10 Things I Wish My Friends Understood About Cruising on a Small Sailboat

What you think I’m doing…

What I’m really doing…

Replacing a manual pump with an electric pump.  Pump for what?  Shit.  Pumps shit overboard.  I cleaned those lines as much as I could before removing the old hose clamps but still got shit everywhere.  And this is right under my bunk, by the way.  More on that later.

So here’s the reality of cruising on a small sailboat – what is really going on versus the tropical Shangri-la you think I’m living in.

1. Fresh water is liquid gold.

What’s your record for standing under the hot water in the shower early in the morning and just zoning out? Mine is about fifteen minutes. Comes out to over 20 gallons of water. Feels great, doesn’t it?

Small boat sailors typically only carry on the order of 50 gallons of fresh water. This water is either caught as rain, purchased for up to $1/gal, or made via an onboard desalinator.

I grab the soap & washcloth and run up on deck to scrub down in front of my neighbors when I see heavy rain approaching.  Other rain that I catch in my dinghy gets pumped into a bucket to use as laundry water. I clean dishes in salt water and then rinsed with dribbles of fresh water. Not a drop is wasted! My daily water ration is about 1.5 gal/day.

To put that in perspective, a water-saving shower head goes through my entire daily ration in only one minute. Needless to say, there are days I just flat-out stink, but that’s the life.

I do have a desalinator but that doesn’t give me unlimited fresh water because it does consume a fair amount of electricity.

2. Don’t talk to me about your newborn keeping you up at night.

Oh, sleep. What I wouldn’t give for an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep. Hell, I’ll even take six. There’s always something happening.

• I forget to completely secure the coffee press before bed, and the rocking through the night eventually frees it up to fall on the floor with a bang.
• Rain comes in at 2am, waking me up when my face gets soaked, so I have to get up and close the hatches, and now it’s hot and stuffy.
• A cross-swell comes through and sends me crashing into the hull, waking me up and making it impossible to go back to sleep unless I get out of bed and make a swell bridle while naked and still half-asleep.
• Boats upwind of me aren’t secure and drag backwards into me.
• Or I’m worried about my own anchor in heavy winds that make it hard enough to fall asleep already. Always something.

And let’s not forget the actual sailing passages, when I sleep for fifteen minutes at a time throughout the course of the day.

This is the most calm night I ever had in Prickly Bay, Grenada:

3. There’s that saying…it’s 23 hours of terror followed by one hour of pure bliss.

Sure, the majority of the pictures you see me posting are of some kind of tropical paradise. That’s because the rest of the time I have my hands full with tending sails and whatnot, getting knocked all over the place!

Taking pictures is the last thing on my mind in some of these situations where I honestly think I may lose my home & belongings and end up drifting for days in a liferaft.

4. “Checking the weather” takes on a whole new meaning.

Open up an app on your phone, look at the picture, and that’s the end of it, right?  Five seconds and you’re done.

Examining the weather while cruising on a small sailboat is much more involved.

The direction & strength of both the winds and the ocean swell determines if I can stay where I’m at, or if I have to move, or if I can even move at all. I’ve been unwillingly stuck in places for weeks because of bad weather.

Or I might be perfectly content where I’m at and even have commitments ashore to tend to, but if there’s a storm hundreds of miles away influencing ocean swells that might enter the bay where I’m at, I have to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice and find better shelter.

“Better shelter” could be a full day away, or more.  Can I make that passage without putting myself in danger?

5. Salt. Everywhere. All the time.

No matter how hard I try to keep salt water from coming into the cabin, it somehow finds a way.

Salt water does not dry on its own inside a boat – it has to be wiped away. And clothes – always damp and salty.

Chances are you have a tiny dinghy if you’re cruising on a small sailboat. The general rule is, the smaller the dinghy, the wetter you’ll get when going ashore.

It’s futile to try to wash clothes every day to remove salt stains because you’ll just get covered in salt again tomorrow. Deciding which clothes to wear ashore is determined by 1) least smelly and then 2) least salty.

