This article, in shorter form, first appeared in the March edition AllAtSea, a regional yachting magazine, based in St. Thomas, USVI.  www.AllAtSea.net  © 2010  By David H. Lyman

“It’s Laundry day,” my wife announces at 7 in the morning. “Strip your bunks. Get your laundry bags into the cockpit.” We are at anchor off Hermitage Beach  in Five Islands Bay on Antigua in the West Indies.  It’s a nice anchorage, calm, except for the northerly swells, quiet except for the jets that pass overhead. We on the flight path into the airport on the other side of the island, and then there’s the steel drum band that played until 11 p.m. last night at the plush resort ashore.  But life goes on on this floating home of ours and laundry is one thing that is a weekly if not twice weekly requirement of living this life of freedom.

Laundry is one of life’s chores that is only complicated by life afloat. We tried doing it ashore, and at home in the States where it's not too costly. Down here in the islands a boat load of sheets, towels and clothing can cost $50 to $75 US. The only way we found to reduce our laundry load was to ware few clothes, if any at all. My wife is compulsive about the laundry. When I was single, my laundry amounted to a few pounds a week, done-up nicely and wrapped by the ladies at the local laundry. It cost me $10 a week. Let a woman into your life and the first thing that needs to be acquired, is the  washer and dryer. Little did I know that laundry is a almost daily ritual in the lives  of most women, at  least in the life of this woman I’ve married. Now, when the kids arrived, I began to see that laundry was not only a daily event, it was almost hourly. The Kenmore washer and dryer were humming away, turning out immaculately clean duds, daily.

We move on the boat, kids, wife and all. Before we took off on this extended cruise, Julie, my English wife (which may explain the cleanliness gene),  did her research before leaving Maine. We now have our own laundry on board. The kids help out and a week’s worth of dirty duds, bedding, plus towels and such takes a little over two hours to do. By breakfast time, the life lines are festooned with colorful fabric, drying in the tropical sun. Better to get this job done in the early morning whilst it’s not too hot and before the wind picks up and we see our towels floating in the ocean astern.

It took Julie a few attempts to find a workable procedure. She read the cruising books and tried buckets, pails, hand scrubbing, wash boards, kids wading pools as well as going ashore. Regarding going ashore: While it’s possible to catch up on e-mail, if there is WiFi at the shore-side laundromat , or to read a novel, as long as you don't mind the interruptions, taking the laundry ashore is not only time consuming it's also costly. 

R2D2 Now Does Our Laundry

Julie found a portable, manual, non-electric washing machine on line. It looks like R2D2, white, with a removable top, attached to a frame that sits on the cockpit seat. It has a hand crank at the side, but it’s flimsy, so we just spin the machine by hand. It takes small batches of towels, sheets, shorts, T-shirts, undies, hats, pants and anything else that needs a good wash. A gallon or two of hot water and a small amount of detergent are added, the top screwed back in place, and 120 revolutions are enough to satisfy the discerning eye of my fastidious English wife.

The literature that came with the Wonderwash pressure washing machine (www.Laundry-Alternative.com) alludes to the washer’s effectiveness is through pressure, built up by the hot water and agitation. I have my doubts that this is true, but it does seem to work. The water that flows out of the machine after each load is dirty.

Rinse Cycle

The freshly washed load is transferred into  series of two rinse tubs, those plastic tubs with rope handles you buy at WalMart.  These are filled half full of fresh cool water, the cloths hand squeezed between tubs.

Wringer ‘Em Out

My mother had one of the early electric washing machines, the ones that had a tub on legs, with a bucket inside that sloshed the clothes around driven by an electric motor mounted on the bottom. Getting the wash water out of the clothes was done manually with a wringer which we kids used to crank by hand. The wringer was comprised of two rubber covered rollers, geared to rotate in unison, driven by a hand crank. The wet clothes went directly from the wash bin to the wringer, the water that was squeezed out ran back into the wash tub. The clothes came out wet, but not drenched.

Julie’s research turned up the Mini Counter-top Spin Dryer by the same company (www.Laundry-Alternative.com), a glorified, electric salad spinner that is absolutely fantastic. The unit does need 110 AC current, which our generator provides. The machine is about 2 feet tall, made of plastic, with a see through chamber so you can watch the basket inside spinning around at a great rate of knots.  It takes about 1 minute to extract a few gallons of rinse water from a single beach towel, or a bin full of clothing. The water flows into the cockpit where it drains into the scuppers, rinsing out the cockpit floor in the process.

What’s so good about this salad spinner is that it works; it extracts about 90% of the rinse water which not only cuts drying time on the lifelines down to half an hour, but gets rid of most of the rinse water which makes the clothes cleaner. Rinse water in fabric, left on the lifelines to evaporate in the sun, leaves behind dissolved salts and dirt.  Wringing out the towels and clothes by twisting them removes less than half the rinse water, leaving some of the dirt and salt behind that the laundry process was meant to remove. Getting rid of the rinse water is half the job, and this machine does it.

Problem Solved

The Spin Dryer did stop functioning after it’s first use. The company offered to send us a new one. To ship it to us in the Caribbean via FedEx would have cost us three times what the machine cost new. After several months of living without the Spin Dryer, my wife tossed the machine my way and suggested I do something with it or get it off the boat.  On close inspection, I found the problem was improperly installed wires to the timer. They’d come lose. With extra wire I had on board, plus 4 shrink wrap connectors, we were back in business.

The two rinse tubs stow together in the lazarette, filled with coiled lines, hoses, inflatable beach toys, etc. The Spin Dryer and Wonder Wash pressure washing machine are stowed in an unused head up forward.

Gone are the days of taking all morning just to do the laundry.  Most of the time our laundry for a family of 4, is now done and on the life lines to dry before the family sits down for breakfast.  

My wife feels rather good about the whole process. She feels it is more ecologically sound than going to the laundromat.

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EDITORS: This article is available for re-print. Contact David for permission and payment. DHLyman@mac.com.

Searcher’s life lines provide ample space to air dry the laundry . . . in only a few hours.