward".)

1. buy a boat that has lots of room. A bigger boat does not have to be more money. This also allows you to have a "real" bathroom and real size closets.

2. Decorating a boat more like a home helps to make it more livable. Cindi says no fishing poles hanging for the overhead in the salon.

3. Galley appliances....we replaced the refer with a Sears full size refrigerator/ freezer with ice maker. Tremendous asset! A real oven as opposed to a microwave will produce better meals...more like home.

4. Insulate the boat. I have done more work trying to keep paint on the boat and trying to keep heat in or out that some fairly easy insulation work up front could have prevented.

Well that's four. Maybe we can add more later.

First, I agree with Beth's 5 and won't repeat those!

1. The single best advice that I would give to women who want to cruise or love someone who does :^) is to learn as much as you can about every aspect of a cruising sailboat (I specify cruising because the finer points of racing may not be critical, though good sailing skills are). I did a week with Womanship and it was SUPER. Not only was there no yelling (their motto) but you had to take your turn at every job-- engine maintenance, navigation, sail selection and trim, docking, anchoring, (wo)man overboard... as well as the usual galley slave and head cleaning chores. Don't assume some responsibilities are "his" and others are "hers" because you may need to know in a critical situation.

2. Don't set a tight schedule or plan to meet people at a given place at a given time. Relax and move when the weather is good. Why should you risk your comfort, equipment or worse so THEY can get good air fares? Contact them when you are in a place you'd like to stay for a while and they can join you there.

3. Learn to use the radio and have good communications gear (beyond VHF)

4. Keep a journal or log of your experiences-- what you like and don't, special information about places, and ESPECIALLY names of people and boats that you meet and interact with. You will come back to these notes and memories for years afterward.

5. The best way to save money is not to spend it (credit to Tom Neale on "Chez Nous"). Learn to live a simpler life style with fewer things. It takes up less space on board and helps to stay within your cruising budget.

I'll stop at 5.

Mary

John's five:

1) Give extra attention to the engine when purchasing your boat. Hire a separate engine surveyor if necessary. He can check compression, have an analysis done on the oil, and other neat stuff to let you know about potential problems. Do you want to spend your time watching tropical sunsets, or do you enjoy contorting your body into painful positions while covered with grime, sweat, and fiberglass dust? If all of the rubber hoses and belts don't look new, replace them and save the old as spares. It is much easier to do at the dock than underway with an engine that has just been shut off because of overheating!

2) If money is a concern, buy a smaller, but well built, boat. You will spend more than you plan on. We went with a 33 CSY in the $40 K price range. Sure, it wasn't as comfortable as a $80 K 40 footer. But for us, it was either that or not go at all. Bear in mind that our trip was planned from the start as only a two year trip.

3) Learn all you can about weather and make your own departure decisions. Too often I hear VHF conversations on the subject and 90 percent of these weather gurus are like me, they don't know doodly squat about it. We just want to give the impression that we do. I already know that you are into computers so consider getting the $100 software and black box gizmo, then a portable SSB receiver, that will let you see current weather maps. (somebody help me out here, is this broadcast service being phased out?) In the North Atlantic through the Panama canal and beyond, Southbound II is an excellent source of weather forecasts. He's on daily at 20:00 GMT on 12.359 MHz. In the Caribbean, station WAH in St. Thomas, gives detailed wx. They repeat the WOM and NMN broadcasts which aren't very rich in detail. Then (the best part) they give radar and surface analysis summaries that basically list every rain producing cloud of any size. I could babble on for an hour here.

4) Make sure that your experience level is up to the trip you are planning. I spent two years sailing the Caribbean with only protected water experience on smaller sailboats. I didn't have any disasters, mind you, but I was a loose cannon waiting for one to happen. The worst I suffered was fear in scary situations caused by things like heavy weather, and poor navigating. Also, I was much too dependent on our GPS. In retrospect, I wish that I had shelled out a few hundred dollars for some formal training. All the reading I did on these subjects just wasn't a good substitute for the real thing.

5) Change your attitude and try to get laid back as soon as possible. It is completely OK to make new friends by the dozens. Pot luck dinners, happy hours, and bbq's on the beach abound. If there's not one planned, start one yourself. It is OK to dink over to someone's boat and ask about their wind generator. Friends are easy to make. I guess it is the isolated life style of living aboard a boat that makes us crave inter-activity with others. You are now living in a world where anyone needing help, whether it be an engine problem or advice needed, will find numerous offers of help. It's kind of like what I call the good old days. You see it in campgrounds too. Folks just stopping by to chat. People helping people just cause it's the right thing to do. Sadly, shore based life seems to have lost most of this element of friendly and outgoing personalities.

all right I'll bite

1> Ventilate, ventilate, ventilate. Make sure that your boat has a lot of ventilation. People give off a lot of moisture, even when they are just hanging around. So does cooking, propane is a wet fuel, as is diesel, wood, and alcohol and other liquid fuels. We have a natural bilge ventilation system consisting of two dorades on the aft cockpit coming. We have two solar day night vents in the two hatches and that does a pretty good job of keeping the boat ventilated and taking out the moisture that we put in. Remember to keep the boat heated all winter long. A little heat takes the moisture off of the walls, ceilings etc. and puts it into the air to be carried away by the ventilation system. There was only one week in this very very wet winter that we had to do anything special with this system. We opened all of the lockers while we were at work and left the heat on it's normal "we're home" setting. Closed them when we got home and had no more problems. Those goldenrod things seem to work too, although we realized we had them at the end of the winter, so a full report isn't available yet.

2>Set up a good mattress. This makes sleeping a lot more enjoyable. I have yet to sleep in a boat that came anywhere near comfortable from the factory. A little foam can go a long way and cost less than $10.00. Put it over the bumpy parts, and there are always bumpy parts.

3> Go sailing. This helps keep the boat a boat instead of a floating repository of junk. If you go sailing and you haven't stowed things they tend to make themselves very apparent, often by falling on the cabin sole. Those people that don't go sailing, or motoring seem to loose interest in living aboard. For us this reminds us of why it was that we moved aboard in the first place.

4> Live more simply. If you don't use it in a year, it should never have been on the boat. If you don't use it in a quarter, it should perform some really important function. Get rid of things that you don't use. This applies to living aboard at the dock only. Cruising often means that you need to take spares and things that you'll be happy never to use. Personal items should be used rather often to justify there effects on the water line whether cruising or living at the dock.

5> A cockpit enclosure gives you an extra room that is almost always divided from the general living quarters. It can give spousal units a place to have more of the space that they are used to. We are working on finishing ours. One winter without it really made us see it's usefulness.

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