Airing Some Dirty Laundry

LOL…did you think this post was about some dark dirty secret? Nope. Sorry. It’s literally about dirty laundry.

Ok let’s be honest. Doing laundry stinks (laundry pun!) Even when we lived in the house it always felt like there was a big pile of laundry waiting to be done and on the days where we would crank through 11 loads we really only gained a day or two of breathing room before we were stepping around big piles again. I realize this isn’t unique to us. Unless you live in a nudist colony or some remote island where only the dolphins will judge you, you probably wear clothes of some sort and eventually those clothes need to be cleaned in some way. So why am I writing about something we all (likely) do?

Because like everything on a boat, laundry is about a million times more of a hassle than on land. So much so….we go nude as often as we can ;) Wait, maybe that’s our dark dirty secret…

Maybe if it were just the two of us and we were at a dock all the time this would be really good…provided the clog was an easy fix. But between the water, power and size (and clog) she gots to go!

When we bought Matriarch we were informed on her spec-sheet that she had a washing machine on board. True she does. It does not drain properly (probably just clogged but the fix is right at the back so we would have to uninstall it to unclog which is a minor, no MAJOR, undertaking). It uses a HUGE amount of water for a VERY SMALL LOAD. It takes a HUGE amount of power. It takes a HUGE amount of time. So needless to say this was not going to work well for us. NOTE: removing this thing is on our long to-do list…it might be need to be cut apart to get out of that cabinet but when it’s out we’ll have a new massive space we can use for storage.

Hand washing is not a thing we did much of in the house. With just a few exceptions for some delicate items, everything was unceremoniously tossed in our washer and spun to death. We were pretty rough on machines too…we loaded too much, used the wrong soap for a long time and push the stuff in with too much force. It’s a bit of an embarrassment but it was only about 5 or 6 years ago that we learned the hazards of overloading a machine when a repair guy came and dressed us down (laundry pun!) for the state of our relatively young machine like we were teens caught being naughty. Apparently we’d been doing it wrong for years and our machine was aged beyond her years (fun fact: clothes still got clean). Possibly that is another dark dirty secret…

So we learned from the error of our ways and treated the machine with respect after that fateful day with the repair guy…she still died young (and about 6 months before we moved to the boat. Super timing. Who doesn’t love buying a big new appliance for someone else to use?). Now knowing what it’s like to wash clothes by hand for a family of 5 I wish I had been kinder to #1… I hope our tenants are kind to #2 or the guilt will be unbearable.

Knowing we were moving aboard we started playing around with ‘efficient and effective’ ways to wash laundry without a machine in the Spring of 2019 (feels like a million years ago now). There is a really cool littler foot pump washer I love called the Drumi but had been in development / preorder / startup mode for a long time so I had to look elsewhere…it’s available now but I think holds loads that are too small to be practical for the 5 of us. Bummer.

We bought the following to try:

The Laundry Alternative “WonderWash”which is basically a drum that you spin to agitate the clothes….it sucked. Leaked all over, was hard to turn, wobbled when doing so and then was a pain to drain…oh ya also used a ton of water.
A laundry ‘plunger’ (think toilet plunger) that you use with a bucket…also sucked. Hard to use, head wobbled on the pole, and really felt like much harder than just using our hands to do the agitation.
A washboard…surprising hard to find for laundry. Much easier to find for making music. No I am not kidding. This was the best alternative so far in terms of pushing soapy water through clothes.

She works for laundry…and making music apparently…between this, some buckets and our ukulele Harris Crew can challenge the VonTrapp family ;)

Oh ya. Did you know? That’s the whole bloody point of using anything. Forcing clean soapy water through the fabric. Perhaps you all knew this, perhaps you didn’t kill your laundry machines like a laundry psychopath (slowly and without feeling), perhaps you are so perfect you never make mistakes or break anything and always smell like roses and walk around with rainbows and music flowing from your buttt….sorry, carried away there. Well I did not really ever think about how clothes get actually clean beyond: dirty stuff in, clean stuff out. I did always sort of wonder about how people got clothes clean by beating them on rocks but honestly didn’t dedicate much brain power to it and I’m ashamed to admit this…dark dirty secret #3 I think we are at now.

Ok so back to the point…once I realized that the idea was to force clean soapy water through the fabric (carrying away all of your gnarly stankness) the washboard really made more sense. But man, using it ‘efficiently and effectively’ has taken practice.

