When Christmas was approaching Nathaniel and I talked about how we would spend our first Christmas on the boat. We considered sailing over to Ganges Harbour on Salt Spring but this plan was dependant on the weather. The other consideration was the fact that our 2 sons and daughter were joining us; at ages 17, 19 and 20 they can easily get cranky in confined quarters and tend to take up a lot of space. I was not looking forward to being confined with three young people on our boat in cold, wet weather with not much to do.

A couple weeks before Christmas we learned that friends of a friend were looking for someone to housesit over the holidays, so we gave up our plan to sail this Christmas but hope to do so next year. After our previous time off the boat, when it was being repaired I learned how to manage moving our belongings from place to place. We took minimal from the boat and I bought groceries specifically for the week once we moved into the house.

It was a lovely home with a bedroom for everyone and there were all the comforts including music, games, TV, full kitchen etc. The family had decorated their home for Christmas, which we enjoyed without having to do all the work.

Although it was strange being in someone else’s home I guess it is no that different then renting a suite. It helped that the family we were housesitting for were very friendly and hospitable.  It turned out that we had a great Christmas with the kids and I think they enjoyed their visit more because we were in a traditional home rather than the boat. It was possible to cook a traditional Christmas dinner which all enjoyed. We could have managed Christmas on the boat with everyone but I think it would have been stressful and less relaxing. Living aboard is a real experiment and it helps to be flexible.

Do other people mix housesitting with living aboard?

i’m less keen than tracy on temporarily moving off the boat; i find it more difficult making the adjustment, though she finds it a relief to have more space, and with kids coming it really was a godsend.
once i have adapted to small space i don’t notice it, but after a week in a big house, it feels like moving back to a closet. i especially notice how cramped the fo’c’sle is, and how difficult temperature regulation is in there. tracy is at the period of life where she is a blast furnace, and at night i can’t get far enough away from her. my head will be cold, my torso will be sweating from the burning log next to me, and my feet will be freezing.

we have already had another family ask us to housesit at the end of the month, but no way. if we could get at least a month or something i might consider it, but popping off for a week here and a week there is too much like when we had the prop wrap this fall and we lost our home for 6 weeks. it worked well for us at christmas, but we are liveaboards!

there are many reasons for the things that we do and often we are the last to understand our own motivations. people are complicated, and rarely does someone act like a jerk because he’s “an asshole”, or do good things because they are “nice”. the powers that be are pretty good at manipulating opinion, but there are still plenty of exceptions because of this individual complexity.
wow, quite the preamble for 8am. anyway, i’m thinking along this line because i recently started down a new path – i took fáinleog out the other day, without crew. i’ve thought about solo sailing for quite a while, but the time never seemed right, which i guess means i never felt ready. but when the time came I had to do it, even though it was blowing 25 knots at the time and no, i don’t have tethers or harness. i prepared myself as best as i could but it really didn’t matter, i had to go.
i think it had something to do with the solstice. i’m not much of a christmas person as i feel the holiday has long ago been drained of any relevant symbolism by the current materialistic and consumeristic ethos. but i do find the idea of solstice compelling, and our xmas and new years have been appropriated from original solstice celebrations anyway.
the return of the sun and the swing back towards longer days and an eventual spring seems to me to be a true new years, a renewal of the timeless cycle. and unlike the commercial drunk fest of jan 1st, this new years held for me a true challenge for something new. there were no resolutions, just a sudden and unexpected desire to push this personal boundary and so i went.
it is the next step in a period of so many changes in our lives. selling the house, moving the kids out, unloading all our stuff. changing cities, changing jobs, starting a new business. and now preparing to follow a horizon.
the amount of change is almost overwhelming, but after a number of years of languishing in the suburbs, i feel i have so much catching up to do.
this wasn’t a conscious choice. being alive means change, and while it is possible to stagnate, it takes an effort of will to do so. folks who are stuck are expending tons of psychic and emotional energy in doing so, but in their reality it is better to exhaust oneself fossilising than risk the unknown. it has little to do with courage or skill or temperament; we all shoot along time’s river anyway, it’s just a matter of whether we do it with our eyes open or closed.

