How We Wash Without A Shower

This is the girls’ rinse off bucket after a sandy day at the beach

The spot in our boat that is meant to be a shower is actually used for storage. It’s our linen closet, our WestWing, our hide-it-all spot. You can find anything from towels to s shop-vac hiding behind that shower curtain. There are a couple of reasons why we haven’t hooked up our indoor shower yet, power/electricity, kitchen, and bottom paint were higher on the priority list, and also because we were ok with finding other ways to wash that didn’t require an indoor shower.

The West Wing

This is how we have gotten by washing without an indoor shower thus far. When in the crystal clear water of the Bahamas we would get wet with fresh water (f.y.i. not many soaps will suds in salt water and I’m not too into the idea of washing my skin with Joy dish detergent), suds up on the boat, jump into the ocean to rinse off, and then spray down once again with fresh water to get the salt off. I actually leave the salt water in my hair finding it gives me more body than if i were to rinse it out. For the before and after spraying part we use a garden sprayer, we stole that idea from another cruising boat.

As for the girls we used to use just the garden sprayer on them to wash off, but now they get the luxury of a baby bath tub. For them we boil some water on the stove so they get warm baths and do all of their cleaning in our salon area, keeping them out of the cool breeze.

Fun in the tub

Arias getting princess treatment

Now that we are in Luperon where the bay water isn’t ideal for using the ocean as a rinser we either make a trip to the beach outside of the bay and clean off there, or we fill up our solar shower (a black 5 gallon bag) that we hang below our solar panels. It sits in the sun all day long giving us a warm shower in the evening.

Jaala getting the Solar Shower experience

We are planning on hooking up our indoor shower, but there is some plumbing fixing we need to do first, since right now it is set up to run off into the bilge and we don’t really like that scenario. The idea of having all my shedding hair clogging up our bilges just seems like to much extra cleaning and maintenance. Until we get around to rerouting the drain plumbing we will continue on with our current ways which suit us just fine. And also once the indoor shower is working I will have to deal with the headache of finding storage space for all the things we are currently “out of sight out of mind” in our West Wing.