This door is really only 15" x 30". Taken with a fisheye lens.

People (meaning women) often ask me what I do about my clothes and shoes.  Surely a 27-foot sailboat can’t hold everything I need, so I must make a lot of runs to storage when I need new stuff, right?  Well don’t let her little size fool you – this boat has more than enough room for me.  Aft of my berth and across from the head, next to the icebox, is a small locker.  The door is about 15″ x 30″.  It is deceivingly small.  In it, I have hanging a full two-piece wetsuit, dive gear (sans tank and vest), foul-weather gear, two sweatshirts, four dressy-ish short-sleeve shirts, two long-sleeve dress shirts, four pairs of pants, and four pairs of shoes (including hiking boots)…with room to spare for a few more things.  Moving forward, on each side of my berth are two storage hammocks.  In these I keep rolled-up underwear, t-shirts, shorts, socks, and exercise clothes.  Don’t believe me?  The pictures speak for themselves.  Everything I need for long-term cruising.  Back in the stern, I also have a small duffel with my trekking clothes and extra-cold clothing.

On my to-do list is to replace these hammocks with more sturdy wooden shelves, but the hammocks are working out just fine right now so that is more of a long-term project.

Storage hammocks hang from both sides of my berth in the bow of the boat

As a sidebar to point out just how much storage there is, underneath my berth is 100′ of chain and 200′ of line for anchoring, power tools, tool chest, spare engine parts, spare rigging parts, and the holding tank for waste.  And that’s all just in the bow.  I won’t even list all the other little hideaways throughout the rest of the boat.

Do you really need any more than this?  Think you could do it?

Getting the dough as thin as possible

In my last post, I informed you that I was going to just be buying the staples and making everything from scratch – like bread and soups.  Being a fan of Mexican food, I had to learn how to make flour tortillas.  I’m a quick learner!  These are fairly easy and only take thirty minutes from start to end, and it only requires flour, oil, water, and salt. Probably the most difficult part of it is finding a flat space large enough to roll out the tortillas on such a small boat!

The tortilla mixture with flour, olive oil, water, and salt.

To one cup of all-purpose flour, add about 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil.  Mix this until you have a mixture of crumbly chunks.  You can use different kinds of oil, but I’m only carrying olive oil with me.  As long as you don’t use too much, you can barely taste it.  To this mixture add salt, then sprinkle in water and mix until you have a dough the texture of chewed gum. Sprinkle a pastry mat or other flat surface with flour and proceed to work the dough.  Be generous with the flour.  Flatten it with your palms, fold over itself, and flatten again.  Keep doing this until the dough no longer sticks to your hands.  It should start to “spring”, meaning when you flatten it out it will want to shrink back.

The tortillas are ready as soon as bubbles appear!

Now to make the tortillas, first start by heating up a frying pan over medium-high heat.  Tear off a chunk of dough the size of a golf ball.  Flour a rolling pin or other similar object and flatten out in all directions so it maintains some sort of circular shape.  However, the shape isn’t as important as getting this dough as thin as you can – it should be translucent.  As soon as you have a paper-thin tortilla, immediately throw it on the frying pan before it has a chance to shrink up.  Once on the pan, the dough should start to bubble – it only takes a few seconds – and now it’s time to flip.  Cook the other side for a few seconds and you’re done!  After cooking, I threw the tortillas in a freezer bag so that the moisture would be trapped inside the bag, leaving the tortillas soft enough to roll.

Tortillas with honey and cinnamon

Now for the fun part – food!  For breakfast, you can eat these with scrambled eggs and sausage, the for lunch & dinner use your stores of rice, black beans, and canned chicken with some other spices for a quasi-burrito.  And for dessert, my favorite, tortillas rolled up with honey and cinnamon.

This recipe makes a half dozen tortillas.  In the future, I’ll probably double this recipe so the tortillas last a little longer – they’re going fast!

Jewels performing with her firehoops

Boys like fire.  Boys really like girls playing with fire.  That’s what happened when the Washington waterfront held its fourth annual Beaufort County Music Festival.  Just after dusk, Hoopdrum took the stage and hypnotized young & old for the duration of their performance.  Jewels dances with fire while Scott plays his homemade drums.  They’re out of Carrboro, North Carolina but are known around the world for their performances.

90mm, ISO 1600, f/5.6, 1/8 sec.

