Making Your Own Ice

Ice can be purchased, but what if you can't afford it, or if you find yourself far from civilization? If you have mechanical refrigeration, you can simply make your own ice! 

While working on the hard in the beginning of our cruise, we met some other cruisers who seemed to have mastered the art of ice! They let me in on a few tricks that they have found to make ice living very easy. 

During the day, when the sun is shining and the solar panels are producing, they run their refrigerator. In the freezer compartment, they keep several water bottles, which are not for drinking, but instead for keeping their food. 

When the fridge is running, these water bottles will freeze! At night when the sun disappears behind the horizon, they turn off their fridge to save their batteries the abuse of keeping the food cold over night. By this time, all those water bottles have frozen solid and are now ready to do some work. With the fridge off, these frozen water bottles will become their ice source, and that keeps their meats frozen and cold as well. Over night, the water bottles might melt a bit, but the water is kept in place by the plastic bottle and when the sun rises, the entire process repeats itself!

We keep two 500mL bottles in our freezer for this purpose, but have also take it one step further.  

When we are tied up in a marina and connected to shore power, we no longer have to worry about solar panel production. We can run our fridge full blast day and night! Instead of freezing water bottles, we switch over to gallon ziplock bags filled with water. We fill them pretty full, but still able to keep thin and stack them in our freezer in pairs. As the time passes, these bags of water will freeze into blocks of ice that can be used to keep our food cold when we are no longer plugged in. 

The blocks of ice offer us a few options. We could either peel off the plastic and throw them into the bottom with the other blocks of ice, or keep them in their plastic and place them in our other fridge compartment that does not have a drain. As the ice melts, it would simply remain in the bag and not cause any problems of water needing to be removed from the bottom of the fridge. 

The other advantage of making your own ice while tied up in a marina is it saves you the cost of buying said ice. A 10 pound block of ice can cost around $4 in the Chesapeake, and that is saying that you can even find a place that sells it. When you are tied up, you are already paying for the water and the electricity, so why not use your time there to save you some money and create your own ice? 

Ice

Frozen water may not seem so special, but it makes life aboard so much better! Ice lets you preserve foods and meats, allowing you to eat well as you travel far from shore. Looking at meat alone, your options when ice is involved is endless. Any form of meat can be kept frozen or cold for a long time to keep it fresh enough to eat as you cruise. Without ice, you would be limited to canned or salted meats. Don't get me wrong, Spam can be doctored up to be quite tasty, but the options are limited and at some point you will crave chicken, steak, or fish! 

Ice comes in a few styles, cubed or block. They both have their merits and their weaknesses. Cubed ice is by far the most common and easily obtained. Any grocery store, gas station, marina, or convenience store will have bags of cubed ice. Cubed ice also conforms to any shape of ice box you present it to. The small pieces simply fall into place as they cram into the shape of the box. They will also tightly pack around your foods and help keep them very cold as you voyage away. The problem with cubed ice is it has a lot of surface area for the volume of ice you buy. This means that it will melt faster than the same volume of ice that was frozen in one piece, or block of ice. 

Block ice is not as easy to find, but if you can get a hold of it and fit it in your freezer, it will serve you very well. Block ice has less surface area and therefore melts slower than cubed ice. This means that a 10 pound bag of ice cubes will melt in a few days while a 10 pound block of ice will last around 1 week in a properly insulated container. Keeping your ice longer also translates into keeping your food cold for longer!  The problem with block ice though is that it is very unforgiving when it comes to size. You are limited to the size of the ice that is produced. If you can't fit it in your ice box, then you can't reap its benefits. Also, block ice doesn't really wrap around your foods, meaning that it will keep the compartment cold, but not necessarily your food as cold as cubed ice would, being how cubed ice would be right up next to the food on all sides.

