Everything is salty. Down below decks there is a thin layer of salt that makes every article of clothing, upholstery and every other surface feel slightly damp. Even clean clothes feel a bit “off”. Outside, however, it is much worse - we have a thick coating of wet salt crystals everywhere. We are growing our own sea salt apparently.
This is understandable and not surprising. After all, a sail in strong winds and breaking waves results in spray from wind and waves, but it turns out that even a pleasant breeze at anchor carries many little salt bombs hidden in its gentle caress. You might expect salt to leave a little crusty film on surfaces. You would be wrong. Salt loves water and water loves salt you see. It is like the passionate embrace of hormonal teenagers. Once they embrace, it’s really hard to get them apart. The embrace of the teenage couple can be broken with a stern parental word, but salt and water, once joined, are not so easy to separate. Together they make a slimy ooze that feels more like motor oil than salt or water. There is a damp, wet, slippery mush over everything on the outside of the boat. Seats, deck, lines (ropes), tools, steering wheel, anchor – everything is covered with slime! We can “ice skate” on our deck on a bad salt day. The only relief is a steady rain, but even that only provides a brief respite and we don’t get a lot of them here in the sunny Bahamas.
You cannot stand up all the time you are on the boat, so sitting is inevitable. Your butt sits on many things as a sailing day progresses. You sit at the helm, in the cockpit, on the fore deck while pulling up and putting down the anchor, on the cabin top as you are working to free a line or move a block (pulley). When you sit, these little wet particles of salt glom onto your derriere and you carry them around with you until you do laundry. Sometimes your butt dries a bit when it is hot and sunny and the humidity drops, but by nighttime when the dew comes back you will be uncomfortably damp, slimy and sticky again.
After a brief time of sailing, only minutes on a high wind day with the splash and spray, your rear end is salty and slimy! There is no fixing this. Even if you can find a clean dry towel by this point, you cannot wipe the salt off. A wet rag only encourages more salt to seek you out and join its friends. Going below just helps spread the plague to the interior of the boat, and so that is to be avoided at all costs. Changing clothes provides momentary relief, but once out of the cabin, it soon feels the same as before. It is ironic that while salt and water turn slick and gooey, they also help clothing, especially underwear, bond to your butt skin. I think I got tendinitis one day from peeling my undies off my skin too many times.
To be fair there are a couple of positive aspects to this situation. Wet salt is a preservative, so your shorts are free from mold, mildew, rot and bacteria growth. Your skin may be inflamed and sore, but underneath the pain, at least there’s nothing serious growing. The other positive is that at the end of the day you do not have to hang up or fold your shorts and undies. You can just stand them in the corner and they will happily wait for morning to join your bottom in another day of life on board. That is of course assuming they don’t run off on their own which has been known to happen.
(MB’s commentary: I don’t suffer this malady that David describes to nearly the same extent. It may have something to do with the fact that I actually change my shorts every couple days instead of wearing them for 4-5 days! I do appreciate his efforts to decrease the amount of laundry we have to do though!)