for the record, the least amazing part of this process has been moving aboard, yet this is the part that everyone gets so excited about. moving aboard a boat is the stuff of dreams, but it’s mostly myth. a 20 foot trailer has much more space and comfort than our 36 ft sailboat, and nobody would get excited if we moved into a small trailer. but put the trailer on the water and it’s amazing the number of folks who think it’s so romantic. it’s not because you can sail or travel to exotic locations, because the myth applies regardless of whether you actually ever leave the dock. i guess it’s the symbolism of non-conformity and adventure, while a small trailer is symbolic of poverty.
i had bought the myth and the dream saw me through more than a few difficult times, but now that i’m here i have to laugh at myself. it’s just life – afloat.

below is a video i made of my solosail

Kiss the Sun

I bought this book that this post is named after because we had problems with moisture, problems that in the end we were able to cure on our own with a little thought and experimentation. i don’t like spending money because as an artist i don’t have much to spend, and because it’s a philosophy of mine to minimize the need for external resources. but water dripping onto my face at night from an aluminum hatch frame seemed to be a problem worth paying for a solution.

as usual when I put my mind to the problem I can usually figure it out myself, but sometimes it’s hard not to be lazy and pay for someone else to find solutions to my problems; it’s what makes the world go around, at least in this economy.

anyway, I got the book last week, and it was a waste of money. the solution to achieving warm, dry boat is good ventilation and a good heater, (and in the author’s mind your heater and stove should be diesel), which wasn’t exactly a revelation.
I did learn about the energy content of various fuels, and some details of different appliances on the market, but that’s not what I was looking for.  all the author’s examples are for large power boats, and the physical arrangements of these boats are very different from a sailboat. the principles are the same, but I already knew the principles. oh, well. if anyone wants the book I’ll gladly pass it along, but I recommend you work on your own solutions.

I already guessed that tracy and I put out a lot of moisture via breathing, and that cooking and boiling water also pumps a lot of water into the boat. warm air holds a lot of moisture, and when that air comes in contact with cold surfaces like hatch and port frames, and uninsulated hull surfaces inside lockers, water will condense out.
since I can’t heat these objects, I can either insulate them from the interior air, move that warm moist air outside, or both. of course it’s raining out and the humidity is 100%, but 6 degree air at 100% humidity has a lot less water in it than 22 degree air at 80% humidity, so fresh air in and warm, moist air out, is key to fixing the problem.

the v berth was the worst for condensation because it is small, far from the heater in the salon, and we were both in there for 9 hours out of every day.
1st problem to deal with was that the locker had no insulation in it and our clothes were getting wet from condensation. i lined it with the bubble wrap used for hot water tanks and no more wet.
the next issue was being dripped on at night and wet hull. opening the hatch meant getting rain inside, so we experimented with different objects, and found if we put a clothes peg in the hatch frame, it left it open enough to let our breath dissipate but kept rain from getting in. the final step was getting the 120 outlet in the v berth working (the po had wired it incorrectly to the gfi outlet in the galley). I then put in a small cube-type heater on low, which is sufficient to keep the space warm; I can’t tell you how cold those sheets used to be when we crawled in there at night; it would take an hour for my feet to finally warm up.
this got rid of 95% of the moisture. there is still moisture accumulating in the bed foam where it touches the hull, and I think the only way to get rid of this last bit is to install a vent in the v berth, because we can’t open the hatch further without getting rained on.

we now slide open the companionway hatch when cooking in the galley, and judging by all the water on the inside of the enclosure, we are keeping a ton of moisture out of the boat itself. remember that propane releases 1.5 lbs of water for every pound of propane burned. that’s just shy of 1 ½ gallons of water!
we also have a small portlight that opens into the cockpit, and we usually open that to varying amounts depending on the outside temps; a lot of air comes in through it despite the full cockpit enclosure.
a po had installed a muffin fan and vent above the galley, but the way the vent was installed, the passage was effectively blocked and the fan didn’t do anything but churn air around. I changed the install and now the fan blows out a lot of the moisture while we are working on the stove.
I also occasionally turn on a small fan we have mounted on our ceiling to circulate air through the boat and push the warm air towards the cold sole.
before these few steps, we would have moisture beading up on all the portlight frames and locker hull surfaces. not any more. once I put an additional vent in the v berth I believe that we won’t have any problem at all with moisture.

To summarise: circulate a lot of fresh air inside the boat, find a way to duct moisture out that is produced by cooking and showering, and provide enough heat to warm all parts of the boat. pretty basic. the details will depend on your own boat, so you will have to find a custom solution for your own unique living environment. the interesting part to the above is that it didn’t cost anything, just a bit of thought and experimentation.