Dark side of the boat life

Let me tell you something. This life we live now, it ain’t always beach, drinks and reggae music. For starters, we are not really beach-type of people. Second of all, drinks are way too time-consuming to prepare, so we take it straight, beer, wine, or rum, you name it.  As for reggae music…. Well… The Caribbean still has some crazy tunes, but it definitely ain’t reggae, baby 🙂 Let me scratch this perfect picture of permanent holidays. There you go – the dirty side of paradise… 

Every boat is a very special environment. No different here. Our boat and we live in symbiosis, a perfect balance. White Dog is an old lady with some old habits and we know them all. There are so many things that we do or don’t do because we know it may break, bend or block. But from time to time we have guests on board and then it hits us badly how complicated the life onboard actually is. We often laugh at the creativity of kids visiting us. Elephants running on the deck, monkeys hanging from the boom, climbing the mast, or hiding in the chain locker – mostly no harm to the kids or the boat. But!… Our boat is Moody by birth and by character, so every now and then she protests and we end up with the dirty job. Mind my French – a proper shit-job, unfortunately. 

Recently we had Captain’s birthday party onboard. It was the first one after the prefecture of Martinique eased up our lockdown, so we were all very excited. It was awesome to meet again, but at some point, it slipped my mind that I should probably inform our guests how to use our toilet… We have a bidet system because we don’t use toilet paper*. It works very well for us, but in order to use it, you have to know how to do it. And ups… that tiny detail I forgot to mention. So one of our guests, not being able to find T-paper, must have used kitchen paper towels (I bet all yachties feel the cold sweat on the back right now!!!). Luckily the toilet didn’t explode, pump or hoses didn’t leak greywater or so, but halfway through the party, it was out of order and a new shit-job popped up on top of our to-do list with a big sign “YOU CANNOT DO IT LATER!!!”. Day after, on Sunday, which should be entirely spent on watching movies and hydrating, we had to… you know.

When on land you can easily find a service 24/7 that would fix it for you, living on the boat requires doing that kind of stuff yourself. Anyways after hours of cleaning, draining, disinfecting, plus the entire alphabet of stinky swear words, and one dive under the boat for the lost valve, the toilet was back in business.
Not our first rodeo after all 😉

Reporting to you from the again brighter side of the paradise,
White Dog Crew

*We are not 100% eco, but wherever we can, we are. That was also the reasoning behind the usage of the bidet system instead of toilet paper. It works for us so well, that sometimes I feel confused visiting other toilets and facing the paper reality 🙂 The main reason was that chemicals used to make toilet paper white include chlorines which are not environment friendly. We’ve also seen beaches literally covered by toilet paper residuals because it is quite popular among boaties to throw the paper through the window. It prevents blocking the toilet for sure…

Happy Birthday Captain