Our first time using it was a film featuring Too Much Soap and her co-star Too Much Water and got two thumbs down. Our second time using it was a saga with Too Little Water and Still Too Much Soap and got laughable reviews and resulted in strangely soap-crusted-yet-stil-unclean-and-would-never-dry clothes. After taking a break while living aboard at Herrington Harbour North and using their machines (recall our clothes had experienced two failures and were really in need of an ACTUAL wash), our third time was a bit better. We’ve continued to refine the process we established in the third run and it looks roughly like this (depending on deck space, available shade, etc.):

3 laundry basins side by side: 1 with clothes in soapy water + vinegar, 1 empty, 1 with clean rinse water
Megan positions herself over the middle basin grabs a garment from the soapy water, and pushes the water through the fabric (!!!) on the washboard, plunging back into basin #1 as many time as she feels required as determined by the level of stank on the clothes. NOTE: a bar of Ethique laundry soap is at hand for spot washing stubborn spots or overly crusty leftover food deposits. ANOTHER NOTE: Megan considers this her exercise for the day.
After a purely subjective amount of time, Megan squeezes out as much of the soapy water as possible and drops garment with a *sigh* into the rinse water to sit for a moment until she yells (politely) for Greg or the kids to come help
Some helpful human on board will take the garment in the rinse water and swish it around bit (very technical), remove, squeeze out excess water and…now this is very important…smell the garment in any questionable locations to ensure satisfactory level of de-stank. I am not kidding…the nose knows (bahaha I can hear your eyeroll from here).
Clean looking and clean smelling garment is then hung to dry on one of the various and vary public locations around our deck. Classy!

Action shot…missing pants of course ;) Honestly it’s just easier to always be semi-naked…less laundry!

We really class up every anchorage…especially this load since it was basically all underwear and bathing suits!

This worked reasonably well for a while and then one morning I started things out and then got busy so the wash basin of clothes with soapy water + vinegar ended up sitting for a few hours before I got to it. MIRACLE!!!!!!! Shit gets real clean real easy after it soaks for a bit. Honestly even as I write this I am ashamed I didn’t think of this sooner…sort of like our mistreatment of our washing machines…I clearly do not have an efficient-and-effective-laundry-focused brain. Anyway, ever since that happy accident our wash day starts early with various pails of soaking laundry in soapy water + vinegar for a few hours and then I follow the above process. The two other upsides to this process is that:

a) the soap is much easier to rinse out after it’s been soaking for awhile…I don’t know why…Does it disappear? Does it get all full of stank and sink to the bottom? Does our level of saltiness just destroy it? Mystery.

AND

b) I can do a lot more laundry much faster using just two basins and working through pail to pail to pail of soaking laundry…which leaves lonely basin #3 available for when we have to ditch the darkening rinse water for a fresh batch. (My standards for how grey the rinse water can get before I demand a husband or kid dump and refill varies with my mood).

Here we go…magic of soaking at work and ready to get my exercise of the week (jk, sorta)…gotta work off all of the baguette (jk, sorta) ;P

There is one terrible horrible no-good very bad exception to this process….can you guess?

…..Sheets

I lied, there are two exceptions. Sheets and tea towels.

Ok sheets are just too damn big to wash on the deck without slopping them all over the teak and dragging them through left over salt from the last sail or sand from the last beach day. NOTHING makes me more pissed off on laundry day than clean items being dropped or dragged on the deck (ahem helpers on my boat please pay attention here). I have done them in a pinch but if I can find it, a laundry service every X number of weeks is required to properly clean sheets. Wait…? What’s the X? Hahaha you’ll have to guess because I am not sharing my sheet washing frequency…it’s a dark dirty secret that will die with me. But rest assured if you come visit they will be properly laundered before you lay your head.

Annnnnnnd tea towels. You’d think something that gets wet so often would not be such a little stubborn piece of shit to get clean. Whoever designed tea towels only thought of the drying function and not what happens after the thing it was wiping is dry. Like honestly. Nightmare. Bits of food, weird smells (like strong onions) and long strands of brown hair (I swear they are Greg’s not mine) get all snarled up in our tea towels and my ‘agitation’ with the washboard has them laughing back at me like an evil villain. Solution? Toss them in with the sheets yes. But also, have one hundred million thousand of them so I don’t have to deal with them too often.

So there you go. Now I’ve confessed to being woefully ignorant about Adulting 101 basics and having questionable cleanliness standards that vary based on my moods. I guess I did air a bit more dirty laundry than I anticipated but when the cycle starts spinning you just have to let it finish (laundry pun!).

Stop rolling your eyes. Puns are the best.

Also consider this a PSA for your machine: half-full, don’t shove and use an environmentally friendly soap. Seriously what are you? A murderer?

Join the club.

Much love,

M