I previously wrote about the pet import process while cruising from the Bahamas to the British Virgin Islands. Click here to see how we got ready to cruise with the pups before we set sail. This season we continued cruising south down through the Leeward Islands. Just like last season, we had three documents for each pooch:
Category: Sailing With Dogs
The Pet Import Process: Our Experience So Far
Before starting this adventure, we were a little nervous about sailing with our two pooches. It wasn’t living in a small space or on water that worried us. We knew our pups would adapt to their new home with us by their sides. It was navigating the pet import process in each country that made me uneasy. We researched and worked with our vet prior to setting sail to ensure we had our ducks in a row. We gathered the following paper work:
A Day in the Life of a Boat Dog: Jaela
Baxter and Jaela are best friends, but they couldn’t be more different. Baxter is very intelligent and extremely moody. Jaela doesn’t share Baxter’s intellect, but she is loving and sweet and always happy. She also has some killer hunting instincts. A day in Jaela’s life looks a little different than Baxter’s.
A Day in the Life of a Boat Dog: Baxter
We get a lot of questions when people discover we are sailing with our two pooches. How are they adjusting to life on the boat? How do they exercise? Where do they do their business? Where are they while we are underway? Boat dogs are intriguing. When we meet new people, half of our conversation ends up being about our two furry anchors.
Cruising Life Revealed: Answers to Our 10 Most Frequently Asked Questions
When we first revealed our cruising plan to our friends and families, they were full of questions. Regardless of how we phrased it, explaining that we were quitting our jobs and selling our house so we could sail the Caribbean with our two dogs made us sound crazy. A cruising lifestyle can be strange and has its own challenges. For us, it’s all a part of the adventure. Below are the answers to our 10 most frequently asked questions.
Great Exuma
Being at anchor on a sailboat is pretty amazing. Your boat is always facing into the wind, so there’s a nice cool breeze running through. Bugs like land, so I don’t have to worry about any more noseeum attacks. And the views are usually spectacular. My favorite moment is after we’ve eaten dinner in our cockpit and we are watching the sun set with cocktails in our hands. Life on the hook can be pretty magical. But there are some pretty nice things about staying in a marina: hot showers, laundry access, free internet, unlimited water, no long and wet dinghy rides to shore to walk the pups, and better protection from strong winds. When we pulled into the Emerald Bay Marina, we figured we’d stay a few nights…we had no idea we’d be staying eight!
We met Will, Tori, and Ryder (Sailing The Button) before we even secured our dock lines. I think they were just as excited to meet another young cruising couple as we were. Not to mention that they were traveling with a very adorable Boxer. It was St. Patrick’s Day evening and I was on a mission to find green beer. We all walked to the one bar/restaurant in the area. Mission complete—they had green beer. Little did I know that instead of food coloring, they added shots of apple pucker to achieve the color. It was horrendous, but I choked it down in the spirit of St Patrick’s Day. Just one though. I ordered a normal color yellow beer for my second round.
Over the next few days, we did a lot with our new friends. We had dinner at each other’s boat, we snorkeled, let the pups run on the beach, and hung out by the nearby resort pool. While we love the ocean, it felt amazing to soak in fresh water. We’d been moving fast for the last month and traveling can be exhausting. It was nice to relax. We spent several nights sunk into the most comfortable couch I’ve ever sat on in the boater’s lounge watching Netflix.
With the green beer mission complete, our next mission was to drive to Georgetown to get medication for Baxter’s ear infection and the replacement fuel line for our engine. The fuel line had sprung a leak about a week ago and rescue tape was the only thing preventing diesel from spewing all over our engine compartment. Getting these two items turned out to be a bit of a challenge and demonstrated how unorganized things can be in the islands.
There is one vet clinic in the Exumas. The vet flies in from Ft. Lauderdale once a month and we had just missed him. However, the clinic was willing to sell us the Zymox we needed to clear up the infection. We tried spraying vinegar in Baxter’s ear, but it wasn’t helping. The clinic’s hours are noon-1pm on Wednesdays. That’s it. They are only open 1 hour a week. And of course we pulled into the marina on Thursday evening. After leaving a few voicemails, the clinic called me back and said that I could pick up the medication from a “colorful hotel on the north side of town”. The woman couldn’t remember the name of it, but there was a restaurant on site called “Splash”. Well, I can’t say I had a high level of confidence that I we’d be able to get the Zymox, but we had to try. We rented a car and drove to town looking for a colorful hotel. And sure enough the medicine was waiting for me at the front desk.
