Fr J Hackett
Well-Known Member
You are Dirty McSquirty and I claim my free Perishers albumNot true! One can learn (or may be forced by circumstances!) to use less water.
Needs a shift of mindset from superyacht mode to rufty-tufty intrepid explorer!
There's the Maurice Griffiths approach - strip off every dawn and jump into the sea (and that was the muddy old East Coast!).
If it's raining you can have a free shower in the cockpit!
I saw a vid recently about a young submariner who had been on a 7 month undersea deployment, and said they had daily showers, but limited to16 seconds of water each. If you hadn't rinsed off when your automatic 16 seconds of supply was up, then tough, so you soon learnt.
None of my boats (nor a friend's boat we cruised in extensively) had a shower. (I did once, with a marine water hose to hand, plug the cockpit drains and have a bath in the cockpit footwell!) We mainly just had daily upper body washes, interspersed with sporadic whole body washes done with a flannel (doesn't take much water at all) or visits to showers/baths ashore when in harbour. If the weather was kind (both weekends of that, every year!) we'd have a shower in the cockpit with one of those portable black shower water bags, hung or laid up facing the sun to heat up, then hung from the hiked-up boom to take the shower..
Somehow I managed the whole of my childhood and substantial parts of my adulthood with only an upper body wash daily. Saturday night (only) was bath night. I am just remembering there were also grades of wash: 'a good wash' (i.e. a thorough one); 'a quick wash'; or 'a lick and a promise'.
(I remember being shocked, aged about 11 or 12, reading about life in Australia, to where my family intended to emigrate. The booklet said that people there had daily showers (no wonder they had the summer water shortages they also mentioned, I thought!). I'd never seen a shower in a house before, only the ones you rinsed off in getting in and out of the public swimming pool, and the dreaded communal ones at the school gym.)
Installing a hand or foot pump for the shower, or a sub-10 second timer on the electric pump, usually cuts water consumption
So embrace your inner Tarzan, and if all else fails maintain a good distance off, or downwind of, nearby boats when anchoring.
