My Husband the Watermaker

There are a lot of things that I envisioned would happen on this trip that have proved not to be exactly so. Perhaps they have ended up being some variation of my vision but many times, nowhere near. I thought we would be swimming off the back of the boat everyday. It happens a lot, but never when we are in a harbor where our many neighbors are pumping their unmentionables overboard. I thought we would be catching and eating fish everyday. Again, it happens a lot but not nearly at the pace that I thought. I thought all of our days would be reminiscent of the long lazy summer days of some after school special, but the reality is that there is a lot of maintenance that goes with living on a boat and every passage, large or small requires work. I thought we would be sailing everyday, but until we reached the VIs we were not doing a ton of sailing. Everyone does this route at this time of year because it is the safe route to do. I have known that we would be sailing the windward passage but what I did not conceptualize was what this actually means – sailing to windward. What it has meant is that we have done a lot of motor sailing. It has meant that our biggest concern is to get where we need to go safely, not necessarily by sailing there. Thankfully once we reached the VIs with most of our great miles and passages out of the way (excluding the biggest passage of all of course) we have been doing a ton of sailing. To the point that often times, we never even turn the motor on, we’ll just hoist our sails and mosey right of our anchorage.

Well one thing that has surprised me is our ability to capture rainwater. One day we had spent the afternoon doing internet and by the time we were ready to head back to the anchorage that evening it was verging on a torentrial downpour. We made it back to the boat getting completely soaked with blurred vision. Just as we pulled the dinghy up to the swim platform, it was buckets and buckets of rain on us and the boat…sheer comedy as our clothes clung to us. David could not let this opportunity pass, so out on the deck in his boxers he rigged a system to collect the rain into our tanks. He managed to capture 40 plus gallons of water over the next few days. You gotta love self sufficiency!