06:14 You either love it or hate it. I think our longest experience on the sea so far has been a day trip from Tallinn to Stockholm, sleeping two nights in small cabin – Or „youngsters drinking tour“ as they call it, where you get wasted on the ship, having way too many drinks and dancing to some bad disco music at small and sweaty nightclub.
That is nothing compared to actually having sustainable life on small boat on the sea.
We arrived to Puerto Princesa not exactly knowing what’s coming up – Where is the boat, what kind of boat and how big. Most of our expectations were completely different – I wouldn’t, say in a bad or in a good way, just different.
Our host Phil is definitely a character, a crazy guy with his own way of doing things and enjoying life. But he has seen a lot of life and has stories to tell. What concerns his boat, it is his castle and he takes really well care of it.
Our trimaran type boat was hoisted in the middle of the bay (because it is cheaper and they don’t have enough room in the bay area anyway) – That meant going on and off the boat with a small 2 men kayak on daily base. That is an awesome workout and also a great hazard to all the electronics that was with us.
First trip to the boat with three of us on the kayak, we got our bums wet and almost drowned my battery bank. Other than that everything went well and we still have our phones and laptop 🙂 It would be advised to have some water proof bags when kayaking with electronics.
As the boat is beeing rebuilt, it has limited resources at the moment. Electricity is only generated from solar panels and small windmill – thats barely enough for few lights but not much more.
Water you have to hoist from the land, thus making a lots of long trip to shore and back. This way of living is basic, almost back to the roots, but really rewarding.
This exact boat could accommodate about 20 people in different tiny sections, but it already felt crowded with three of us there. You almost have to forget about privacy. Sleeping arrangements are narrow, but comfy in my opinion – I had really good sleep every night.
Maybe due do the workout of kayaking several times per day. If you are really afraid of the seas like Veronica, this might be too hard of a nut to crack for you and you will be better of on land.
Due to limited resources you learn to appreciate everything you have, especially water. You have to rationally use everything, to save enough for the next day. For cooking you have a gas stove but washing your pots and pans every time would be wasting water recourse. Might sound nasty but you will survive 🙂
Whats really different ashore, is that you have hardly any bugs – no mosquitoes, no flys, no nothing (except for the small cockroach problem at the moment, that he is trying to get rid of – I only saw 2 really small ones that times). So all you bug haters will love that aspect. But in the other hand, there is a lot of life underneath the boat, in the sea.
In our short stay I had opportunity to help with few on onboard tasks. I know now how to filter and run water maker, when needed. Really expensive but useful piece of equipment, when sailing on salty seawater. You can make your own water supply anywhere anytime – it just needs quite a lot of energy for doing that.
Second job was unscrewing, cleaning, lubing and rescrewing all the polts, that are holding up the main mast. That ensures that they wont rust together and helps to prevent overall problems holding up the mast. When the worst happens, the mast will fall down and could possibly do a lot of damage.
Third and most interesting job was cleaning the boat underneath. This needs to be done few times a month. When boat is not moving, small shells start to grow beneath and eventually grow really big and hard – at that point removing them gets difficult and will damage to surface of the boat.
Doing this job means a few hours in the water scraping the whole bottom of the boat, in the meantime meeting a lot a crabs, fish and other creatures of sea – luckily none of them harmful this time 🙂
In the end it was a super experience, but I’m pretty sure I’m not ready to live a life on the boat for now – maybe some day, but not this day. If you happen to have an opportunity to try life on a boat, you should!
