The Wife has finally reached the snapping point with the cheapo heads toilets in our house. The damn things keep clogging, with the result that our children are now experts with the plumber's helper at far too tender an age. They complain bitterly about having to do the nasty deed, at which point I remind them that such tasks are precisely the reason we had children in the first place. For some reason that doesn't seem to help their attitude, the ingrates, which makes Wife cranky. Which means we went on a toilet shopping spree one recent day. While giving a test-sit to one particularly fine model in the showroom, my thoughts wandered to a place far, far away. The lake, to be exact.
I follow with squeamish fascination the tales of the Real Sailors (those with installed heads, as opposed to us wannabes) who not only have to deal with clogging on a regular basis, but in order to resolve the issue have to disassemble a Rube Goldberg-level device with numerous crap-encrusted springs, valves, diaphragms, hoses, flappers, pistons, seacocks, siphon breaks, and probably even ball bearings, motors, and Large Hadron Colliders. After they finish chasing down random parts which are trying to escape to the bilges, the Real Sailor gets to put the whole mess back together again. Apparently it is traditional to perform these tasks in a seaway, encouraging the most propulsive bouts of seasickness imaginable. Great stuff.
I am more of the bucket-and-chuck-it school. I have little patience with recalcitrant and complex widgets, especially when they're emitting clouds of sewer gas in my face or dripping unmentionable goop. Of course I have a porta potti on my boat (and it is actually a pretty civilized little plastic marvel), because I do entertain hopes of convincing the occasional human female to come sailing with me. But even the porta-potti is kind of scary, mostly because of the odd squishing effects (caused by heat softening the plastic) when one tries to use the thing in the Arizona Summertime. It's kind of unnerving, to the point that my preteen twin boys refuse to have anything to do with it. Out on the lake, I hold a boy by the scruff of his life jacket, angled out over the side of the boat, so he can pee. We try to remember to pee downwind. One time I actually had both boys angled off simultaneously-- While sailing. That was cool. Not sure how well this will work when the boys outweigh Dad, though. (That'll be another post).
I will grudgingly use a porta-potti, if for nothing else than to keep the federales off my back. But when the rebellion happens, I'm there, man! I'll even drive over to West Marine and buy a cedar bucket. Vive la caca!
But I digress. The Wife, being a diligent researcher, decided to google toilets in order to figure out what we were going to buy. After 4 days of googling she landed on YouTube, where thousands of people have posted videos of their toilets flushing. I am not joking. Go there yourself and check it out (not at work, though, OK?). Some people actually are trying to provide a service, by reviewing their particular Porcelain God, or comparing Brand X to Brand Y, but a disturbing number are happily filming the toilet flushing away, even with nothing in it, each flush saluted with a pleased thumbs-up or cheerful comment by the cameraman. Lots of people flush goofy stuff in a disconnected toilet, just to watch the bowl drain successfully into a bucket, after which much self-congratulatory glee happens as the camera zooms in on the floating golf balls, smurf toys, or whatever. These people are the Polanskis of Poop. The Kubricks of Caca. The Fellinis of Feces. The Spielbergs of... Well you get the picture.
One suggestion for those of you out there who are tempted to post videos of your toilet on YouTube: Please describe the nature of the simulated effluent at the beginning of the video, not the end. One guy began with a bowl that looked like the aftermath of a Mexican vacation gone tragically awry. After grossing out the entire internet, he tells us at the end of his video that the noisome concoction was actually just innocent salt and pepper. Yeah. Thanks for that.
Not that the manufacturers are any better. One video had a perfectly normal looking young lady hand-dropping ANSI Standard Simulated Turds into the bowl, each splashdown accompanied by a loud kerplunk of the sort we all know and love. There was even some kind of-- I kid you not-- template affixed to the seat-- so she had a hole for proper aiming. For good measure she tossed in some precisely wadded up TP, then flushed the rather unfortunate-looking bowl contents away. She caught the discharge in a colander and held it up, smiling broadly, for our inspection. The video was rated five stars by thousands of viewers.
I realize now that our civilization is doomed.
Anyway, we bought some toilets. Installing them will hopefully be the closest I ever come to the Real Sailor Ritual of getting up close and personal with a diabolical poop machine. So on to the Real Topic.
