Boat Life: How Do We Eat, Shower and Poop?
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Today, I am going to give a little peek into life on our 34 foot trimaran sailboat named “Oasis”.
When people first hear that I am living on a boat, they usually have one of two reactions. Either they think I am living some kind of glamorous lifestyle on a super yacht, or they think that I am living in a rowboat. It’s funny, because as unusual as I think this reaction is, I had a similar reactions when my husband told me 25 years ago that his dream was to live on a boat.
At that time, I did not even know that that was a thing people did. You don’t know that this world exists, until you are exposed to it. As it is with many of our subcultures in the world.
Fast forward 12 years from the time my husband first suggested that we live on a boat.
We had befriended a lovely couple in our couples Bible group at church. They were in their 80s and had lived their life around and on sailboats. They had actually built a number of them, and sailed them all over the Atlantic, as far down as Venezuela.
When we met them, they had a couple of boats that they were looking to sell. We were not in any kind of a position to buy a boat. I was just beginning seminary studies to become a full-time minister and still teaching part time in a preschool classroom. We were also trying to manage my mother‘s Dementia care and living in her home. It was a very crazy time, and adding a boat into the mix seemed rather insane.
The Sweet Sailing Couple kept lowering and lowering the price, however, until right before Christmas, they basically told us that we could have the boat as long as we paid off the storage fees that had accumulated in the yard. At this point, I told my husband he could no longer say “no” and we would have to just figure it out. So the day after Christmas, we headed down to the boat yard in Wilmington Delaware, to see what this boat had in store for us.
There’s a lot more to the story than that, and I will continue tell it piecemeal, as I write these pieces about life on the boat, but what I wanted to write about today are our basic systems and how we live off the grid.
It is a lot less glamorous than I imagine the people who think that I live on a super yacht would picture, but not quite…
