Wash day.

Small boat cruising post – small boat hygiene.

One of the minor problems that the small boat sailor has to deal with is his or hers own hygiene and cleanliness during a cruise – especially one in which marina visits aren’t part of the plan and’or where the boat is small enough to not warrant having a separate heads and shower compartment. On passage or during a short cruise it maybe doesn’t matter that much ; a quick brush of teeth and maybe a wipe down with some wet-wipes , although more on those later, and many sailors might consider the job done…..on longer cruises though that’s just not going to work for very long.

I’m not talking here about ocean voyages on maxi yachts with a big crew and a watermaker, even then though in the days when I did that kind of thing as mate or skipper we might occasionally declare it to be ‘wash day’ – more than once during a southerly route transatlantic we stopped the boat, had a swim and then a quick sluice off with some fresh water…..strange experience looking down into the intense cobalt blue/black of oceanic deep sea.

Here, i’m dealing with the same situation as I talked about in my 10 day cruise set up for food and water with a look at how I dealt with staying clean. Thinking back to one of my own 10 day independent cruises in Brittany a few years back I finished one of them briefly alongside the visitors jetty at Benodet marina, had done my food shopping and watering but couldn’t then access the marina showers for some reason……my simple solution that time was to fill every bucket and spare container with water and then motor upriver enough to be away from most people and just have a strip down wash in the cockpit as per normal……unfortunate for the passengers of the tourist vedette that came past but hey ! this is Brittany and this is how sailors do it.

https://dirtywetdog.co.uk/2019/07/12/scrub-a-dub/

The yellow yacht is ‘SABI’ …….I used to think of her as ‘WABI’s big sister in the Odet Fleuve.

When I think about the cruising boats that iv’e owned one of them came into my life absolutely filthy inside and always remained a difficult boat to keep clean – one of that boat’s problems is that the frames were all lined with wood slats so even though they allowed some airflow there was also a load of black mold that was difficult to get at to wash out – in the end I just took all of the lining out and spent two whole days just scrubbing between the frames. As a complete contrast the little Liberty was an easy boat to keep clean, not only was she a dry boat but an easy one to access all of her spaces…..mostly what she needed at the end of a ten day cruise was a sweep out of the dust – mostly skin cells I guess, and then a quick damp wipe.

‘Inanda’ before I started scrubbing her out.

My usual wash day routine started with heating a kettle to make up a half bucket of fresh water with some detergent added and into that usually went my working shorts and shirt , my pillow case and in the right conditions the cover of the quilt that I usually sleep on. Just to say that I stopped using sleeping bags at sea years ago except for an old heavy one that I use as a warmer during cold passages and just pulled over me ; when cruising I mostly sleep on top of a lightweight quilt and underneath another one…..any transfer of ‘me’ – skin cells , sweat and body oils, just get washed out during wash day.

Rather than doing all of my necessary jobs piecemeal I find it best now to do everything all in one go – it’s a morning’s work to hand wash a few clothes, to strip the boat cushions out and sweep the cabin out, to take all of the micro galley apart and wash everything in fresh water and finally to scrub ‘me’ as well. By then the little boat looks like ‘wash day’ with my clothes hanging on the guardrails to dry and a quilt hanging over the sprit boom to air or dry. Although i’m not much bothered to be nude in an anchorage, especially in Brittany, a rail load of drying clothes does provide a small measure of privacy.

In Brittany, especially later on during the summer my wash day often started with a swim around the boat followed by a ‘soogee‘ shampoo standing in the companionway.

Wet-wipes, better wet wipes and soogee washdowns.

For most of my sailing life I , like many sailors, bought and used commercial wet wipes until I accidentally discovered how much of an environmental problem they are – my accident just happened by surprise when I was talking to a drains and sewers engineer who told me that in his line of work it was a combination of fats from the many fast food outlets in town combined with thousands of used wet-wipes that formed ‘fatbergs’ in the city sewers. Ok, so it’s different at sea but i’m now reliably informed that microfiber wet wipes don’t break down like paper and tissue paper does and basically just slosh around on the bottom for years.

A better technique for a quick damp wipe during a cruise is to make up a simple pad of say 3 squares of kitchen roll, wet those and use the wet pad to wipe down with – always good I find to wipe the crust of salt off my face and then follow that up with a quick wipe of ‘pits and bits’.

At the heart of my hygiene technique while cruising now is the minimal water volume ‘soogee’ wash…..a total body hair and body wash that can be done with just a liter of water and a few drops of detergent- nowadays I go for the luxury version which uses a liter and a half. That practice, by the way, I learnt when I was a long distance ‘ultralight’ hiker out in the Yosemite back country where water management was a critical skill.

The basic idea of the sailing version is to heat up some fresh water and add to that a small amount of ordinary detergent – I still tended to do that with the I liter water bottle that I kept onboard for cockpit drinks. The technique is simple enough – pour a small amount of the soogee mix onto my head and start rubbing it in….as it starts to run off then also start to scrub those bits it wets and continue adding soogee until the job is done. I usually finish the job by firmly wiping off with a flannel or small section of towel – that takes the dead skin cells off but needs a thorough washing out afterwards or it gets pretty nasty.

Why I still use this technique when I carry more water and after all that i’m anchored in millions of gallons of the stuff ?…..well, in my small boat cruising I know that i’m often anchored in ‘dirty’ water – in my local river for example I know that my favourite anchorage is downstream of two sewage plants and gets the run-off from lots of farmland. I used to be able to quote the known ‘FCU’ (faecal coliform) count of many popular rivers in the southwest and most of them then were some hundreds of times over the recommended safe limits for bathing.

In hot weather of course and off a clean Brittany beach I just tended to go over the side and have a swim first or just sluice down with several buckets of seawater and only rinse off with a small amount of fresh water to take the salt off. By custom and practice some old style sailors routinely wash with seawater and claim that it’s good for the skin to do so ; personally I prefer not to be left with salty skin but there’s not much to beat a cool swim on a hot day or cooling off with a bucket of clean seawater after a hot passage.

Wash day – Lesconil I think and about to take advantage of the rain.