Weather the winter aboard

My wife and I stopped on the dock to chat with a neighbor the other day, and the conversation turned, as it inevitably does this time of year, to how we were all respectively holding up aboard as the weather turns inexorably for the worse.

This is our neighbor’s first winter aboard and we found ourselves nodding sympathetically as she described the travails of condensation, chills, leaks, mold, and limited electricity. Oddly, however, I didn’t feel that natural tightening in my chest, the shortness of breath, the cold sweats, and other coronary-like symptoms that such discussions usually give rise to.

Then I realized: it was because this year, things haven’t been bad aboard Rosie. And last year wasn’t as bad as the winter before… and so on. It turns out we’ve actually been learning lessons every year, and those little tricks and techniques have been adding up, and instead of a soggy, moldy, dark pit of despair, this winter we’re living in a slightly cozier version of our summer-time sailing palace.

Make no mistake: winter aboard in the high latitudes is the acid test. It’s not crossing the Straits, it’s not getting to Alaska, it’s not venturing out to the coast… it’s juggling your limited resources and getting through those 8 daylight hour days with your sanity intact and your wardrobe uncorrupted by mold and diesel fumes. Those are the Pacific Northwest sailors we look up to, not the Vic-Maui winners who drive home to hot baths and in-floor heat systems in their palatial suburban mansions.

We’re by no means experts at this dance. Many folks have been doing it a lot longer, some of them in even more limited circumstances, and even more exposed locations. But this winter, our fourth spent living on board, we’re finally not dreading those long, dark days ahead before spring.

Here’s our formula so far:

KEEP IT DRY
Damp and miserable are words that will be forever closely associated in the liveaboard lexicon. The dryer you keep your boat inside, the less miserable you will be.

The first big rain of the season should tell you where your exterior leaks are, and you should fix them. Don’t put it off; you won’t get the opportunity after November. The earlier you start, the more likely you are to do it properly, too, not to simply slap thick, ugly beads of sealant down in desperation as the clouds gather (as we have done all too often!).

Mop your bilge out dry and clean it. Keeping it dry may not be possible all winter, but if you are starting with a pond of mold and scum down there in the first place, you’re going to be fighting an up-hill battle the rest of the season.

Once you’ve taken care of the water you don’t want inside, you have to deal with the water you have to have inside: mostly, what you bring in yourself.

Start by minimizing this. Shake off as much of the rain as you can out in the cockpit; kick off your shoes in the companionway.

What you can’t keep out, confine. If you have a wet locker, use it. If not, the head is often a ready-made place for putting wet things. Usually there is a separate vent; you can open it and close off the head from the rest of the interior and allow it to air out without contaminating the rest of the boat.

We avoid any other steam-generating activities through the winter, too. No spaghetti, no showers aboard, no simmering stews. If we absolutely have to boil something, we use an electric kettle to pre-boil the water, which keeps most of the vapor confined. As an added bonus, burning less propane in the course of cooking introduces less water vapor. We used to use an electric hot-plate as an alternative to the propane stove.

We have a small de-humidifier that goes in whichever compartment seems the most moist at any given time. In a couple compartments which otherwise have poor circulation, we installed small, cheap 12 volt computer fans to pull out moist air. In places where that wasn’t feasible, we use a variety of desiccants–we’ve trained friends and relatives to retain and pass along the little packets they all get in mail-order packages. Those work well for drawers and small lockers.

This year, I have decided to try some trays of silicone cat litter in larger spaces that aren’t fan-equipped but are too large for small desiccant containers. It’s not as efficient as dedicated desiccants but it’s cheap! We’ll see how that goes. Maybe it will just attract marina cats.

Condensation on interior hatches and portholes is a boon; the water has condensed out of the atmosphere in a place that is easy mop up and remove from the interior. We use some nice absorbent linen rags to soak it up, then toss them under the dodger, where they will dry with the least bit of sun for provocation.

Also on those rare sunny days, or even some cloudy ones without rain, we are aggressive about opening the boat up and venting even at the expense of some of our hard-earned warmth. Getting a mass of water vapor out on one clear day earns you some buffer when you are dealing with weeks following with one rainy day after another and no chance to dry anything out.

We try to keep fabric and cushions away from the hull. Mandy designed, and my mother sewed for us, a sort of bivvy sack of sheets that exactly fits our v-berth mattress, secured with elastic hooks rather than fitting over the edges. Combined with the Hypervent-like material that the mattress is made from, it keeps the bedding and compartment dry and warm.

