We’ve been living that boat yard life lately, and let me tell you – it is not easy! I’m pretty shocked at how meager the facilities are here. You wouldn’t believe what we have to do to get drinking water.

Water

There’s one water source here. It’s a spigot that’s tapped into a shallow well, so the water is almost certainly brackish. Plus, all the toxic boatyard chemicals and paint leech into the ground. The water smells like pluff mud at low tide – think rotten eggs and dead marine life. I barely want to wash the boat with this stuff, it’s definitely not drinkable. It’s about 200 feet away and takes 5 hoses to reach the boat, so we need to borrow hoses in order to use the water. We usually have to wait until after hours to ensure that a) someone else isn’t using it and b) no one will drive over the hose that is stretched across the yard.

When I say one water source, I mean it. There’s no plumbing here, instead they have two truly nasty portapotties and zero showers. At night I just pee in a bucket in the cockpit, fuming a little bit about how boy parts are so much easier than girl parts in situations like this.

We carry two 5-gallon jerry cans around with us and fill them up with fresh water whenever we can, then siphon them into the boat tanks. It doesn’t sound so bad until you’ve carried 10 gallons of water around and hauled it up the ladder a few times. We use this water for drinking and washing our hands.

We’ve been stopping at Cooper River Marina to shower and fill up the jerry cans, occasionally we’ll have friends take pity on us and invite us over for showers / laundry. It makes me feel like a hobo. We’re extremely grateful for such generous friends, but it’s also difficult to feel like we ask for charity every time someone invites us over.

Power

There are a couple power pedestals here, and none of them have 120V – the best we’ve seen is 95V. We use our neighbor’s power source when he’s not here, but one day he was on his boat sanding and we needed to get a little sanding done as well. I didn’t want him to lose power, so we got out a couple extension cords and ran them down to one of the power pedestals. I plugged in a fan to keep the bottom paint dust out of my face and as soon as I did, the neighbor walked over.

“Hey, did you just start up that fan? As soon as it started running, my sander lost power!”

The one thing I was trying to avoid! Apparently his power came from the same pedestal, so we apologized and moved our ext cord to a different pedestal. Kyle plugged the fan back in. It turned a quarter turn, then stopped. Okay, so no power there either. I had a few four-letter words for this craphole boatyard that doesn’t have enough power to actually do any work, then Kyle fired up the generator and I plugged my sander into that.

After our neighbor finished his project I plugged back into his power outlet. He’s a really nice guy, he knows how to get things done here and helped us out, let us borrow his hose, etc. He’s got boat yard life down a fine art!

Since there’s barely enough power to run one power tool, we definitely don’t have any shore power to plug the boat into. We’ve been off-grid since we were hauled out, our solar panels have been keeping the batteries at mid-charge at least. It’s been cloudy lately, so Kyle fired up the generator to bring them to full charge. The forecast this week is all rainy, so we have to watch our power usage.

In General

It sucks.

We washed the boat, then Kyle buffed it and washed it all down again, so the area around the boat is a toxic mud marsh right now. Between sanding off bottom paint and walking through the mud, our pretty white catamaran has been a dull shade of gray.

Fortunately, being in Charleston means we have a great network of friends in the area so we’ve been very social lately. This weekend was one of the big VW bus club campouts so we stopped by and spent the night listening to waves crashing on the beach!

Of course our bus is in storage right now, so we car-camped, but it was great to see everyone! We even won the 50/50 raffle!

It’s also been great weather for working. Mid 60s is a little chilly for my tastes, but for sanding and scrubbing and waxing it’s about perfect.

That being said, we’re totally beating ourselves up trying to get work done as fast as possible. We work ourselves into exhaustion, then drive 45 minutes to the marina for showers, and by the time we get home I haven’t had the energy to pump out much content, blog-wise. Not to mention, boat yard life isn’t very interesting!

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