A Month Into Boat Life

Today marks the official start of our second month living aboard Matriarch and I’m reflecting a bit on how everyone’s adjusting, what we’ve learned, what we’ve accomplished, and our future plans. While actually taking the leap from our comfortable suburban life to this boating chapter of our adventures was much, much more difficult than I expected, every day since has become a little better than the day before. Still, it’s only been the past few days that I’ve been able to sit back, look around, and appreciate how fortunate we are to be here, rather than spending all my attention jumping from one boat job to the next before crashing into bed. We’re getting more and more comfortable in our new neighbourhood, our confidence is starting to build as we knock item after item off our to-do list, and best of all we’re making new connections with like-minded people giving us a bit of a local support network.

Boat Jobs and Embracing the Do-It-Yourself Mentality

One thing about moving onto a boat that has already been sailed around the world is there are bound to be a few things that need to be repaired or replaced. No surprise there and we’ve been expecting it; however, we’ve also got pretty high standards and feel strongly we need to know our boat/home inside and out so when things inevitably break we’re able to handle it ourselves if at all possible. We’ve come to realize this isn’t a trait shared by all boat owners and that paying one of the many contractors here at Herrington Harbour (at a premium) to make boat issues go away is a fairly common occurrence. We’ve got no problems doing just that when we find ourselves truly out of our depth (e.g. when I find a refrigerant leak near our freezer compressor or when we realized today that we have a shaft tube leak that might require a haul-out), but it does make finding reliable how-to information from folks who have been there and done that surprisingly hard to find. That being said, we’ve managed to do almost everything ourselves so far and while it’s taken longer since we’re learning a lot of things as we go, it’s also paying dividends in understanding how everything in our floating home is put together and operates.

Even though Megan and I always said we didn’t want a “project boat”, all boats are projects. We started out with a pretty long to-do list which grew much longer quite quickly as we added many more items than we could possibly hope to get done each day. It was frustrating to start off that way. After a month of grinding away I’ve finally reached a happy equilibrium where the ‘done’ list is growing at least as fast as we’re adding new items to the ‘to-do’ list. On top of that, we’ve now got a good handle on almost all of Matriarch’s systems and have completed a few decent sized upgrades. One of which being the installation of the davits. Nothing is more nerve wracking as drilling holes into the stern of your boat, straight through the fibreglass that reliably keeps you and the sea separated. That said, our dinghy is swinging gently from the davits as I type and everything is rock solid.

Dinghy davits almost done, just need to measure and order the stabilizer. Oh and put some solar on top. Ignore all the messy lines, it’s a kid job to get them all cleaned up and looking ship shape.

Getting Comfortable in a (Very) Tiny House

I've read the definition of a tiny house is anything less than 400sqft. Matriarch is 48.5ft long and has a maximum beam of 14.25ft, which after accounting for the narrow-at-the-ends sailboat shape gives us around 350sqft for the five of us. A little more than 1/10th of our prior accommodations in Milton, but thankfully her space is laid very, very efficiently. In fact, one of the biggest reasons we chose a boat built by Hallberg-Rassy was the excellent Swedish design and practical use of the limited space available. Once we started to get all our things organized and stowed away in places that made sense for everyday life we found we actually had storage space left over! Though to be fair we did edit out some items we brought and either sent them back with Kyle right away or have them in the back of our car for my parents to take home when they visit this week. We could have fit them, we just realized we didn’t need them (for example, 8 boxes of lego, 4 different sized pots, duvets, and so on).

Once the chaos of moving in had passed, it starting taking far less time to accomplish the basic tasks of everyday life like getting dressed, preparing meals, and personal hygiene, because items were in a place that made sense rather than being randomly shoved here and there. Not having to spend 10 minutes searching for literally every little thing we needed before getting on with our day was a huge improvement in quality of life. Don’t get me wrong, it still takes significantly more time to do each of those things than it would in our house; however, it doesn’t require the whole day to just exist anymore.

Part of the process was also adding the little touches that make any space a home - a couple pictures on the wall, a few well placed hooks for everyone’s bags, some hanging mesh bags for food and toys, and some reminders here and there from home in Ontario. It also didn’t take us very long to get used to living in close proximity to each other and falling into a routine for meals, work, and play time.

Making New Connections

Walking around on the docks with our three very social kids and one very social wife has made it easy to meet people and we’ve taken full advantage! Our new friends have given us the inside scoop on the best grocery store, best hardware store (which is turning out to be VERY important given how much fixing is going on), and the recommended spots to visit on the Chesapeake as soon as we get out and sailing. We’ve had a couple over to Matriarch for drinks from Australia who also own a Hallberg-Rassy, have joined others for a dinghy ride to dinner who we met at our Offshore Emergency Medicine course and are hoping to cruise for a few days with another great couple on our dock from New Jersey.

One of our new friends retired recently so of course the kids were all over it with a custom-made card!

Beyond social connections, we’ve also sussed out which contractors at the marina are the good ones and made sure we’re on good terms with them. Cannot stress this enough. Being on good terms with contractors is important. That doesn’t mean you say yes to everything…Megan says they are like researchers: they think they know everything (or are trained to believe as much) but also respect people who ask intelligent questions. So we at least make sure we’ve done our work before going in to talk with them, and have had a coffee.

Looking Ahead (But Not Too Far)

So now that we’ve got the basics sorted out we’ve started looking forward to getting out on the water. Of course this comes with some trepidation because it’s been close to a year since we sold Exodus and started working toward this live aboard chapter. It feels like such a long time since we’ve been out carefree on the water. It also makes it complicated to get-up-and-go when the boat is your full time home. We talked with a couple the other day who said that they started out requiring 2 hours to turn their boat from a house to a vehicle in the first year they moved in. We don’t think it will take us 2 hours to prep the boat (once she’s actually ready to go out) but it won’t be instant like it was on Exodus. In anticipation of this we’ve already changed a few storage systems we had just nicely set up in order to make our get-up-and-go time more efficient. And also made peace with Liam’s top bunk with the lee cloth up being an acceptable place to stow random things the first few times we sail.

Yours truly upside down in a cockpit locker fixing a few things in a very hard to reach location. Being short and flexible does have some advantages.

So we are progressing. Feeling a bit more positive and less overwhelmed. However, it seems as though every step forward so far has come with several steps back as we find new things that need to be fixed, cleaned, learned, or replaced. Case in point, today as Megan and I were working through the boat reviewing all the systems and doing some basic maintenance, we noticed water seeping in the engine room from around the prop shaft entry, which turned into an hour of research to figure out why and how to fix it, which turned into an examination of the bilge, which turned into realizing the automatic switch for turning on the bilge pump when water is present wasn’t working, which turned into a project for tomorrow to fix that, and so on… but I’ll save that for another post.