6. I store poop less than a foot away from my face where I sleep.

Really, it’s actually something like eight inches.  See the second photo in this post.

It all goes into a holding tank that I can only empty when there’s no chance of swimmers in my backyard. There aren’t many options for where to put the holding tank on small sailboats. The only option on mine was underneath the head of my bunk.

I guess I’ve never really thought about how close that shit is to my face until I wrote this post.

7. You just have to learn to live with certain smells and sounds.

You eventually get used to most of them but it makes for some good fun when you have visitors!

It’s funny – I can now sleep on passage through all the racket, but when a flying fish lands in my cockpit and the wings start buzzing (happens more than you’d think), that’s the noise that will wake me up. But the rest of the clashing and creaking and splashing? I’ll sleep right through it. That’s how in-tune you become to everything living on a boat.

As far as the smells…see number 6. Storing trash can get nasty after a week or two when there’s nowhere else to put it but in the house.

And some smells just can’t be identified, and therefor not remedied – those are the worst.

8. Sometimes you just want to quit.

I don’t like to think of myself as a quitter. When I start something, I see it through. When the going gets tough, I buck up and charge forward.

But then you wonder, “why am I torturing myself like this?” Why am I getting into this nasty, filthy water in this crowded harbor in order to inspect something on the bottom of the boat? Why is this “to-do” list getting bigger and bigger and more expensive despite my efforts to check things off? How can this special hardware fitting, that I desperately need before I can move anywhere, cost so much money?

Going out to buy some milk isn’t as easy as hopping in the car and driving down the road. It can sometimes be a huge risk-management decision that you thought you’d never have to make for a liter of milk.

Sometimes you just want to go back home and have a burger & cold beer with your friends instead of wondering if someone will board your boat at night and shoot you or hack you with a machete (as happened to others during my last trip to the islands).

9. The range of emotions will strain your soul.

Everyone has their ups and downs – no one is immune.

Cruising on a small sailboat amplifies these ups and downs and increases their frequency. You could be sitting in the hammock enjoying the sunset one minute, in pure ecstacy, then an hour later be in complete despair for one of the many reasons the lifestyle can bring – maybe a critical boat component broke, you received distressing financial news, thoughts of a loved one, it hit you that you have no clue what you’re going to do the next few months, and so on.  Or you might be on the best sail of your life when suddenly a piece of rigging breaks and compromises the mast.

You can feel euphoria, despair, awe, joy, fear, outrage, dismay, frustration, distress, nostalgia, irritability, panic, fatigue, loneliness, apathy, agony, ecstasy, serenity, boredom, and anger in a span so short it’s a miracle your brain doesn’t fry.  All due to many of the above reasons.

10. I wish words and pictures could describe the experiences.

Going back to number 3. That one hour of bliss is…bliss. Pure, indescribable bliss.

Dolphins always seem to show up right after a storm when the stress is high. They were with me on my very first passage one night, swimming through the phosphorescence.  They left bright green glowing tunnels through the water as they did laps around my boat. There’s no way I can show you or tell you what it was like to be out on the ocean with that. Really, no words or pictures.  I wish I had a way to share it short of employing the DreamWorks CGI department.

Watching the sun set over the horizon while sailing in open ocean, and then watching the colors of the sea and sky change early the next morning is another thing that words and photos could never truly describe. Some authors have tried. You just have to be there.

Many islands are also only accessible by boat, and not commercial ferries. They’re really off the beaten path and the only way to see them is on your own. Some are inhabited and some aren’t; either way you’re in for a treat that only a relative handful of other visitors can claim to have experienced.

So do numbers 1-9 make number 10 worth it? I think so.

Some final words from an old salty sailor:

“But even when things are at their worst at sea, we rarely wish to be anywhere else than where we are at that blessed moment…”

 

“For me to try to tell them of it exactly would be like attempting to describe at the same time all the colors in a shifting kaleidoscope to someone who’d been born blind.”

– Tristan Jones, Encounters of a Wayward Sailor.

What do you other small-boat cruisers have to add to this list?  Let’s get a good one going!  Leave them below.