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Stormy night / Life on a boat



Compared to living on land where you are dry and safe from storms and torrential downpours, a life on a boat is a little different. For example, it's always a chore to drive back to your home (boat) during heavy weather. Our dinghy, as well as most other dinghies worldwide, has no roof like a car does so you'll always get wet and battered when moving between boat and land during rainfall. If there's a storm expected, like tonight, you'd need to take a few safety precautions to not put your home and yourself in too much danger when the worst of the storm passes by. A house stands for most of the time safely on the ground and we all rely upon it to shield us from any type of weather, whereas a boat is either tied up to a dock, hooked to the bottom of the sea with an anchor or two or tied to one or a couple of mooring buoys with a few lines. I believe it goes without saying that neither of these options, on the ever so changing sea, can ever be as safe as that house which is solidly cemented into the earth. Both buoys and anchors can break free and set a boat adrift, too much wave and wind action can violently push the boat onto the concrete or wooden dock causing major damage to the hull and lines tied to a mooring buoy could chafe and break, also setting the boat free which of course could have terrible consequences. No matter what size of a boat you are in charge of, you'll always have to follow proper safety precautions in tune to the unpredictable weather.

In the image above, Alex is adding one line, securing the other ones and making sure none is chaffing. We have btw moved from the anchorage into the center of harbor in Gustavia and are now tied to a couple buoys so finally no more rolling at least. In that moment when the photo was taken, it had been pouring down tropical storm sort of rain for three hours non stop and we had collected about 300 liters (80 gallons) of water into our fresh water tanks with the little help of a few plastic cones mounted by the inlets of the tanks. So something good it comes out of rain, too, cleaner water than that might be hard to obtain. Now let's see how much sleep we can get with the shrieking wind and massive amount of rain falling just above our heads..

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