Wow! One year living full time onboard our boat Lulu, what a milestone! It took a while to get used to living onboard, as everything from cooking and sleeping to washing clothes and taking a shower have their own unique challenges.
Our favorite part about sailing continues to be the people we meet and the cruising community. Here in Curacao, there is a large and active community of live-aboard sailors who are anchored here in Spanish Waters. They arrange trips to the grocery store, barbeque pot-lucks, games of dominos, events and dinners, there is a social activity almost every day.
We reunited with our buddy boats Angelina (met for the first time in Pasito Blanco, Gran Canaria), Blue (met for the first time in A Coruna, Spain), Anastasia (met for the first time in Nazaré, Portugal) and Blue Joline (met for the first time in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria with the ARC) here in Spanish Waters in Curacao. Additionally, our new boat neighbors Platina and Scirocco have both included us on their days of sightseeing around the island. Some of the boats have been our travelling companions for parts of our journey, and some of us will be travelling through the Panama Canal in January so we are planning joint trips toward Panama and San Blas.
Since June 25, 2023 we have sailed 8170 nautical miles, not bad for a year with lots of stops. The largest single trip was across the Atlantic for almost 3000 miles, with the second longest stretch of 480 nautical miles between Nazaré and Porto Santo, Portugal. Prior to sailing this year, I thought it was a bit scary to sail out of sight of land and I was nervous about sailing at night. Now we enjoy the night sails and think a trip below 30 nautical miles is short.
Daily life onboard can have different challenges, perhaps the biggest one is that if something might be an issue with the boat, it needs to be addressed immediately. With a house, if you have an item that needs repair, you might be able to wait a bit on the repair. Boats can be unforgiving if the wrong thing breaks, and we spend a lot of time on preventative maintenance. Many systems are interdependent, a good example is the washing machine. It needs water from our water tanks, which in turn comes from our watermaker. The watermaker runs on electricity from our solar panel, and the waste water from a wash runs into our bilge into a grey water pump which pumps into our kitchen sink and then drains off out the boat.
If it’s cloudy and rainy for a couple of days, we might not have enough energy to wash clothes and run the watermaker, and we also need the sun to dry them. When our batteries are really low, we stop cooking on solar-powered induction and switch to propane, fortunately we haven’t had to do that very often. Our last propane tank held from La Gomera (October 2023) to Bequia (May 2024).
The other challenge to doing repairs and maintenance onboard is the itty bitty working space, or having to hoist someone up the mast or dive under the hull – or in the worst case, have to haul out completely and repair on land. We try to do as much preventative maintenance as possible when we haul out, as you need to haul out approximately once a year to really clean the bottom and wax and polish the boat, so it stays protected against the sun. Our next haul-out date hasn’t been set, but it’s getting to be time that we need to do it.
Well – that’s a few thoughts on one year aboard from Spanish Waters, Curacao on 27 June, 2024. Fair winds!