We feel a lot closer to the elements here than we did at home, the wind in our faces, filling the sails, the water rushing under our feet when we’re sailing, gurgling under the hulls while on anchorage. Using only the wind to travel feels very satisfying, especially in this modern age of global bellyache from gorging on fossil fuels.
Back when these islands were first populated, the wind and food (and later on, rhum) were all the external inputs that sailors needed to go wherever they wanted. And it never ceases to amaze me, a child of the modern developed world, how powerful the wind is, how incredible it is that you can travel around the world, by wind alone.
Without the convenience of water and electricity on tap, we have to bring everything we use with us, forcing us to notice our consumption. We’ll need to be super efficient when we get to the long Pacific crossings (which could take up to 4 weeks without any possibility of adding fuel or water); but more than that it is about trying to lower our impact, aiming to live as much as possible from the sea, the sun and the wind.
Our water tank holds 800 litres of fresh water, and we preserve it as best we can. That means washing up in salt water, and only rinsing off in fresh. Never leaving taps running. Having ultra short showers, or no showers at all. Normal soap doesn’t work in salt water, so we have special salt water soap and shampoo.
We cook with salt whenever on a clean anchorage, using half salt water, half tank water for pasta and rice, salt water for bread dough once the yeast is working, boiling eggs and potatoes in salt.
In order to get more water, we have two options: either find a place where we can buy it (which is not always easy in remote areas) or turn on our watermaker, which makes lovely fresh water from seawater through a process known as reverse osmosis.
Which brings me to power. The watermaker works off our batteries, and to keep the batteries topped up, we have a large solar panel on the back of the boat. This can easily keep our batteries topped up on a sunny day. Another option is to run the engine and charge the batteries by burning diesel. Making water is expensive in terms of power – it really drains the batteries. But as the watermaker can make about 60 litres an hour, it doesn’t have to run for long each day to replace what we use. We worked out that when we are not super careful we use about 50 litres a day for our family of four.
We use gas for cooking, which is quite efficient, and a bottle seems to last three months or more. And of course, we use petrol for the dinghy, although it has oars. We’ve been trying to buy a sailing dinghy, but so far have had no luck.
Apart from the watermaker, the other big power user is the fridge/freezer, which we currently only run for about an hour a day, when the sun is high in the sky. Not perhaps quite enough to be entirely foodsafe, but enough to keep the temperature below 10 degrees most of the time. We bought a thermometer to figure out how cool the fridge got, and it was working fine outside (38 degrees), fine in the water (32 degrees) but not so fine in the fridge (-23 degrees). A new thermometer shows the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, clearly within the ‘danger zone’ for fridges. Dairy is OK for two days if we keep it in the freezer, where temperatures stay in the fridge ‘safe zone’ most of the time. As we don’t have access to a lot of dairy or meat, the exact temperature isn’t crucial, but on the other hand we could stock up with more of the stuff if we had a working fridge. Kind of chicken and egg situation (of which we currently only stock the eggs, because they’ll keep outside the fridge).
Whenever we turn the engine on, the watermaker and the fridge go on too, and we joke that in a man overboard situation, the desirable course of events is to hit the ‘Mark’ button on the GPS, turn the wheel to heave to, throw out the bouy to the person in the water, switch on the engine and then switch on the fridge and the watermaker. And then try to lower the sails and get back to the person rapidly drifting away.
On ocean crossings we may chose not to run the fridge once the fresh vegetables are finished – we’ve crossed the Atlantic on boats with no fridge before, and it doesn’t detract much from the experience.
Barring whatever energy went into making the boat, we certainly have a much smaller environmental footprint here than we did at home, where we ran cars, had baths and watered our flowerbeds. The only thing we’re doing less well on is plastic – it is everywhere in the supermarkets and hard to avoid. Of course, we’re not working while we are away, so there is no transport to and from work. And to make this trip possible, we had to fly out to the Caribbean, so there is still a hefty carbon debt to pay off. Nevertheless, it is good to teach the kids to be in touch with what we use, to be aware of the resources on which we depend, and to try to minimise the consumption of fossil fuel energy.
Now all we need is to catch some more fish, so we can start getting our food from the ocean…
SV Bob The Cat 