got gas?

When we first moved aboard, though it was easier than I thought it would be, it definitely took an adjustment to get accustomed to doing things, well…differently.  While I’ve said to many folks that we find living aboard “easier”, I don’t necessarily mean it in its literal sense.  Easy for us tends to mean “simply”.  We don’t have 5 or 10 pairs of jeans, or countless t-shirts.  If we want to get a new pair of jeans, an old pair on the boat has to go – it’s a one for one swap.  Living in a small space, we no longer buy the economy size pack of paper towels, with 8 rolls, or the 12 pack of toilet paper.  This makes us more conscious of our usage (at least with the paper towels), thus wasting far less than we might have on land.  Living aboard has forced us to think differently about how we approach many things.  For example, on the boat we have a small 8 cubic foot fridge; so when we go grocery shopping, we only shop for the next 4 days, since that’s all there’s room for.  I remember the first time I went to the grocery store after moving on board, with each item I placed in the cart I had to visualize (in particular, anything that was cold and/or required refrigeration after opening) whether there would be sufficient space.  I couldn’t buy more than I had room to store in our new down-sized “kitchen”. 

One of the biggest differences of living aboard is that there is not an endless supply of resources, such as water, propane for cooking, and even electricity (when we are not at the dock, connected to shore power).   On Knotty we have 88 gallons of fresh water - when that runs out, we have to refill the tanks.  In the winter that means driving up to the marina office, filling two 6 gallon jerry jugs, and lugging them back to the boat.  Depending on how many times we are willing to do that, in the often bitter cold and piercing wind, determines how much water we have on board.   Even in the summer, when the task is much easier, it still requires that we go out and attach the hose and filter to the dock-side spigot , run the hose to the bow to fill the forward tank, then monitor it until full, reversing the process once complete.  So living aboard has taught us a lot about conservation. 

I recently talked about how we utilize baking as an additional heat source in the winter.  Well, the other evening, which happened to be my night to cook, I mentioned to J that  we should go ahead and fill up our propane tank the next day.  We’ve been doing a lot of cooking, so I figured we would be running on the low side.   Just for giggles (though I wasn’t laughing later) I thought to myself what I would have to do if I ran out of propane in the middle of cooking.  I was in the process of making one of our regular meals, a turkey Tex Mex, and had just put the ground turkey into the hot pan to brown.  No sooner than finishing my thought, about my hypothetical plan B, did I hear a putter, putter, and then poof… Yes, I had run out of propane!  With that, I turned off the LPG solenoid and prepared to finish dinner up in the cockpit, on the grill.

Upon going topside, I checked the LPG and sure enough, the pressure gauge read zero.  I guess we did more baking then we realized. 

So, I proceeded to go back below, bundle up and gather all my remaining ingredients, and spent the next  20 minutes standing in the cockpit, taking in the quiet evening while I completed cooking our meal. 

Implementing Plan B

The stern pulpit seats serve as great counters :)

I will admit that at first I wasn’t happy about the situation, but it wasn’t because of being outside in the cold, it was because I had just thought to myself how much I didn’t want to have to implement my Plan B.  As I stood there, laughing at myself, I made a mental note to check the propane more often.