Boat Time [#9]

Island Time ain’t got nothin’ on Boat Time.

I mean nothing.

If a task takes 30 minutes to accomplish pay someone to complete in Old Normal Life and a day to tackle in Paradise, it takes 74 years on a boat.

You wouldn’t think unpacking such a relatively thin amount of stuff would take more than a day or two.

It didn’t.

What is taking all the days and all wish-we-were-sleeping hours is the absolute minutia of sorting and organizing and evaluating and repurposing and tossing said “thin amount of stuff.”

Each item onboard gets a second look:

• clothing
• tools
• galley items
• dog supplies
• cables
• hoses
• leftovers from the previous owners

Then, if it passes the keep-test, we still have to find a space for it.

The list seems endless.

We sort one bin and another appears in its place. We clean out two lazarettes but discover three more.

Then, there’s the extra special feature that really kicks Boat Time into a class of slow all by itself.

Fixing all the things. All the time.

• The electric head won’t turn off
• The starboard bilge alarm is on
• The port side water pump won’t stop running
• The fridge is out of freon
• The other fridge stopped working
• The sink hose is leaking
• The starboard hot water heater is still winterized and the bypass valve is ghosting us

Sometimes, even bigger issues arise, like we’re low on beer or the closest liquor store doesn’t carry cans of bubbly rosé. You can see where things can really start to go south.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s all worth it. All of it.

We’re learning at a rate I don’t think we’ve achieved since sometime in early-adolescence.

When there’s a problem, we fix it — or at least we try. We don’t have our assortment of wildly talented friends down the road we can call to come lend a hand. We all cook. We all clean. We all unpack. And that ever-growing bag of dirty laundry is our shared burden.

We’ve lived aboard the Ruby Vi for a whopping five days now. In keeping us on our toes, she’s helping us remember how to be creative problem solvers, how to work as a team, how to live big in a small space, and how to enjoy the process.

Boat Time is definitely slow. But since we’re no longer racing, slow seems like a pretty perfect pace.