That was strange, but easy enough, now it was time to find the engine part. I had called a Yanmar dealer in Nassau and they shipped the part to the Exuma Market in Georgetown. The woman from the Yanmar dealer told me the part would be $53 and that shipping would be somewhere around $35. She didn’t have a total for me, but she was confident that it would be around $100. We went to the market, which is really just a grocery store, and asked if they received a package for us. They hadn’t. I then rang the Yanmar dealer again and she told me that I needed to “go to the dock and it will be in the shack”. What dock? What shack? We had no clue where to go. I wasn’t even sure how to form a question in order to ask someone. “A dock with a shack” sounded ridiculously vague, but I gave it a shot. Shockingly the woman at the market knew just what I was talking about and escorted us to the dock. We picked up the package and was informed that there was no charge. The shipping had been paid. I called the Yanmar dealer once more so that I could pay for the part. She still didn’t have a total price for me yet and she would call me back to collect payment when she got it. That was two weeks ago and we still haven’t paid for the part.
Getting the medication and engine part was a random adventure. While we had the car, we also stopped at the hardware store and the market. The market had the best produce we’d seen in the Bahamas yet.
While at the marina, we also took the opportunity to complete some boat work. We fixed the generator, replaced the fuel line, replaced the mast boot, replaced transom shower, re-bed a sanction that had been leaking, and oiled all of the downstairs teak. There is a lot of teak on this boat!
The Emerald Bay Marina was pretty convenient. At $1.00 per foot per night, it was very inexpensive for the Bahamas. There was FREE laundry and wifi. The showers were hot and amazing. The boater’s lounge was very nice with comfy furniture and a pool table. And on Monday, the marina brought in food and drinks for “Happier Hour”. So when the forecast called for strong winds, we didn’t mind staying a few more nights—in fact it gave us a chance to watch a few more episodes of House of Cards. But after eight nights, we were ready to move on once the winds died down.
On March 25th we left the marina and set sail for Georgetown along with half of the other sailboats at the marina, including our new friends Will and Tori. We spent 3 nights in Georgetown. We provisioned, hiked, and enjoyed the gorgeous beaches while we waited for the right weather window to leave the Exumas.
Georgetown has everything you need. Great groceries, free water, fun tiki bar, fabulous beaches, volleyball courts, a water taxi, and Sunday pig roasts. It’s easy to see why cruisers love the many nice anchorages here. Georgetown is also known as “Chicken Harbor”. Many cruisers arrive here with plans to sail the Caribbean, but then turn back. Sometimes it’s because of a broken part or bad weather. For many it’s because the passages become long and require overnight sails. For others it’s because they have already found a convenient paradise in the Exumas. To be honest, we also seriously considered turning back and just cruising in the Bahamas. Cruising has its challenges. Some days it’s magical and we can’t believe this is our life now. Other days it can be incredibly frustrating and we question why we are even doing this. After much thought, we pulled up our anchor on March 28th and left Chicken Harbor behind as we continue heading Southeast.
There is No Such Thing As a Free Lunch
Just 4 short months ago when I was working for an engineering firm, I would attend “lunch and learns” one or two times a week. A company sales rep would bring in lunch and present their products to us engineers. Engineers are like college students and love “free” food, so we’d come out by the dozens to attend these “lunch and learns”. But the lunch wasn’t free. In exchange for lunch, we gave up an hour of our day to learn about the company’s products and potentially specify them on the projects we were working on.
We are very fortunate that we get to travel to exotic and beautiful places, but don’t let our gorgeous pictures on facebook fool you…cruising is hard work. It’s actually more difficult than either of us had imagined. But cruising is like everything else in life, you can’t get something for nothing. Here are some of the less glamorous aspects of our new lifestyle.
1) Water Conservation
Our water tanks hold 100 gallons and we have an additional 20 gallons in jerry cans. While we really wanted to install a watermaker, we couldn’t swallow the $5,500 price tag. If we do a good job of monitoring our water usage, this amount will last us about 10 days. This means rinsing dishes quickly with low pressure water, very quick showers, washing the deck with a bucket of water instead of a hose, and never leaving the water running.
2) Showering
Showers on the boat are not particularly pleasant. Our hot water heater has two heat sources. One is AC electric power and the other is heat from running our engine. We don’t have the battery capacity to run AC power to the hot water heater, so I try to only shower on days when we’ve turned on the engine. The downside is that the water is lava hot and our shower temperature control is touchy. Finding a temperature between lava hot and freezing is a skill that I’m still developing. Because water conservation is important, we can’t leave the water running. So, we have to take navy showers. Get wet, shut off the water, lather up, rinse, repeat. Even though I only used our bathtub 3 times in the 2.5 years we lived in our Denver home, I would have killed for a soak in a hot bath when my legs were covered in bug bites.
3) Manual Toilet
Without going into too much detail here, modern day toilets are amazing inventions that add comfort to our lives. But most heads (boat toilets) have manual pumps. This can be rather unpleasant. Privacy on the boat is nonexistent, so if you weren’t already aware of your partner’s bathroom habits, you will be after a week on a boat. We thought it was ridiculous that some boats our size have two heads on board. Now we sometimes wish we had a second.
