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