This post was originally going to be about Typhoons, Hurricanes, and Thunderstorms, but it got hijacked by the Honey-Let's-Go_Shopping-For-Six-Hours festivities. Considering how long I have been bloviating so far about bodily functions, in order to forestall any complaints about how tedious this post is, I will condense the Typhoon/Hurricane part down to the following:
If you are a trailer sailor and get caught in a Typhoon/Hurricane, then with all due respect, you're a dope and deserve to have your boat deposited upside-down atop an apartment building 15 miles inland.
Alright, then. The coolness of owning a trailersailer came home for me one summer evening a couple of years back. Up to that point, I was certainly very pleased to own a new 19-ft sailboat, but a smallish part of my envy gland was wishing that I was piloting a Valiant 40 over the horizon to Bora Bora instead. I hadn't quite assimilated the "Small boat, Big adventure" philosophy so well encompassed by Small Craft Advisor.
So it was a typical Arizona Monsoon day, with ginormous thunderheads poofing up over the mountains as the Boys & I launched the boat and set off in search of adventure. Because we got a late start, we didn't get a lot of sailing in before it was time to motor off to an anchorage for the night. After about 20 minutes we dropped anchor in the chosen spot, a fairly well protected nook.
After I set the hook and turned off the outboard, the peace and calm I was expecting failed to materialize. I could hear a nearly continuous rumble of thunder from the West, and in the twilight I saw the poofy thunderheads were closer, and arcing and sparking like a discotheque. It was pretty, but now I was on a boat. With a big shiny aluminum mast. Held in place by a suddenly very puny hook in the mud.
My snug anchorage was protected from most directions, but an Arizona monsoon storm can attack from anywhere. When it hits, it is not uncommon to experience microbursts that snap a mile of thick power poles like toothpicks. Two years back we had 100 MPH gusts a mile from our house. Worried, I flipped open the cell phone and called The Wife, who in turn fired up the computer and checked the radar for me. Sure enough, solid red and mad as hell, and heading right for us. ETA, 1 hour. "Idiot. Don't kill my babies." counseled The Admiral.
Leaping into action, I yanked the anchor up. As soon as it was secure, we fired up the outboard and made haste back to the launch ramp. In record time we got the boat out of the water and lowered the lightning rod as the strobe lights closed in on us. It was just starting to rain when we parked the boat in the campground next to the ramp. Eager to try a vicarious Fastnet Force 10/Perfect Storm simulation, We climbed into the boat and battened down the hatches.
Then it hit. The wind rose to a shriek, rocking the boat on the trailer. Rain slammed the fiberglass hull, making an amazing racket and spurting in through the edges of the companionway. And the lightning. FlashBLAM! it was right over us, and nearly continuous. The boys and I grinned at each other. This was exciting! Then the hail started.
Right about that time I had an epiphany. I thought about experiencing this exact same weather out on the water. With each blast of wind I could imagine worrying about whether the anchor was going to hold. Each blast of lightning might have had our mast beckoning to it. If this cell had hit 1 hour previously, while we were at the anchorage, it would not have been fun-- It would have scary.
But we weren't scared. This was actually exciting and fun. Right then I realized how utterly cool it is to be able to yank your boat from the teeth of a fierce storm. With a minivan, no less.
As the virtual typhoon raged around us, I took the opportunity to tell the boys of some of the epic storms various sailors had endured at sea, and watched as they imagined, wide eyed, being in this boat, on the water, struggling to keep off a lee shore while a storm pounded away. I don't think that any dry retelling of a sea story ever matched our experience huddled in the cramped cabin of the Potter that night as the storm raged around us. It was all very cool until #2 Son announced that he needed to use the head, right at the height of the tempest.
Said boy resolutely cracked the companionway door and scurried topsides into the deluge. "Dad," he called, "hold my jacket for me." It took me a couple of seconds to realize what he was planning. I leapt out of the cabin and fixed #2 son with a steely glare befitting of the Captain. No way I was going to let him pee off the side of the boat in the campground parking lot. Especially with the elderly campers in the pop-up next door staring curiously at us through a foggy plastic window.
So #2 Son got the full Cape Horn treatment as he climbed down off the boat in the midst of the deluge, buffeted by hail, rain and wind, with thunder and lightning crashing around us. I watched with fatherly pride as he made his way to the campground head, then ran back to the boat, climbed aboard, and dove into the cabin, soaking wet.
Truly, if you are going to go through a gnarly storm in your trailer sailer, the best place to do it is in the parking lot. That, next to the ability to go to windward at 60 knots, is one reason I love small trailerable boats. No more Valiant 40 envy. Well, not much anyhow.
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