This is the second instalment in a Series called “Boat Life Basics”. We thought we’d do this series in response to the most common questions we get from people who aren’t living on a sailboat…that is, most people ;) The questions we most often are ask related to: Water, Food and Power.

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So from our previous post you know how we get fresh, drinkable water into our lives on Matriarch. But as anticipated when we started this journey…our water consumption habits have also had to change. A lot. In fact, the way we think about water overall has changed. A lot.

We use water on the boat for the basics:

Cooking

…plus the very important COFFEE MAKING (and slightly less important TEA MAKING). This obviously depends on what we eat (e.g. if we eat pasta or soup vs. something sautéed or raw as well as how many vegetables I have to wash in prep).

Estimate: 5L / day but really it depends on what we eat, 35L / week

Drinking

…including filling our water bottles for when we leave the boat for the day since everywhere here you have to buy water (and yes Greg, sometimes you need to drink water instead of rum).

Estimate: 10L / day (probably we should be drinking more water…), 70L / week

Showers

The adults shower more than the kids but we probably take about 3 soaped up showers per week per person, but sometimes more depending on what we’ve been doing and how hot it is. Saving on showers sometimes just means more laundry so it’s not really saving anything…also it’s a small space and a little stink can get real big, real fast.

Estimate: 4L / shower, 60L / week

Aft Deck Rinsing Off

Yes, this is different from showering in our minds…this is when the kids or Greg and I rinse off salt water from a swim or a salty dinghy ride before getting into the boat. Super important to contain the salt to the exterior of the boat…that stuff is really hard to get out of fabric or off wood because there is some kind of natural oil involved which is fairly insoluble. Clearly on beach days, or a sweet anchorage where we can swim easily and often off the boat, this is more of a need.

Estimate:  1.5 L / rinse, 45L / week

Laundry

Or more specifically doing laundry in buckets…this is a huge water consumer. HUGE. We wash approximately 3 of these small loads each week.

Estimate: 15L per load (and a load in this context is pictured below in the basket…so not huge), 45L / week

Dishes

Another constant and huge consumer, more so than laundry actually. And this one is harder to control because the dishes is a kid job so they do what they do how they do it and it’s not usually with water conservation in mind. One strategy we’ve employed with them, or with guests who aren’t used to thinking about water this way, is to use the foot pump at the sink rather than the lever faucet. It’s a bit more of a pain to pump your wash water manually with your foot (as opposed to just opening the tap fully and letting water flow while you slowly clean a dish) and as a result we find the kids use less.

Estimate: 20L / day , 140L / week

Handwashing

Yes please and no kids you can’t conserve water by skipping this. Gross. Also Greg whenever you touch ANYTHING in the engine room you really need to wash up to your shoulders. The kids learned some bad handwashing habits somewhere which involved getting hands wet, squirting soap and then basically washing the soap right off…omg this drives me nuts. Aden is the worse culprit here. So we have drilled into them the whole wet – soap up – rinse off thing as per the shower protocol. If I don’t see bubbles when you wash your hands you don’t get to touch me after you poop.

Estimate: 7L / week

Teethbrushing

Ditto above kids. Dental care is expensive and also a big hassle. This consumption was the easiest to contain…even at home we all just wet the brush and turned off the tap immediately, brush (2 minutes!) and then back on for a quick rinse off.

Estimate: 7L / week

We think overall we are using about 400 – 500L / week (fun fact: we worked separately on this, Greg had the overall estimate based on water maker production and I did the daily / weekly estimates and they actually really lined up…told you we were water obsessed!)

What’s not on this list? THE POOPERS! Our toilets are raw water flush (as Liam explains) and as such do not require our precious, precious fresh water to flush. In the Chesapeake (where the water gets a bit fetid in the harbour in the summer) this seemed like a con; in the cruising world, this is a mega pro!

I think (for me anyway) I had a hard time at home (i.e. in the house) actually quantifying water consumption. I mean it’s pretty difficult to do unless you collect what you use and actually look at it before it all runs down the drain. Well we actually have this opportunity on the boat which has helped us with our estimates. In fact, we can quantify use in three ways:

1)    Collect

When we shower the used water collects in a basin under the grid floor and we pump it out when we are done. You can see what you’ve used (and I guess how dirty you were too). When we’ve had guests on the boat we’ve told them if the water level touches the floor…you’ve used waaay too much water to clean yourself. Also the upside of handwashing laundry (yes this is a stretch of the word ‘upside’) is that you can see how much water is in your damn bucket.

2)    Count

The water pump activates after every 60mL expressed (either at one of the 2 head showers, aft deck shower or at one of the 3 sinks). We know how many pumps it takes to get adequately wet to start your shower (i.e. wet enough to lather soap)…it’s about 10-15 pumps. And we can count these easily because the freshwater pump is in the engine room and is clearly audible anywhere on the boat (it’s not overly loud, just a very distinct sound). This took a bit of practice but now we know that if we hear someone showering and the pump just keeps going on and on and on…they aren’t following the wet down – turn off – soap up – rinse off shower protocol. Then we knock on the door and tell them to wrap it up. Our family crew on passage really loved this level of auditing. LOL. (they hated it)

3)    Gauge

We have a water gauge that…surprise…gauges the water level in the tanks. BUT we’ve learned that ½ doesn’t mean you have 475L left to use. More like 300L we estimate or maybe even less (still figuring out). Before we filled up the water tanks in Bermuda the gauge read ½…then Heidi and Andrew did their laundry (which all fit in 2 backpacks) and the tanks were close to 1/4 …I don’t think they used 200L to wash their laundry. This was one of the first indications that the gauge required interpretation. For us ½ full means make water and we generally prefer to keep them at or above ¾ to be prepared for unexpected circumstances.

So to wrap this up I harken back to the days when I would take a hot bath in our beautiful deep tub. Dude. I can’t really imagine how much water would fill that tub but it’s probably pretty damn close to what we use on Matriarch in a week. That is freaking crazy to think about!!!

Wait hang on, Greg is a math genius (kicked off by his high-school math teacher and hoops guru Coach Raj)….so let’s do the math!

The tub was approx. 1.5m x 0.75m x 0.75m in size and when used was likely filled half-full. Given that 1L = 1000cm3, how much water did my bath take?

Answer: 422L

Holy sh*t.

Now hey, I’m not bath-shaming anyone…I don’t regret these baths necessarily (or at least at the time I didn’t really think about it beyond feeling like it was a not-daily extravagance)…it’s just really wild for us to know we could comfortably exist for a week living on the boat with a bathtub half-full of fresh water. And it’s also wild to think about the effort it takes us now to generate that bathtub half-full of water compared to me turning the tap, walking away to get a glass of wine and my laptop to watch Netflix and them coming back to enjoy 422L for about 45 mins.   

Damn. I said earlier we are water obsessed but I can honestly say we didn’t plan on doing all of this math when we started writing this post so these numbers are as much as a surprise to me as they might be to you.

We welcome guests to Matriarch but if you take a shower – you best be quick or you will find yourself swimming home.

Much love,

M