This is where compromise can help you out! If you are able to get a hold of both forms of ice, you can reap the benefits of both! We like to fill the bottom of the freezer with block ice, that way it remains very cold in there. We then lay our food over the block ice and cover it with cubed ice. Now our food is laying on the block ice, and the top of the food is covered by cubed ice that we can easily move around to retrieve our food when we are ready for it.  

We have found that this method will last around a week with the fridge off, but with the fridge turned on, the ice lasts even longer! 

Ideally, you want to keep your ice above your food, that way the cold air from the ice will fall and the food will remain bathed in cold air from the ice above. This works great if you have a side opening fridge with an ice shelf. The ice can live on the shelf and you can open the door and retrieve any foods stored in the bottom of the fridge. If you have a top opening fridge, then you will have to reach around the ice and ice shelf to get at your food below. 

We don't have an ice shelf, and our fridge is top load, so we have no way of accessing what is at the bottom without removing what is at the top. This has led us to the compromise of blocks at the bottom and cubes above. The chill plate is located high in the box, so when it is on, it does cool the air and that keeps the ice in the bottom from melting as fast. 

The Cost of Cruising

When people ask: "How much does it cost to go cruising?" They are asking the wrong question. They want to know "how much money does it cost to go cruising" and not "what are the costs of going cruising." 

While these might sound like the same thing right now, they won't when you finish reading. The financial aspect of cruising is simple, it will cost you what you have set aside to do it. You can tie up in a marina every night on a huge yacht and pay through the nose for fancy meals. This style of cruising will be very expensive and you might not be able to afford it for very long. On the contrary, if you anchor (which is free) and cook your meals on board, and buy food that is on sale from a cheap grocery store, your costs will be very low and you can sustain it for a long time. But this is not the cost of cruising! 

The real cost of cruising is saying goodbye to the people and places you love. Leaving everything behind you as you set off into the unknown. When you leave, you don't know when you will return or what you will find out in the world. You will miss years with your family and friends, as life events happen and you are far away in a distant land. 

Your friends might move away, the neighborhood you lived in will change, and you will never be able to return to the world from whence you left. If you stay, you will experience all the changes gradually, so they won't seem like a shock to you. Your life will continue as it always had and you will always dream of what could have been if you had set off cruising.  

There will always be a cost, and the price is time. You can't set off cruising and expect the world you left to pause itself. When you return, things will be different and the place that you remembered will be gone, replaced by something new and changed.  

I used to work in a family dental practice with my parents and sister. We lived a few miles from Maddies parents in Baltimore, Maryland. I would see my parents and sister almost everyday, and we would see Maddie's parents a few times a week. We kept the boat in a small neighborhood of Baltimore called Fells Point, where we would walk the streets at night and eat at our favorite restaurants.  

Change was always happening, but we saw it happen on a daily basis so it was nothing shocking. At the same time, looking back at when I moved there 5 years prior, it had changed a lot; i just never noticed it since it was gradual. While we lived there, restaurants came and went, a massive hotel was built, and crime started to become more prevalent. The old park where the farmers market would happen on Saturdays was demolished, and the farmers market stopped happening. The abandoned pier that used to play movies on a big screen at the edge of the water stopped happening. Stuff was always changing, but we were there to see it and the change was always gradual. 

With family, my sister is pregnant, and I will miss the entire process. My parents send me pictures as her baby bump keeps growing, but I will be away as my niece or nephew (she doesn't know the gender) is born. We also had to leave our pets behind, as ocean sailing is not very conducive to an exotic bird or a dog that demands a walk on shore twice a day. We know they are doing fine, but we still miss them very much as they are a huge part of our lives.

Our friends will also change as we are away, they will find new interests and have life events without us there to experience it with them. They might even move away in our absence, life goes on and no one can stop it! 

All of these factors may sound like if cruising is a horrible idea. The costs are very high when you think about all the things that you will miss while you are away. At the same time, the costs of not going are equally high if you make the most of it. If you don't set sail, you will spend your whole life wishing you had gone and wondering what lay out beyond the horizon. You only get one life, so you need to choose what is more expensive to you and which can you afford. 

