I am getting ready to go home in a couple of days.

Tomorrow will be a Field Day, a day of cleaning this pig sty up.

Wednesday morning will be the long ride home and if everything goes well, I'll arrive home at about 1700 unless there is a problem.

The day before we get off is generally the biggest water usage day of the tour. There's bedding and clothing to wash and washing machines sure go through the water.

People that live ashore do not understand that if it's on a boat, it has come from ashore.

Water is a good example of what I mean. To get a drink of water the process is the same as it is ashore. You get it out of the tap in the sink.

The difference is that if you forget and leave the tap on, you run out of water pretty quickly. That's because the water on a boat comes from a tank. When the tank is empty, you are out of water.

There's no Philly water and sewer company out here.

Same goes with otherr things. There's no hardware store of food store when you untie and leave the dock. The 7-Eleven isn't a block away.

Generally the people that come to work in this industry are pretty good about things like that, but there are a few that never seem to get it.

When I crossed the Pacific from Honolulu to Seatle, we had a guy that jusst didn't seem to understand that there was a finite amount of water on a sailboat.

Time and again, he was warned, yet he never seemed to get it, even after he ran the water tank dry halfway across the ocean.

Thank God the skipper and I had planned for the occasion, as we knew the waterr tank on a Baltic 42 was small to begin with. We had seceral collapsable 5 gallon containers ratholed in his room. I was issued one and I was the water doler outer.

Much to the amusement of my skipper and another shipmate, I was a real hard nose about the way I doled the water out. I would have the guy that wanted a drink hold out his cup and I'd fill it and watch him drink it. I also made the ship's coffee.

His whining did not fall on deaf ears, on the contrary. I simply used his grousing to judge whether I was doing a good job or not. The more he groused, the more I instilled water discipline on him and the rest of the crew.

I didn't like doing this one bit, really. It would have been a whole lot nicer if the jerk had just used his head and thought.

When we reached port, the wives showed up at the pier, all 3 of them. I was single at the time, so I quietly debarked.

As I wass walking off, the jerk said to the skipper and his wife that I was a real jerk. I overheard it.

I also overheard it when the skipper told him that he considered me to be the first one he would call the next time he needed someone because I knew how to make do.

That left me walking on air all the way up to the yacht club, where I took a long, hot shower.


my other blog is:

http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/