If there is one thing I knew I would miss about living in a house would be a bath tub. I am a bath person. I would take a bath every night and that was even after I would sit in the hot tub. What can I say? I love sitting in hot water. It's how I would relax and get some alone time, where I would read or recuperate when I wasn't feeling well. I thought within my last month in the house I would get my fill of baths and had resigned myself to living without them, a huge sacrifice for me, but once we moved onto Sweets I foresaw a way I might be able to have my boat and bath tub too, or at least a close facsimile of one.
Yes, a large storage tote is my bath tub.
Our neighbours, one boat over from us have been living aboard their motor boat for the last four years and while walking down the dock one day I happened to notice a large, black, horse trough with a hose coming out of the bottom, tucked up into the rafters above their boat. When I asked them what they used it for, they told me it was their homemade bath tub.
This was joy to my heart to think of other live aboards, not blessed with a bathtub in their boat, but finding a way to make one anyway.
Of course we don't have a lovely large enclosed bridge with deck space to set up a large horse trough but there is some small floor space in our cockpit, right next to the hot water heater as it turns out, I could make that work.
And I did. I bought the biggest tote I could find that would fit my small floor dimensions and Mark fabricated a drain out of a PVC pipe elbow that had a cap that threaded onto one end, so we could use it as a plug to keep the water in and screw off the cap when we wanted it to drain. Now as I mentioned before I hate having water pooling in my cockpit so I couldn't just have it drain right out. Mark clamped a piece of drain pipe we had hanging around and ran it over to a hole in the corner of the cockpit so the water drains right overboard. Perfect. As you can see it is big enough for two children to splash around in. As for myself, I had managed to have one bath before our hot water tank broke again, was it the most comfortable bath? No, but I did fit all the way in with my knees bent and it is deep enough that I am mostly submerged, what more could I ask for?
From this bath idea sprange the shower system we concocted. I figured since the hot water heater was right there and had a shower nozzle attached to it and I now had a way to catch the water from getting all over the cockpit and to drain, I saw no reason why I couldn't shower in there too, why pay the marina $0.25 per minute for a cold shower when I didn't have to?
The only problem of course is that our boat is right out in the open at the end of a dock at the entrance to the marina, every boat that comes and goes has to pass by us and our cockpit is not enclosed, yet.
So for privacy I found one of the kids hula hoops I had made and they weren't using anymore and our old shower curtain from the house. Mark zip tied the hoop to the cockpit roof, I sewed two shower curtains together and attached Velcro to the open sides so it could close completely into a circle and hung it from the hoop. And voila, a private, cockpit shower.
Necessity truly is the mother of invention and who says you have to do without? All you need is a little imagination and a Home Depot.
Of course two days after we got all this set up the hot water heater stopped firing all together. The first few days it was intermittent, with hot water for about ten seconds before it would shut off and we would have to keep turning off the faucets and turning it on again to get it to flash up for another ten seconds. A few days of this and the heater seemed to sort itself out, we had blazing hot water constantly whenever we turned on the tap, we had baths and hot showers and didn't need to boil water for dish washing. But alas it was too good to be true, a few days after that and the heater gave out. We tried a new regulator and still nothing and finally called the company we bought it from and are working on problem solving or else them sending us a new one.
So for now we are back to paying for cold showers at the marina and boiling water for dishes, but for a few days there I had hot water and it was great!
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