Dental Health While Traveling

As a dentist, I know how important it is to take care of your teeth, and also how easy it is!

The best thing you can do for your teeth to prevent any issues while at sea on a long voyage is to brush your teeth! When you are sailing, time drags out and you have long periods with nothing to do. This is excellent because this is when you can brush your teeth like a dentist.

Everyone knows that you should brush twice a day for two minutes each time. That’s nice but it doesn’t really work. You need to brush twice a day and you need to do it well! The average American brushes for about 7-15 seconds! Now that you are at sea, you have plenty of time to do it right.
The first thing you need to do is stop brushing your teeth and start cleaning each tooth individually.
The toothbrush is not a chore machine that you pass over your teeth, it is a tool to help you clean your teeth.
Focus on cleaning each and every tooth. Start on the bottom back right and clean the last molar, now after it’s spotless, scoot forward one tooth and clean the molar in front of that, next the premolar, and on and on. When you finally finish the bottom arch, it’s time to clean the top arch.
How do you know when your teeth are clean? This one is very easy, you just need to use a very sensitive and agile appendage to feel your teeth: Your tongue!

Rub your tongue over each tooth. If you feel anything rough or sticky or anything other than slippery smooth, brush it a little more and recheck.
You have 32 teeth if you never had your wisdom teeth removed, and if you did, then you only have 28 teeth to clean. This whole process takes me about 4-5 minutes to carry out and my teeth are spotless at the end of it all.
In all honesty, this is fine on calm days when the time drags on forever; but on days when the wind will not relinquish you from the whips of furry brushing is the last thing on your mind.
When we have found ourselves hove to in a gale for days or just in terrible seas, brushing my teeth is the last thing on my mind. If brushing occurs that day, it will be fast and sloppy because the last thing I want to do is fall over with a tooth brush in my mouth! I honestly forget to brush unless Maddie reminds me of it. Once the weather calms down and we switch out our storm sails for our working sails, I get to relaxing in the cockpit and my tongue will notice how fuzzy my teeth feel!
And so begins the ritual of brushing my teeth in calm weather.
Fun tip: if you pull up a bucket load of clean ocean salt water, use that to brush your teeth. The salt in the water will do wonders for your gums and your mouth will feel great! I honestly prefer brushing my teeth with ocean water over using regular fresh water or even rain water!

A toothbrush is a wonderful tool to clean your teeth but it won’t repair neglect or decay! Always visit with your dentist and have them take X-rays before you set out in a long voyage. If your insurance won’t cover X-rays because of frequency limitations, pay it out of pocket! Catching a problem and fixing it while on shore is so much better than having an issue flare up while at sea and far from a dentist.

Balancing Life and Cruising

When you are at work, you dream of casting off the lines and sailing out into the sunset. There are no more rules, no more worries, and best of all, no more stress!

The reality is a bit different from the dream. You still have local and international rules to follow, and the customs agents can be very strict if they feel you are not taking them seriously enough.

No more worries, well, you have forces of nature and gear failure to worry about now. Instead of boss breathing down your neck, you have a squall! The big advantage is clear skies really do lift your spirits because it means the weather has cleared up and your worries have vanished as fast as the clouds did!

No more stress, also not entirely true. Instead of arbitrary work deadlines imposed on you, you now have to contend with weather windows.

The truth is, there is always something going on around you that needs your attention, and there is no further vacation to take once you live in a permanent vacation. This is where state of mind becomes very important.

You have transcended from your old job into a world that you used to imagine. This is the dream life you were waiting for and you can’t really escape in a daydream to anywhere else because your old day dreams have become your reality.

When something is bad, you need to fix it because you need to get back to the happy state. The more you have the more projects you will have to keep them all operating. For this reason, you need to set aside some “ideal time” where you get to live the life you imagined. You need to make time to sit on a beach and drink a fruity cocktail or a beer.

Work will always be there to do, but life is short and there is a reason you left the rat race. So, when you are given the choice to buy a fancy gizmo “that will make your life easier” think about it this way: Would you rather be fixing that piece of equipment or would you rather be sitting on a beach under a palm tree watching the sunset over your boat in the anchorage?

A Simpler Time, Now

We often feel like the olden days were a simpler time. The world seems more complicated as the features that were supposed to make our lives easier seem to have made our lives a chaotic cacophony! Technology that was supposed to make life flow more seamlessly always needs attention and allows us to pack so much into our day that we can’t seem to spare any time. When these “conveniences” fail us, we then are inundated with stress as we try to sort out the technical issue while still maintaining our insane self-imposed schedule. Why isn’t the simpler time now? 

We don’t have radar, we don’t have electronic autopilots, or watermakers, or bow thrusters, or most any gadget that they try to shove down your throat at a boat show. Instead, we have a simple setup of sails and a hull. We carry a lot of water and collect the rain that falls from the sky. We eat foods that are easy to keep, and we eat them before they go bad. We plan our day based on what feels right and what seems easy enough, instead of following a set schedule that we created long before we knew what we were getting ourselves into. We went back to that simpler time of sailing, and found ourselves in this simpler time of land. 

Here, a farmer sits on a seat as he milks his cow by hand. Behind him is a splendid waterfall and lush foliage over the foreboding cliff. No milking machine, no hormones, no complicated setups. He has a cow, the cow eats the grass in the field, and he milks the cow.  

Life doesn’t have to be complicated, and the simpler time can be now. Uncomplicate your life so that you can begin living it!