We also have to avoid flushing any toilet paper. It will plug our waste system and who wants the job of unplugging it. We have a small trash can with a lid in the bathroom to dispose of toilet paper. It’s really not as gross as it sounds, but it’s less convenient.
4) Dog Hair, Dog Hair, and More Dog Hair
Dog hair is everywhere. I’m sure we had just as much dog hair in our Denver home, but it was much much bigger. The dog hair would just gather in the corners and vacuuming/sweeping once a month kept it out of sight. Now that the four of us live in a much smaller space, there is dog hair everywhere despite constant vacuuming. We have to vacuum and/or sweep every few days just to stay on top of it.
5) The Motion of the Ocean
We haven’t seen any major storms while at anchor yet, but we have certainly had some rocky nights. In Shroud Cay we couldn’t even cook dinner, because of the waves. It’s really impossible to do anything other than watch movies to pass the time.
6) Dinghy Rides
If the boat is our house, then the dinghy is our car. It is the vehicle we take to shore. In flat clam waters, it’s a lovely ride. But typically there’s wind and where there’s wind, there are waves and when there are waves, we get soaked. Despite wearing raincoats, we rarely arrive at our destinations dry. Getting a face full of salt water each time we walk the dogs gets rather frustrating. We are on the hunt for a larger dinghy which should help some.
7) Laundry
Puppy Proofing
Any dog owner can relate to the sacrifices we make for our furry children. They depend on us for everything—food, safety, shelter, affection, water, etc. It’s difficult to see how our pups are related to wild dogs, because these two wouldn’t last a day on their own. Jaela would probably chase a squirrel off a cliff and Baxter would curl up and die without his blanket.
We take them out in the early morning cold rain when all we want to do is sleep in. We take them to the vet and spend too much money to make sure they are healthy and stay that way. We clean up their vomit when they throw up when we are already running late for something. We put our time and energy into making sure they get enough exercise, are happy, and learn obedience. And in return, we get their unconditional love. Their tails nearly fall off from so much excitement when we walk through the door, even when we’ve been gone only minutes. The only thing they want, other than our food, is to be near us.
Life on the boat is no different. So many of our boat projects revolve around making the boat safer and more comfortable for these two moochers.
Teak Time
One Step Forward…Two Steps Back
Well, we’ve had our boat for a week now and we’ve already learned that owning a sailboat is HARDWORK. We’ve been working very long days. The good news is that we are becoming very familiar with our boat’s systems. The bad news is that every time we fix something, we discover two more things that require maintenance in the process. We were testing the hot water heater, when our fresh water pump failed. We cleaned out the anchor chain locker only to find that the windlass and raw water wash down pump weren’t working. Thus, our to-do list is growing faster than we can cross items off.
I was really hoping to have our to-do list knocked out before we start cruising, so we can spend our time diving and drinking cocktails with mini umbrellas in the cockpit. But I’m quickly learning that a large amount of our time living aboard will be spent fixing things. We just need to prioritize projects and make sure we also make time for fun and cocktails in the cockpit (and mini umbrellas). We (Rob) did manage to get our dinghy cleaned up and on the davits. We have a vehicle!
In addition to boat repairs, operation cushion update is in full swing. I’ve been staying home working on the cushions, while the pups lounge around. Honestly, if I knew sewing new cushions would be so difficult, I don’t think I would have accepted the task. I could sew pillows for days, but cushions are back breaking! Not to mention, I’m using sunbrella fabric which is very sturdy and thus, very rigid. It’s been frustrating and very time consuming, but I’m making progress. I’ve finished the bottom salon cushions (no joke…I opened a bottle of champagne after reaching this milestone, because I felt so accomplished)–so I’m half way done! I hope to complete the job next week. Jaela, who is terrified of the sewing machine, will be just as relieved as me to get this project behind us.
Our first week of ownership wasn’t only spent fixing and breaking things. As our dock neighbor likes to say, we also “took the boat out for a walk.” Our new home currently resides in slip C2 in the Regatta Pointe Marina. The marina is great and we are really looking forward to living there full time. However, our slip is in a very difficult location. We are the first boat on the dock and are parked next to a large concrete wall to leeward (aka…The Concrete Wall of Death). This means we can only back in and pull out in one direction. As you can imagine, concrete + boat = no bueno! It’s like having your driver’s permit and trying to parallel park a 40 foot truck next to a river of lava.
As you can imagine, we aren’t comfortable enough yet to take the boat out on our own. So when Rob’s dad flew into town last Friday, we jumped at the chance of taking the boat out with his help. The weekend was beautiful and the shakedown sail went really well. We practiced some man over board drills and we saw 7 knot speeds while under sail in mild winds. The boat sails like a dream. We fell in love.
She’s a great boat that has just been a little neglected. The next couple of months will be hard work as we get her back in shape. But she is our new home and like all other home projects…it will be so worth it in the end.