-What is easy to make and tastes good?  Back in my “civilized” days, I loved cooking complex dishes with multiple ingredients (most of which come from the refrigerator).  At sea, I’ll only want to cook “one-pan” meals and with minimal ingredients.  Canned meats will be my friend.  Surprisingly, quite a variety of simple dishes can be made with a few basic ingredients.  I’ll be carrying a lot of staples such as flour, oats, rice, beans, and pasta.  I’ll bake my own bread and grow my own sprouts.  I’m going to recreate what others have suggested and come up with a few things on my own, and see what I like and don’t like (or can’t stand!).

-How do I do this while producing the smallest waste footprint possible?  Some things I’ll be able to throw overboard, like glass and simple paper, but other things like plastics and metals I’ll want to keep on board until I can dump it in a landfill (better than winding up in the ocean?).  I’ll have to carry this trash with me until I reach port, and this can be a major problem when storage is at a premium.  Some places also charge for trash disposal, and with more trash, the price goes up.

-How will I store everything?  Anything in a paper container (grains, pasta, rice, etc) needs to go in a plastic storage container.  These containers need to be impervious to infestations and moisture.  I’ll also want to split up my rations so that if one container goes bad, I don’t lose it all (i.e. I’ll have another container of flour).  Ditching the packaging at port and transferring to reusable containers will also help reduce the trash I produce at sea.  Multiple small containers are also easier to store than one large container, considering I’ll be finding some outrageous places to store these things!  (Cereal behind the toilet?  If it fits!)

-How much fuel will I consume?  Right now I have a 20-pound propane tank (about 5 gallons), which is similar to your everyday portable gas grill tank.  This tank has lasted me seven months so far, cooking on average once a day, boiling water for coffee and oatmeal, cooking a dinner dish, and even a Thanksgiving roast.  I’m just waiting for its last breath.  Anyways, I imagine I’ll be cooking more when I don’t have options to eat out.  I’ll be using it more, but I also have a pressure cooker in the mail which will reduce the fuel I use.  Even though I’ll be cooking more, maybe I can still get close to a year out of one tank?  This will be a difficult goal to measure objectively, but I should be able to make some good estimations of how much I’ve cooked so far and what I plan to cook in the future.

-How much water will I consume?  My tank carries 40 gallons, and I’m going with a conservative estimate of using one gallon per day.  I’ll need to avoid the foods that require a large amount of water, and the first thing that comes to mind is brewing my own beer.  Too much water.  And no refrigeration.  Dehydrated foods and beans that require a lot of rinsing won’t be very practical though I do plan on carrying them.  There are also alternatives such as using the water in canned vegetables to cook the rice you plan on using with those vegetables.  Let’s get creative!

-How much will all of this cost?  Buying in bulk, and buying basic ingredients will really help with keeping costs down.  One such example is homemade bread.  A few pounds of flour cost less than a loaf of bread, and I’ll get more than a few loaves out of that.  I’ll get a good idea of what my costs will be while provisioning in America, but costs could be considerably higher in remote areas.  That’s why it helps to buy as much as I can now, and figure out…

-How much will all of this food last?  This should be the easiest part of the planning.  If I can figure out recipes that I enjoy and make meal plans, I should know exactly how much I’ll need for a given amount of time.  I’ll also need to figure out how long specific foods will last.  Did you know that eggs can last for a few months without refrigeration?  Fresh never-refrigerated eggs, coated in vaseline and flipped once a week can last months down in the bilge.  There are a lot of little tricks like this that I should learn to master before letting the shore slip from sight.

Oh, and what about the booze?  Red wine and rum.  Maybe I’ll add some vodka, Kahlua, tequila, and lime juice if I get bored.

When I moved out of my apartment and onto the boat last October, I incurred a total daily commute of two and a half hours.  This was worth it to me; I wanted to begin projects on the boat, see what it’s like to be a liveaboard, and work out whatever issues I could before I finally set sail.  I have enough leave accumulated so that I’ve taken all Mondays off between now and July (when I separate from active duty) and I also stay at a friend’s house near base at least once a week when I have an early morning or late night at work.  So during those 2-3 days of commuting, I typically spend five to seven hours a week in my jeep driving between my boat and the base.  Plenty of time to think (or worry?) about the future.

I’m going back to California.

Stand up paddle boarders and boaters out on Christmas Eve morning, Dana Point Harbor, California

But that’s all I know.  I was born there and love my Pacific Ocean and Sierra Nevadas, and all of the recreational activities and exploration opportunities available.  When and how exactly I get there is still all up in the air, figuratively and literally speaking.  I might be there next year after abandoning my voyage either by choice or natural disaster.  Or I might finally land there ten years from now, after exploring every Caribbean island that I can, holing up in a small banana republic for a few years, and exploring Patagonia at land’s end (no play on outfitter companies intended!).  Or I might stumble upon an amazing woman in Uruguay and spend the rest of my life there.  The world is waiting for me and has its own plan.  I’m not going to force it, but now I have some direction.

