rudderless

Water water everywhere

and not a drop to drink . . .

I just finished the National Geographic issue about water. It had the usual scary receding glacier pictures (there are few things that sicken me more), and a half dozen fascinating maps of the world’s rivers. But the one statement that has stayed with me was the fact that the average American uses 100 gallons of water at home every day. Albuquerque, New Mexico, recently brought their per capita consumption down to 80 gallons, from 140 gallons per day! Where does it go? As I was filling up our drinking water jugs the other night I tried to do the math for us. As a family of four we go through about 58 gallons of freshwater a week, on the boat, for dishes, drinking, washing and cooking. Our toilet/head uses saltwater exclusively. Our tank is pumped weekly by a local pump-out boat to keep it out of the Keys waters. The girls and I shower together at the marina, with a low-flow shower head. Between ourselves and John, we use about 40 gallons a week to keep ourselves clean. We do two loads of laundry a week, which we estimate to be about 80 gallons total. That brings our total family freshwater usage to 178 gallons per week. If you go by National Geographic’s numbers, the average American family of four (like ours), uses 2800 gallons of freshwater per week.

One of the pieces in the magazine profiled a community in Ethiopia where women spend eight hours of their day walking to and from a dirty river to fetch drinking water. They wash their clothes once a year. We are clean, healthy, and well-fed. We drink all the water we want. In fact, we’ve banned juice and other sticky beverages from the boat, so water is just about all our kids drink. John and I supplement with beer. But the numbers seem staggering to me. How is our weekly total just 78 gallons more than the average American uses on a daily basis?

I found a water use calculator for Tampa, Florida and entered some guesstimations for the average family of four- two showers a day, a few baths a week, a lawn to water occasionally (in Florida, for sure!), four loads of laundry per week . . . and sure enough, I hit the 100 gallon per day mark. It must come down to a few things. Our faucets don’t run. They can’t run, as I have a foot pump to feed water to my galley sink. We don’t have a lawn or a garden. If we do in the future, we will most certainly collect rainwater for the plants. The toilet seems to be an enormous consumer. Here in the Keys, we’ve been short on water for so long that public restrooms will often sport the sign, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow . . .” I’m not advocating drastic measures, but for land-based homes, a composting toilet is looking better and better. I’ve seen dishwashers that recycle graywater/rainwater, but they seem to be fairly efficient appliances to begin with. Far better than handwashing. I have made a concerted effort to cut down on our laundry- making sure that the girls clothes are actually dirty. Rosy being out of diapers has helped. And I suppose showering is a state of mind. We don’t shower every day. If we worked in an office or got particularly gross at a job, we certainly would, but years of sailboat living have robbed us of that need. We do spend a lot of time in the pool.

We didn’t move onto the boat to save water. It is a wonderful by-product of our lifestyle, in the same way that energy conservation comes naturally on a boat fueled almost entirely by wind power and solar panels (when we’re off the dock!). But crunching numbers like this makes me truly appreciate how much we were taking for granted. Freshwater truly falling from the sky. Everywhere you look, with every faucet you turn on. And yet it defines entire existences in other parts of the world.

How lucky we are.

Treehugging Tuesday- SOAP!

A few weeks ago my liveaboard friend Behan left this comment: “In the realm of small things: speaking of fish-friendly detergent, there is this old cruising myth about Joy. Liveaboards / cruisers are supposed to love it “because it gives suds in salt water.” Somehow I don’t think it’s fish friendly, although I can’t point to a reference. And… why the fuss about suds? They’re not necessary to get clean, right? The friendly stuff still seems to work just fine. How on earth- (Earth!) can we get this myth dispelled?”

Truly, eh? We’ve tried to do without petroleum-based soaps for a couple of year now, even off the boat. Now that we’re on the boat, when I pump my sink water overboard every day, I can’t imagine using anything but biodegradable, fish-safe soap. It’s my responsibility to do stuff like that, eh? There was certainly a time, on our old boat, when we indulged in our old friends Joy and Dawn. But in the last two years or so, there are so many choices in the realm of cleaning supplies, it wouldn’t even occur to me to buy the other stuff. So, like Behan asked, why do people do it?