We are going cruising because we are dreamers and will always wonder about what lays off in the distance. If we stayed, we would enjoy life with our friends and families but we would always have the unmet dreams of distant lands. We plan to go cruising and explore the world, then we can return to a new home where we can continue our lives with our families and friends in the future. It is a cost to pay, but if it is worth it to you, then the cost is not a concern. 

Salt Water Plumbing

A trick to save on water when cruising is to make all forms of water as available to you as possible. Salt water is by far the most plentiful water an ocean cruiser will come across, why not use it! 

When doing chores like washing dishes or brushing your teeth, you are probably going to use fresh water from your tanks. This is fine, but that water is the only water available to drink and keep you alive. The dishes and your teeth don't actually care how fresh the water is as you scrub them clean, the only time fresh water is actually needed is at the last stage, the final rinse for the plates. 

Now, you could easily grab a bucket and haul up some sea water from the side and use that to clean your dishes. Truth is, this is a lot of effort and the tap is right there on the galley sink! In the end, the sea water is present but never used because the tank water is easier to get at and thus will be used for superfluous uses. 

To avoid this problem, the sea water needs to be as easy to reach as the tank water. This means that you should have the same water pump setup for the fresh as well as the salt water sides. If the fresh has an electric pump and the salt has a manual pump, the salt will still go unused! 

In our case, the fresh water pump is a 2 gallon per minute electric pump. Therefore, the saltwater pump is the same sized 2 gallon per minute electric pump. I tapped the salt water plumbing into the hot water side, making it equally easy to use salt and fresh in any part of the boat. 

It is important to make sure you install a valuing system though, that way salt water can't backfeed into your fresh supply and destroy all of your drinking water!  

When washing dishes in the galley, the hot tap is now salt and the cold tap is now fresh! I can scrub and wash until my heart is content with all the salt water I want, and then at the end, I rinse all the dishes together with fresh water. This lets me finish the dishes with a fresh rinse and use much less water than I would have if I washed everything with fresh. 

With brushing your teeth in the head, the salt water is all you really need! The hot tap is salt, so you can wet your brush, scrub them clean and then rinse with salt water. Seawater is actually very good for you gums and you don't need to rinse with fresh (unless you can't stand the taste of salt). As a dentist, one of the treatments for people with severe bleeding gums (gingivitis) is to rinse with salt water after they brush because the salt water helps their gums heal faster! Why not take advantage of this on a daily basis while out at sea! 

Nervousness Before a Journey

Maddie and I are waiting in Deltaville, VA, for a weather window to leave the United States and head out to Bermuda. As it stands, the forecast on various websites says that Saturday will be a good time to leave. We will need to leave here at dawn to make our way down the bay to the mouth of the Chesapeake on Saturday, then spend Sunday heading far from land, and hopefully Monday to cross the Gulf Stream. 

Tuesday starts some foul weather up in this area, but if we are far enough south, we will be able to avoid the worst of it and have a nice and gentle sail towards Bermuda. 

Maddie is totally calm about the whole ordeal because she fully trusts that when I say it is time to go, it will be safe for us to go. This is what makes me nervous. This will be our first ocean passage on our boat Wisdom and I want it to be a wonderful experience. I worry that if we run into some serious weather, that it might set a bad taste in her mouth for future passages. 

My other concern is if I say it is safe to go and something bad were to happen, I would have put her in danger. 

I know that no voyage would be complete without a storm at sea, and I know that we are far more than prepared for anything like that but I still worry. 

As our planned departure date approaches, I feel my heart race and my stomach twist with anxiety as we prepare to leave the safety of the marina we are tied up in to head out into the great blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean. 

This has been a dream of mine for 9 years, and now the moment I have been waiting for is 2 days ahead of me, and I would say that stage fright has struck!