Over the last three years, we have made modifications to the boat to make us more self -sufficient while cruising. Having never done this long term cruising thing before, we relied on lots of other people’s opinions, read books and cruisers blogs, sailing magazines, etc. Everyone is different and every boat has different systems so you don’t really know what you need until you start doing it though. You could spend a fortune adding things and then your boat becomes more expensive and complicated to maintain so we tried to err a bit on the side of “not enough” figuring we could add later if needed. This trip to the Bahamas will teach us a lot about what is right for us.
We have been out about 11 days now without any external services available. So how are we doing?
Fresh Water-Our water is ok since we carry 145 gallons in our tanks and have a watermaker to make reverse osmosis water every few days. We’ve started using salt water to rinse and wash the dishes before finishing with fresh water so this should help consumption a bit (we installed a salt water hand pump at the galley sink last year). We like to take showers most days though and this is one thing I wouldn’t want to give up! The tradeoff here is that the watermaker uses quite a bit of electricity, so the more water we use, the quicker our batteries drain.
Fuel-Doing ok because we have been mostly hunkered down avoiding 30-35 knot winds! Our diesel engine is very easy on the fuel consumption though-averaging about 0.8 gallons per hour and we have about 55 gallons of fuel onboard. Also, we tend to sail as much as possible rather than motoring.
Food-We have a pretty big refrigerator and freezer (by boat standards) and still have plenty of food plus lots and lots of non-perishables (canned, dried, etc). This fall I added insulation to the refrigerator and compartmentalized it to add more freezer space and this has worked well. I baked bread when we ran out and we have lots of shelf milk and canned OJ, etc. We are running low on fresh veggies and may have to rely on some canned or frozen soon. It’s amazing how long the produce does last though. We don’t refrigerate most of the fruit and it lasts for weeks (except the bananas). Lunch choices are getting a bit monotonous though.
Power-Our solar panel is not able to keep up with our power needs so we need to run the engine to charge batteries or plug into shore power every once in a while. After 11 days we are still at 91% of full state of charge so we are doing ok. We will probably add a wind generator and a couple more batteries to our bank this summer so we don’t have to monitor it so closely. We don’t do "luxury" things like use our computers to play music or watch movies as often as we might because we hate having to fire up the inverter to charge them.
Laundry is ok-we did bucket laundry for the first time a few days ago. Unfortunately we picked a day that had rain showers off and on all day so drying was a bit problematic! We strung clotheslines below and under the bimini and it eventually dried because of the 25 knot wind! Plus we were treated to some amazing rainbows!
Parts failures-You can’t be self-sufficient unless you have the right spare parts with you and know how to fix things. We have done most of the work ourselves over the last 3 years because we knew it was important that we know how things are installed, how they work and how to get to them. We got lots of additional practice with this over the first six weeks or so of cruising and I am sure will get more. We didn’t have some of the spares we needed, but the kids brought them to us at Christmas. Luckily (knock on wood), we haven’t had anything fail since the rebuilt alternator failed on our way over to Nassau to pick up the kids on 12/21. We had a new one onboard and David did a quick swap while we were underway under sail.
TRASH-This is the biggest problem!!!!! There just isn’t a good place to put it. We have almost 3 bags now (smaller than tall kitchen trash can size). Two bags are stowed up in the anchor locker and we will probably put the third in the dinghy. When we bring food onboard, I remove most of the packaging and leave it onshore before stowing the food to reduce our trash and reduce possibility of insects/eggs coming on board. I re-use ziplocks as much as possible, use Tupperware containers to store leftovers, don’t drink many cans of soda (Soda Stream is a wonderful invention!), but still the trash piles up. As you can imagine, the trash gets pretty stinky after a week and a half. If we were cruising offshore in the ocean, we could dump the bio-degradable food stuff overboard, but we can’t do that here in the Bahamas. We need to figure out a way to reduce our trash….
Holding Tank-OK, this is kind of a disgusting topic, but a critical system on a boat! When you flush your head (or toilet), the contents can either go directly overboard or into a holding tank. In the US, you are required to pump into a holding tank and then pump it out at a pump out station (usually can find them at marinas). In the Bahamas, there are no pump out stations, so boaters pump into their holding tanks and then when they are out in water away from anchorages and other boaters, they pump the holding tank overboard. There is so much water exchange with the ocean and Exuma Sound and there aren’t that many boats so the discharge is quickly diluted and it is not a problem. We have two heads, but only use one of them unless we have guests onboard. It has a ridiculously large holding tank-like 150 gallons! So even if we are hunkered down for a week to avoid the weather, we are just fine in this area!
So overall, we are doing pretty well, but we have a few things to figure out yet. One of the things I like about cruising is that there are always things to figure out! However, I’m glad that things are not failing on a daily basis like they were the first few weeks. David is even getting a little rusty on his sailor language since he hasn’t had to use it so much lately!