In our aft cabin, where the cushion is just the traditional fabric-cased foam rubber, we put our cockpit cushions (which are waterproof, obviously) underneath the mattress, to provide an air gap for circulation and to keep the fabric out of any puddles that might form.

KEEP IT WARM
Rosie isn’t well-insulated, but she’s insulated… a cored hull, some interior foam insulation, curtains, and interior wood paneling all help keep the warmth inside to some degree. The insulation also helps in keeping it dry; without getting into the dewy weeds of water cycle physics, it’s reasonably safe to say that keeping the boundary layer temperatures of your interior members warm when it is cold out will help prevent water condensing on them.

We have a forced-air diesel furnace aboard but while we’re on the dock, shore power is actually a cheaper heat source. We can keep the whole boat in the mid-sixties with a 1500 watt fan-equipped space heater when exterior temperatures are in the forties; by closing off some compartments, we can keep the necessary living spaces warm enough for us when it’s as cold out as it usually gets in Seattle (in the thirties or so). If it’s much colder than that, we can use both electric and diesel heat.

Space heaters are a controversial and potentially dangerous way to heat a boat. We use the moderately safer ceramic type, and position it so as to keep clear of potential ignition hazards. We tend not to run it when we’re not aboard. The diesel furnace absolutely doesn’t run when we’re not aboard, or when we’re asleep.

At night, we tend to rely mostly on an electric blanket for warmth; no sense heating the whole boat when we’re scrunched up in the v-berth.

When it’s particularly cold, you’ll be trading off ventilation for warmth. Our diesel furnace helps this equation; it has a cold-air return plumbed in, and so recirculates air from the boat, but also adds in relatively dry exterior air from its intake.

Wardrobe figures into your comfort level, also. We’ve gradually, slowly, and painfully learned to excise pretty much anything cotton from our wardrobes, particularly in the winter. If there’s water around, your socks and t-shirts are going to find it, soak it up, and hold it, cold and chilly, against your skin. Synthetics and wool are pretty much what we stick with now.

KEEP YOUR SANITY
I was going to say, “Keep it bright” but that’s just one aspect. If you’ve followed the advice to keep warm and dry, you’re probably living in something that now resembles a cave.

We use a lot of cheap, small tea-light candles when we’re aboard to make things a little more cheerful, as well as adding heat to the boat (you’d be amazed how easy it can be to heat a small boat using only candles; that was basically our back-up heat source on our last boat, and worked remarkably well).

This year, Mandy talked me into stringing up Christmas lights through the interior. The LED string draws almost nothing and it keeps her happy.

But there isn’t really any substitute for just making yourself get off the boat and go places from time to time. Usually, one or the other of us will take off for a few hours every other day or so and work from a coffee shop or co-working space or at a local library. It’s good to see the outside world; even if it’s wet and miserable and cold, it’s a change of pace. And if it’s wet and miserable and cold enough, it makes the boat look that much better.

If you can manage it, getting away for even longer is a good idea, too. This winter, we’ve picked up a couple different house-sitting gigs that will take us off the boat for a couple weeks or a month at a time. Houses aren’t necessarily all they are cracked up to be, either, but going from a couple hundred square feet to a couple thousand opens your horizons considerably.

An unavoidable side-effect of heating, ventilating, and lighting is increasing electric bills, and higher demands on your limited electrical systems.

From the safety perspective, it’s a good idea to go over your AC system before fall and ensure all your connections are clean and solid, and your shore power cord and plug are in good shape. If you’re not getting good connections, you’re going to be turning that valuable electricity into heat in the wrong places, and sometimes dangerous places.

We have to manage our electrical consumption closely to keep it affordable and to avoid over-drawing our circuit. It becomes a ritual; running the space heater in the morning to warm the boat, turning it off to run the hot water heater, juggling the demands of the de-humidifier against the electric blanket, the lighting against the ventilation fans. And you have to balance how much of your nice warm interior air you are willing to vent and replace with drier, but colder exterior air that you’ll have to pay to heat all over again.

In time, though, this all becomes a sort of second nature, like any sailing process.

Our way isn’t the only way, and probably not even the best way, but we’re pretty comfortable in these dark, cool, wet days. Still, we enjoy conversations with other liveaboards on the subject; everyone has a cool tip or trick that they use that we would never have thought of independently (the 12 volt computer fans, for instance, came from a chat with another couple this summer who had learned of it from another friend).

So what are your tricks for weathering the winter aboard?