Boatyard Life: Bucket Brigade

We’re halfway moved back onto the boat. All of our clothes are out of the house, and a fair number of boxes have been removed, but there’s at least one more van trip required to be fully out. We’ve spent a couple of nights aboard. The fridge is back in operation. Life is once again accessed by a ladder.

Side-on photo of a sailboat on land, a ladder propped up on the port side — *TBT to the Deltaville yard; the ladder is in the same place in Maryland!*

If I can offer any piece of advice about living aboard in a boatyard, it’s about buckets. Better living through buckets.

There are 3 essential buckets to make life aboard a bit less onerous, at least in our experience. Two of these limit the number of trips you need to make up and down the ladder; the 3rd also is a courtesy to yourself and all boatyard neighbors.

Bucket 1. The “hauling items up and down” bucket. This is one that lives at the base of the ladder, ready to be filled with the odds and ends that always seem to need to be transported up. You could substitute a canvas bag for this bucket. I’m a believer in holding onto the ladder as I go up and down, so using two hands to carry things is challenging; if I can stuff 8 loose items into that bucket, it means I’ve got one hand available to hold on. If there’s a lot of stuff to transport up to the deck (hello provisioning runs!), the bucket can be hauled up by a line.

Bucket 2. The “night relief” bucket. This bucket lives in the cockpit after dark and is handy for 2 am nature calls. It’s emptied every morning by carrying it to the shore facilities and carefully pouring the contents into the toilets there. A rinse can be achieved with a little water from the hose, again to be poured into the shore head. Ideal? No. Better than nighttime trips (no pun intended) up and down the ladder.

Bucket 3. The sink bucket. Sinks “can” be used on the hard, but the resulting puddle and greasy food detritus that comes with it is kind of disgusting, both to look at AND to smell. When we first asked about living on the boat while on the hard, the yard manager said flat out “you can’t use your sink.” We mentioned that our plan was to put a hose from the thru hull into a bucket that we’d empty daily, and his tune shifted. Having the use of the sink, through a bucket, both limits the trips up and down the ladder and also just makes living aboard much easier. Having the bucket there to catch the runoff means there’s no stink or mess left on the ground. Win win. Of course, we have to empty it (which we do into the utility sink, which is where we’d be doing dishes if we couldn’t use our galley sink).

Photo of a 5-gallon bucket, half-filled with soapy water. There's a hose that drains from a boat into the bucket. — *Sink bucket on the ground*

Life on the hard adds a couple of challenges to our world. Buckets make them all better.