How to shower without having a shower aboard
Issue 32 : Sept/Oct 2003
A cruiser friend once said about her first trip up the Intracoastal Waterway, “We had to stop at a marina every few days for showers.” This fact helped explain why their cruise was so short and financially draining. At the time my husband, three boys, and I were weeks from dropping our docklines and beginning our new lifestyle as frugal cruisers. Even monthly marina stays were out of our budget.
Though I thought I knew the answer, I asked anyway, “What about a solar shower?” The rolling of her eyes told me what I had suspected. They are great . . . unless it’s chilly, raining, really windy, you’re in a busy anchorage, you want some privacy, you’d like more than a trickle of water at a time, or you want to get really clean everywhere. I knew that before our paths diverged I would have to show her our shower.
Like many old boats, our 1979 Creekmore 34 did not come equipped with a shower. When our cruising consisted of four-day weekends, a solar shower was adequate. But once she became our home, we needed a real shower. It seems that most good ideas start with what worked for someone else and evolve into what works for you.
In one of her books, Lin Pardey mentions using a pressurized chemical sprayer as a shower. She simply gives it a few pumps and voilà! — pressurized shower water. Lin’s idea is the source of our shower water, with a few changes. Though I originally wanted the tank in the head, there was simply no room. Since the tank is 9 inches around and 18 inches high (without raising the handle), our little head could not sacrifice the space. Instead, we strapped it to the mast tabernacle on deck until we could figure out what to do with it. To our surprise and delight, it is out of the way up there, not eating up storage space. And the water is preheated on most days. You have to have the foresight to pump before you get in the shower, but you only forget that once.
Cracked open
Our head has a hatch that happens to be inches from the mast. The hatch can be cracked enough (even on yucky days) to accommodate the hose (modified to 10 feet long). We replaced the original little nozzle with a garden hose sprayer complete with on/off switch. Though most of the water arrangement is simply a matter of taking someone else’s idea and making it work for us, it is inside the head where things get creative.
Yes, we are cruising with three boys on a 34-foot boat and no, we are not crazy . . . yet. Though it has been nine years since the youngest was a baby, I clearly remember bathing him in an inflatable bathtub. I had to invest the $10 to be sure, but it turns out that the head sole is inches from being the exact size as the inflatable baby bath. With the tub in place, shower curtains (clear so you don’t feel so confined) are overlapped and hung from six cupholders. The bottoms of the shower curtains hang in the tub, collecting the shower water.
By hanging the curtains to cover the wall, the top of the shower is exactly as big as the head. It takes three shower curtains to cover all of the walls in our average-sized head. This gives us lots of elbow room. With about 10 minutes of preparation, including blowing up the bath, we have a warm, private, comfortable shower.
When we are finished, we lift the tub so the drain is over the head sink and pull the plug. The inflated sides of the tub make it rigid enough to lift even when holding the water from five showers. The last person in the shower hangs the tub and curtains on deck. When they are dry, we fold them into a small 12- by 4-inch package. No power use, permanent installation, or smell from a shower sump. Best of all, the entire setup cost less than $50.
Our tank holds 2 1⁄2 gallons, and the five of us take two showers each from one tank of water. One suggestion: make sure to hang the shower curtains at a height that allows enough slack to make a shelf out of the head seat for soap and shampoo and yet still drain into the tub.
Despite what my family may think, we are hardly roughing it. Our boat is slowly becoming a lovely comfortable cruising home. Safe sailing and happy showering!
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
