Living La Vida Boat-ah

The overall theme of these past three weeks?  Boats are a lot of fun, but they are also a lot of work.  Not that we didn’t know this going into it.  But when it’s your home it’s analogous to washing the interior and exterior of the house weekly, have a regular check-maintenance-replacement plan for all the electricals and mechanicals to anticipate problems rather than waiting until something breaks and calling someone in, and keeping multiple and redundant tech systems updated with the latest versions and backing up the backups.  Because if you don’t do all this routinely, your house might turn against you and cast you out into a blizzard.

Fortunately Dave has spent the better part of his grown-up years doing the mechanical and tech stuff and is good at it. (Perhaps because he spent his childhood years lighting things on fire or blowing them up, and seeing what damage could be wrought.  But that’s a whole other story.)  So I have taken on the cleaning and supply side of operations, and he does anything that requires fuel, electricity, or has the potential to go ‘boom.’  Of course, the down side of his vast experience is that he’s adopted a lot of submarine terminology and procedures.  (Is that eye-rolling I see of any of Dave’s shipmates and colleagues who have worked with him?)  I’m good with the usual nautical terminology — such as port and starboard, bow and stern, ‘head’ instead of bathroom, ‘galley’ for the kitchen – since they are common.  But Dave upped it a notch.  There are written casualty and general operating procedures, mess decks (the dining table) and a nav station (short for ‘navigation,’ but it’s the size of a third grade school desk so we made it the dog station), topside (essentially the outside area of the boat), and the conn (where we drive the boat from).  We have ‘lockers’ instead of cabinets: tool locker, maintenance locker, dinghy locker, line locker, play locker (bikes and kayak equipment).  I followed along for the most part, but he threw me a curve ball with ‘DC locker.’ 

“What’s a DC locker?” I asked when I spied the label on a door.

“Damage Control,” he tells me, as if it should be obvious.

“Damage Control???  You mean like fire extinguishers, water bailers, things to plug up holes?”

“No — life vests, the ditch bag, flares…”

“That sounds more like a Damage Has Been Done locker and we’re abandoning ship.”

“Too long to put on a label.”

Of course, I countered by putting yellow stickies on all the galley cabinets.  I actually started doing this many Navy moves ago because I would open up a cabinet and find Dave had put a frying pan in with the wine glasses, because ‘there was room there for it’ as he explained.  After a few rounds of the Sesame Street song “One of these things is not like the others” whenever I discovered some odd combination in a cupboard, I decided it was more conducive to domestic tranquility to put yellow stickies on the cabinets indicating where things should go.  The advantage yellow stickies had with the boat was that I could rearrange them easily to mess with Dave when he drove me crazy with the nautical stuff, effectively hiding the cookies and chips from him.

I have spent a lot of time cleaning and organizing the living areas.  In pursuit of the elusive Bristol rating on the Ship-Shape Qualification Card, I’ve come up with a few Boating Truths:

1. There is a lot of Butt Up time on a boat. I’ve spent a great deal of time with my upper half down in a hold, crammed awkwardly into weird spaces, or hanging over railings while accomplishing one task or another.  This applies not only to cleaning, but also to actual boating.  Keeping my foot on the button to haul the anchor up while simultaneously spraying the mud off the chain with one hand and pointing the direction Dave needs to drive the boat has required a lot of comical contortions.  Cleaning and scrubbing decks and rails is hands-and-knees work, and setting and stowing lines on a moving boat means lots of back flexion and extension.  Getting on and off a bobbing dinghy is worthy of a panel of judges.  The real fun starts when I have to extricate myself from whatever position I’ve managed to get into.  That’s when the derriere is required to take the lead.  Which leads us to the next Truth.
2. Boating is physical, and good exercise. Besides Boat Yoga moves discussed above necessary to avoid going in the drink, there’s just a lot of physical work.  And it feels good!  There’s the climbing up and down on and off the boat, down into the cabins, up onto the deck and dock – there’s a lot of moving.  Toting everything from shore to boat.  Raising and lowering kayaks and the dinghy.  I am finding that some of the mild old-age arthritis is actually feeling better because I’m constantly in motion.  Workouts are great, but this is a constant labor that helps me not only physically but mentally with the satisfaction of a job completed. 
3. There’s nothing glamorous about living on a boat, despite all the romanticized stereotypes in the movies – it’s a messy business. I gave up on glamour decades ago.  Never could pull it off.  And this is a salty life, and I mean you literally feel like you’re covered in salt between the air and the sun and the sweat.  I’m always finding smudges on my clothes with no idea how it got there – white is banished.  Sunscreen stains everything.  Hair is blown every which way within two minutes of stepping out of the cabin in the morning, so don’t waste time and money on it.  Accepting this truth is quite liberating.  No one cares what you look like in the boating world anyways because they’re all – um — in the same boat.