Big day

June 15, 2013

Today was shower day. It’s a big event on Hello World since it doesn’t happen very often. Two weeks for Jason and a week for me; with babywipe wipedowns in between. We were running the motor most of the day, which means we have hot water – there’s a heat exchanger on the engine to warm up the tank. We can heat it with electricity like any other house, but it takes a lot of juice and we don’t bother since we motor often enough. We also got the watermaker finally cleared of antifreeze, which means we can use (almost) as much water as we want.

So shower day it was! It’s a process, as with anything on the boat. After you’ve cleared out the shower of all of the paddleboards and whatever else has been stowed away since the last shower, you’ve got to make sure the hatch is open to vent the steam so you don’t humidify the whole boat and make the mold problem worse than it already is. You also have to remember to turn on the sump pump breaker, which is quite a ways from the shower itself. I always remember to turn this on right when I need the sump, meaning I’m completely wet down and the floor is starting to overflow. Jason usually dutifully stops what he’s doing and turns it on for me so I don’t have to traipse through the entire boat dripping water everywhere.

Today he showered first, so the pump was already on. But this did mean I had to use his wet towel, since the other bath towel is in our refrigerator. Oh, you don’t keep bath towels in your refrigerator? Weird.

We need said bath towel in the fridge because our fridge door, which lifts up from the counter, doesn’t close all the way. Jason spent an inordinate amount of time before our Alaska trip building a new fridge. From scratch. The one that came with the boat was original, took an order of magnitude more power than it really should have and the insulation was shot since it was so old. Oh, and did I mention that the wall of the old fridge followed the shape of the hull? Having curved refrigerator walls made it a constant challenge to efficiently pack it full. And forget trying to find anything once you did.

So Jason built a new fridge. Tore the old one out down to the hull and rebuilt it – tons of insulation, a hugely efficient condenser and in a shape that was actually useable. He built a new lid for it out of the most gorgeous piece of eucalyptus butcherblock that I’ve ever seen. It took him 11 months to build. Eleven months. It’s lovely. It’s just that the lid doesn’t close. At some point last summer that gorgeous piece of butcherblock swelled from the damming humidity that we are always fighting and no longer fits into the hole in the counter. So to keep the cold air in, we keep a bath towel on top of the fridge.