Hooumi, Nuku Hiva, Marquises, French Polynesia 15 Jan 2012 08S53 140W01
In writing mostly on passage, I’ve neglected to share many of the details of boat life near land. There is more to it than algebra, excursions and exotic views, but some of the more-to-it is more tedious than I’d like to admit in public. That tedium bleeds into my descriptions, making for a boring read. Descriptions of the endless tropical eye candy surrounding us would get equally boring. Admit it, all any of us really wants to read about, are the life and death moments, where fear, terror and horror, remind us of what it is to be alive, and well, and far from such dangers. But thanks to a skilled captain, a solid boat and super conservative weather watching, we’ve so far managed to avoid most of those life and death moments (twisting the tip of my finger a year ago in a bucket incident doesn’t quite qualify). Attempting to strike terror in your hearts with a description of washday may be the closest I can come to making you thankful to be alive and not cruising.
Our washing machine died early on in our voyage. Another electronics card fallen victim to the barbarous tropical climes, and another consumer fallen victim to the relentless march of electronics upgrades. Though sorely tempted we did not toss it into the Tonga Trench, but unloaded it at a NZ dump. A replacement machine with the 24in x 24in dimensions required to fit through our hatch, was nowhere to be found in the pacific. The old machine had a nasty habit of leaking on my clean clothes, and we’d struggled to satisfy its healthy appetite for electrons and H2O anyway, so when my dad and Betty came to visit us in NZ, they brought along replacement parts – an old-fashioned heavy duty laundry wringer and a special laundry washing plunger.
I can remember reading about washday in one of the Little House or Little Women books, and relishing in the struggles of those early pioneer women. I’m not sure why I enjoyed the stories so much, those gals all seemed so brave and strong and…well…pioneering. I’ve officially put all romanticized notions of washday to rest. We’re lucky (or lazy), we don’t boil our water, or beat the clothes with sticks and stones, or grind them on a washboard, and washday isn’t weekly, nor on a specific day of the week. But even though our onboard uniform is primarily bathing suits and pareos, laundry still rapidly fills the hole left by the machine (and I had such high hopes for that vacant cabinet).
Washday is scheduled based on several factors, when that pile exceeds our ability to close the cupboard, and when we’ve found a sufficient source of water to clean a washing-machine-sized pile of laundry. So far, our supply of clean clothes is still larger than our dirty clothes storage space, so that does not factor in too often. Finding water is the next big planetary struggle, and we’re getting a firsthand appreciation for how difficult that can be. We’ve carefully planned our travel to be where the weather is not, so the big rains needed to fill our tanks are rare even here. We only make water when we’re on passage, partly due to the increased particles in bays that watermakers don’t like, and partly to double up on energy efficiency; we tend to run the motor more underway and making water is an amp eater. Land based family washing machines are ideal (thanks Mijo!), and a rare coin washing machine in towns here runs about $8-$10/load (drying not included).
When we arrive at an anchorage with easy access to a spigot near a river, room on land to setup our laundromat, and healthy winds for drying, we jump at the opportunity. Hooumi, our current anchorage, has the near perfect combination. Yesterday, Frank and I assembled our laundry gear, slathered on the bug repellent and sunscrean, loaded up the kayak school bus and paddled for the spigot. There’s enough tide and enough of a swell in this bay to make a dinghy landing iffy, so the barge-like inflatable kayak was our vehicle of choice. We portaged our Laundromat to the spigot, bolted the wringer to the large ice-chest, laid out our washing-machine-sized pile for sorting, and went to town with the buckets and plungers and brushes. It’s not quite assemblyline efficiency (especially without Leo’s help), but to the local kids, it’s almost as interesting to watch. Making conversation with one curious little girl yesterday, Frank asked her if she did the laundry at her house. “No one does it, we have a machine,” was her reply. Right – rub it in kid. I think we washed and scrubbed, and soaked and rinsed and squeezed for 2-3 hours, backbreaking work in the hot tropical sun. As the pile got smaller, the odor of dirty clothes baking in the hot sun, was replaced by the scent of soap and frangipani flowers. And as the morning wore on the wind picked up, good news for the afternoon drying back at the boat, bad news for the paddle back upwind with a washing-machine-sized pile of wet heavy clothes.
Our return trip was a challenge. Loaded with an ice-chest full of gear and two 3-gallon jugs of freshwater on the stern, and 3 hours of soggy wet clothes on the nose, we managed to make it out through the small breakers without incident. Then we paddled the inflatable kayak upwind with 25-30 knot gusts. Awhile back we lost the foot-pedals for the kayak rudder; rudderless it was hard to stay nose into the wind. I gritted my teeth and paddled harder as spindrifts sent saltspray on all our hard work. I’d read a TED talk on the importance of smiling, apparently researchers found that smiling improves athletic performance. So I grinned maniacally, but the paddling didn’t get any easier, and Silver Lining didn’t seem to be getting any closer. In fact, the wind waves close to her seemed larger and larger. This was one of those times I wished I’d spent more time grinding winches; maybe if we hauled up the anchor by hand more often, Frank and I would have the Popeye arms needed for moments like this (canned spinach is not a favorite onboard). It was probably only 15 minutes of paddling, but it felt like a lifetime.
The relief of arriving was temporary, as we still had to juggle a safe transfer of ourselves, laundry and gear on to the mothership – AND – string lines through a washing-machine-sized pile of clean wet laundry. With winds this aggressive, clothespins are not enough to keep the shirts onboard. Every item has to be threaded through armholes or legholes onto the clothesline, the ends tied with a proper double sheet bend. The good news is we have two masts, so plenty of rigging to tie off to for a load that size. I could barely stand on deck or see as the wind whipped the laundry horizontal (at eye level). It must have been a festive and comical sight from shore; onboard we were not laughing and celebrating. If the items hadn’t bunched up so quickly, the load would have been dry before we were done hanging. They say line drying is better for your clothes, but if we had a lintscreen attached, I think we would have found the felt pad of this load to be way thicker than any machine dried load. With the beating the elastic takes from sun and wind, we may soon need to sew in some belt loops to our underwear, but the wind has whipped our t-shirts into an extra comfy, airy, lacy texture.
The folding was uneventful, if you ignore the worries of undies flying into the salty, murky, shark-infested bay as you shake the zigzagging chaos of laundry off the line into the cockpit. If you were looking for more of a life or death struggle to peak your interest, I did manage to get a fat lip from a mosquito bite (invention idea: bug repellent lip balm). That should strike terror into the hearts of those of you who fear dingue fever (a form of malaria here, that is usually minor, but some strains can be fatal). And the fashion conscious among you may be horror stricken to know that all our clothes are converging to one color; reds and blues and greens and purples are slowly either fading or staining to the same shade of taupe – even our cadet gray cockpit cushions are now taupe. Scary? Still nothing feels quite so good as lying down in bed when washday is over. Sleep comes quickly after good exercise in floral scented air (lots of air), and with the guiltless satisfaction of having among the smallest carbon footprints a family of four could have in the western world. Sorry, I can’t help it; I like happy endings, and a day later romanticizing comes easy.
Are you surprised that no one is jumping onboard for that second load of sheets and towels this morning, the load that’s been on our beds and on our towel racks for a month (maybe more…). It’s even windier today, Frank is now immersed in a movie, the kids are pretending to do school, I’m typing away, and to distract us from the remaining task at hand, you get to read the longest washday post ever. Laura would have been up early this morning to bale some hay or milk a few cows. Guess I won’t be making Life Magazine’s top 100 list of pioneering women. If I go for the second load today, would anyone nominate me?
xoxomo