Places I would like to visit, if my journey allows, are Patagonia, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the Galapagos.  I’d cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Strait of Magellan (although athletes have rounded Cape Horn in kayaks, the thought of sailing around it makes me squeamish).  There are many places in between, but those would be the highlights.  Now we all have to see if I make it.

Subject to change.

This 72-foot gaff-rigged schooner has been the talk of the town for the past few months, as city council members discussed giving the vessel a home on the Washington waterfront.  The ship, built in 1985 and relatively young (younger than my boat!) still brings back reminders of the town’s history as one of the east coast’s major shipping ports.  Tall ships like these schooners were all over the waterfront between one hundred and two hundred years ago.
The Jeanie B is used for boys’ and girls’ camps, and also provides sunset & stargazing trips to anyone interested a few nights a week – the ship’s “specialization”, if you will, is celestial navigation.  The deal made with the town council offers the ship a free slip for a term of five years in exchange for a cut of its commercial profits.  The Jeanie B’s official website is at http://jeanieb.com/.

The second switch in the bilge pump circuit, corroded from...?

Probably the biggest project of “Electrical Month” – wiring and power distribution – was finally completed today.  I’m a firm believer in the saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and some could argue that my power distribution panels weren’t broken, but I’d disagree.  To turn on the bilge pump (which had no automatic switching), I first had to turn on the “Sump Pump” breaker on the distribution panel (for the shower drain) and then pull an aftermarket switch labeled “bilge pump” bolted into the fiberglass bulkhead.  The deck light that lights up the foredeck of my boat was wired to the “Cabin Lighting” breaker and then to its own aftermarket “Deck Light” switch.  Inspecting all of these switches revealed bare wire, corrosion, and unprotected circuits – on top of no automatic bilge pump switching – that all presented a serious safety hazard.  Must rectify!

This whole thing started with the fact that I had no automatic bilge pump switch, i.e. if water entered my boat from somewhere and I wasn’t there to turn on the pump myself, the boat could sink.  This was a shocker for such a highly-regarded boat builder, but it didn’t seem to be too important to any of the owners in the previous thirty years.  I purchased an Ultra Pumpswitch Senior that is essentially a floating magnet inside a plastic tube down in my bilge, protected from debris, and when the magnet floats high enough inside the tube it turns on the switch and activates the pump.  I didn’t want this switch on the breaker panel because I wanted it to always have battery power, even if  the master battery switch was turned off.  This meant that I’d have to wire it directly to the battery and install an inline fuse, something that can become a little messy and potentially unsafe with too many wires going directly to the battery terminals.  To address this, I installed a Blue Sea Systems Dual Battery Main Distribution Panel.  This is a battery isolation switch on a panel that also has protected circuits that are always connected to battery power, regardless of the position of the battery switch.  The isolation switch also isolates my starting battery from my house battery circuits, always ensuring that my starting battery has enough juice to start the motor with the option to combine all the batteries if needed.  I finished the bilge pump installation with a Rule three-way switch, enabling me to manually activate the bilge pump when desired.  Phew…there, now I have an automatic bilge pump.

Old isolation switch on the left with the new switch and bilge switch on the right. All that's left is to refinish the teak bulkhead plug.

Now I had to do something about those corroded wires and piecemeal switch configurations.  I purchased separate AC and DC panels, also made from Blue Sea Systems, one of the leaders in marine electronics.  These panels have all the fancy backlit labels and LED indicator lights, but more importantly, the DC panel comes with a digital multimeter allowing me to monitor my battery charge state and amperage consumption.  It and my AC panel also have room for expansion, so I don’t have to keep adding random switches in random places about the boat.  After removing the old panel, I noticed some corrosion on some of the wires.  I never did nail down the source of the corrosion (more important than replacing them), but I’ll keep an eye on them.  I still got those wires replaced – another two days’  work – and would urge any used boat owner to inspect their wiring all the way from the batteries to the distribution panels to the load.

30-year old panels on the left with the new on the right. While I was working there, I noticed the table hinges needed some polishing too! My temporary cover for the old switches was a velcro pen holder. I'll do something more permanent with it later.

This entire portion of my upgrades cost over $1,500, but since faulty wiring is the leading cause of boat fires, I didn’t want to skimp on quality or cut corners.  Then again, I seem to be using that argument about every system.