Cami's routine

I live on a boat! 

Our usual routine of the day is to get up, have breakfast and at about 8:30 am we pick up the anchor and go to another island and an hour or 2 later,we drop the anchor. Then we do some school work till lunch time. After, when we're done lunch, we put on swim suits and sunscreen. We either go for a hike or a snorkel around a reef . When we snorkel we see lots and lots of corals and fish, and sometimes we see rays and very rarely sharks! We swim there for about an hour and after that we go to the closest beach, rest, have a snack and maybe swim a bit. At 5:00 pm we go back to the boat and eat dinner, go to bed and the next day we do about the same thing.

Things that Work

Now that I no longer consider myself a n00b cruiser, I can speak from experience about a few of the things that have worked well aboard Taia. Note that I say from experience, which does not necessarily mean I'll speak intelligently. So if your opinion about these things (that have worked well for us) differs, by all means feel free to add a comment to this post and call my bullshit. This time around, I'll speak about three things that have made our cruising life easier.

Number one in this category is a highly sophisticated device that allows us to be mindful of our water consumption while enabling up to 4 warm and glorious fresh water showers (full body soap up, shampoo and conditioner for my gorgeous mane included). That is no small feat!

Taia boasts a 12-gallon electric water heater that also heats up water using the sea water that the engine uses for refrigeration. It's a wonderful device. We don't normally run it off 110 volts because it requires a lot of power (that we don't have) to generate heat. But we do enjoy the hot water it produces after running the engine for at least 30 minutes. One big drawback is that, when we run the engine, the water gets too hot. The result of that is that we waste a lot of water finding the proper mix of hot and cold that produces the right temperature for a shower.

Furthermore, we don't run the engine every day. Even the days when we move, we try to mimise engine use (we still love to hoist the main, weigh anchor, and sail away, without starting the diesel guzzling machine from hell).

What to do, then, about those glorious showers? Last year we went through 2 camping shower bags. They're a great idea, but they're built for the occasional camping trip only and don't hold up to sitting on deck day after day, taking a beating from the Sun. Enter the flexible tank!

Taia's solar shower bag (actually a flexible tank)

I found a 50-litre flexible tank, meant for diesel or waste, at a flea market in Jacksonville. It was cheap ($10, if I remember correctly), it's very well built, and it's black. I attached a hose and shower head, and secured it on deck, right above the head. Come shower time, we run the hose through the head port, et voila: hot shower for the whole crew with 0 of the boat's own energy being used. Not only that, it's much easier to control water consumption when the supply is limited to what's available in the bladder. We fill it up every day with roughly 25 litres of water. The water temperature is great up until 2 hours after sundown.

Number two: zinc-based spray paint for the propeller. Hold Fast told us they paint their prop with a cheap paint ($5 a can) they get at Home Depot or any other hardware store. One can is good for several coats. I tried it back in October/2014, before launching Taia. Five months, 185 motoring hours, and 1800 miles later, the zinc paint is still on the prop and nothing, absolutely nothing, has grown on it. No more basketball looking prop. No more scraping the prop under water. Marvellous!

Squeaky clean prop with 3 coats of zinc-based spray paint (fish not included with the spray paint)

Last but not least on this instalment of things that have worked well for us, is our sewing machine. Another sophisticated piece of gear, this one we bought at Wal-Mart about 10 years ago for no more than $150. It can stitch through 6 layers of sunbrella. Natalia has re-stitched innumerable seams on our bimini and dodger, as well as sewn up various covers for all sorts of gear that lives on deck.

When we sailed from Fajardo to Culebra, our usual pound to weather at the time, we forgot to properly dog the v-berth hatch. For a couple of hours we pounded against 5-foot seas and 15- to 20-knot winds. Spray flew well over the dodger, encrusting everything in salt. A not-very-fun day at sea. The kids' mattresses and toys were completely soaked. Unbeknownst to us, some of that corrosive sea water managed to trickle down into the locker under the kids' bunks and got into the sewing machine.

This sewing machine--and remember, it's an incredibly sophisticated piece of engineering that we acquired at Wal-Mart--is made of the softest, cheapest, most easy to produce Chinese steel. Sea water is not its friend.

A couple of hours disassembling the whole thing, wiping it down and applying WD-40 on every part, moving or not, left the sewing machine operational. I actually think it works better than before, because it hadn't seen a drop of lubrication since it came out of the factory back in 2004.

Our sewing machine, standing proud after a full bath in WD-40

A typical field trip day

Mati: Careful mom, stand back or I might hurt you.

Nati: (Suprised face) OK...

Mati: (shouting) 3.5, speed a runner!

And off he went, running full speed, through a trail full of plants, using just a tiny bit of his endless supply of energy.

St. John is one of the three US Virgin Islands. 80% of it is protected by a National Park, meaning, among other restrictions, that you cannot fish and anchoring is very limited, forcing cruisers to take and pay for mooring balls. It also means that the island has quite a few hiking trails, many of them with plantation and sugar mill ruins from the 18^th Century.

As a cruising family of four, we always try to find outdoor activities. Yes, we prefer to be walking, swimming, or just sitting on a beach, instead of being on top of each other on the close quarters of Taia. When we can mix a little bit of history with out of doors, it's a win-win situation and one of my favorite activities.

Back home in London, Ontario, the school used to take the kids on field trips 3 or 4 times a year. These were fun and educational trips that the kids loved. So aboard Taia, we came up with our version of school field trips whenever we can take the kids to a museum or any trip that will end with me asking them “What is the one thing you learned in this trip?”. Camila and Matias both love and hate these trips. They love it for obvious reasons and they hate it because, by now, they know that the following day at “school” they will get to write about it. (So sorry, guys, but you need to learn to write and one day, I want to believe, you will be grateful for these written memories we're creating).

And so it is that in one of these field trips we ended up walking (or running in Matias's case) through hiking trails that took us, first, to the 18^th century ruins of the house of a sugar mill owner and a guard house where the guards were expected to shoot any slaves that tried to escape to Tortola, British Virgin Islands, only 2 miles away. We also saw the Annaberg Sugar mill ruins, where about 600 slaves worked. We learned about the manufacture of sugar, we learned geography and we learned about slavery.

The guard house

View from the owner's house. At the back, Tortola

Rescuing Camila from the evil tree spines.

Matias running full speed toward the Sugar Cane Mill

The sugar mill

Reading about the horse mill

The boiling room where the sugar was manufactured

Snorkeling with a turtle after a fun day of hiking.

Ok, guys, this is not funny. Stop following me!

I like to think this is fun and educational for the kids, much better than being in a room and reading about it from a book. I also hope my kids absorb as much information as their young minds allow them to, and use it to become better persons one day.