I assume it’s habit. It’s what you’ve always known. I can understand that. You assume the other stuff works better with its rinse agents and sudsing properties. It might, but you’re probably using too much of it anyway. It can be cheaper, certainly. But the best advice someone gave me a while back is to dilute, dilute, dilute. The soap companies want more of your business. Things have become so super-concentrated lately that you can easily replace half the soap bottle with water and still have an effective solution. The same is true of laundry detergents. If your clothes smell strongly of detergent, you’re using more than you need. Half the recommended amount will suffice in most cases. For the same reason you use less with cloth diapers, use less in normal loads. Lots of soap causes it to build up on your clothes. When we first tried Charlie’s Soap- a washing soda-based natural cleaner, they recommended running a few loads of their soap and water through the machine, just to eliminate the nasty detergent residue. Eww. It does wonders for cloth diapers.

Use better stuff, use less, and if you’re a sucker for scents, I can whole-heartedly recommend Seventh Generation’s dish soap and laundry detergent. It smells like something you might actually find in nature, not to mention that it’s made from the good stuff.

And speaking of laundry- here’s the new normal. IKEA octopus with wind blowing down the hatch. Good times.

Just a Day

Today was a big day here on the boat. This morning John solved our big computer issue. Our boat is steel, so any Wifi signal we receive from the marina, or surrounding businesses, basically stops at our companionway. If we were ever going to surf the web or talk to our family on the webcam from the cozy confines down below, we needed a way to get that signal down into the boat and into the computer. 5-Mile Wifi sent us an antenna and some nifty cables and voila, problem solved. I read a magazine article recently about homesteading and building off the grid. When a veteran housebuilder was asked what his first step would be, he said, a strong internet connection. It allows us to do the research we need to do, to get ideas, to secure the strange engine parts we might need. To read forums, blogs, to write, to stay connected. And no matter how romantic it might seem to be out of touch for a while, living on the boat is not something we do for vacation. It’s our everyday. And in that way, we need to be connected.

We spent the other half of the day tackling the overhead together- the styrofoam/plywood/vinyl sandwich that has to go on the underside of our steel. Teamwork made it bearable, but both of us will be so glad to move onto our more mentally stimulating tasks- the engine for John, the sailcovers and other canvas for me. It’s not hard work, it’s just annoying work.

The girls were wonderfully patient, moving through all of their onboard activites like champs. Coloring, letter-writing, tumbling, present-making, playdough, putting the stuffed animals to bed, napping, eating, DVDs, an inordinate amount of time in the head (seriously, I feel like we take them to pee all day long). Just another day to them. Which ended with a swim in the ocean. Their heaven.

Every time I watch them gleefully, confidently swim away from me, it’s proof positive that we’ve made the right choices. This is where we should be. Styrofoam showers and all.

Exhausted

I’m cooked.
My folks have been here keeping the ladies busy while John and I work on the boat. Climbing in and out of a crowded hatch a dozen times a day is an act my body is having a hard time remembering. Crazy to think that soon I’ll be guiding two little bodies down into the boat, a dozen times a day.

But the work is so satisfying. It reminds John and I of a time when it was just the two of us. In the midst of the dust and drilling, the heat and the grime, it feels good to be together. It feels especially good to be finishing this little house for our little family. It is now and forever ours; our ticket to the world.

Meanwhile Rosy’s contracted some mysterious stomach ailment and poops all the time but hardly ever pees. Talk about tugging at the angst of a non-vaxing, swine-terrified mama. She’ll be fine, but she’s not sleeping when I’m sleeping (she’s fine until I get to bed, and then all hell breaks loose), so it’s been a rough three or four nights. As my mother would say, with kids, “there’s always something.”

We leave for our first real family vacation in two short days. Lazy, chilly mornings in Maine await us. I have to remember to print the inumberable confirmations and directions, to pack the appropriate reading material and DVDs and sweaters (!!). It will be thrilling to be back in New England.

And just think. We’ll be coming back to a home almost ready for a trip back home.

Boat Work

First off, a great blog John and I’ve both reading to get inspired about being aboard with kids. Mike, Alisa and their three-year-old son, Elias, sailed from Alaska to Australia over the past two years. Their blog, Once In a Lifetime is honest and endearing- a great read.

Meanwhile, the boat update. John has welded new steel frames for the large ports in the main part of the cabin. This week he’s going to install all new acrylic “glass” with fancy tape they use to attach windows in skyscrapers. Then it’s all about two tasks- preparing the deck for the mast! And preparing the interior for human occupancy. With the help of two babysitters/friends, and my parents, we are scraping together some “alone time” on the boat for the first time possibly ever (since children, but that’s an entirely different epoch). John will negotiate the exterior. Next week I’m aiming to get the overhead at least somewhat together, deal with the issue of a water supply (flexible water bladder in an old tank- my only trepidation is drinking from PVC?), and start scrubbing. Let the countdown begin!!