Glamorous Life of Cruising Alaska On A Sailboat In October

October 21st

The outside temperature is freezing. Literally freezing! We do not run the heater at night, so in the morning the inside boat temperature is near the lower 40s. We run the generator to power central heat and a little portable heater to warm the room to a comfortable 70 degrees before everything must be turned off to conserve fuel. Our boat is not insulated so the heat leaves the boat much faster than we would like.

Honestly, the temperature dropping is not that bad, and it is kind of what we expected cruising Kodiak October – November. The real issue is waking up to drips of large cold water droplets in our eyes. The primary reason for condensation in our berthing is our own breathe. The moisture and heat from our breathe collects as a bead and drips on us. This seems to only be in our berthing thus far, but we have been careful to vent (open hatches) when cooking to let steam escape. The condensation seems to really form for us when the temperature gets below 45 degrees. We use a towel to wipe up the condensation and that is about the only fix we can think of until our new diesel heater is installed or insulating the entire boat.

If only all issues were so easy to fix. We planned on hiking the mountains around us, but had a poop of a day cleaning . . . poop! It does not matter if you have a super luxury yacht or a little tiny boat, if you have a marine toilet that uses salt water there will come a day when you have to clean the pipes, haha. We wished the toilet pipes would have waited until the boat was being winterized, but when you got to go, haha. The material in the pipe had hardened reducing the hole from one inch to a quarter. The cold temperature made the pipes nice and difficult to remove. Cleaning the pipes in frigid waters and trying not to get splattered making the job all that more interesting. A morning bathroom run that ended 9 hours later, haha.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day!

Cheers,
Wade and Sara

Unknown Bay Anchorage 31′ Mud 57$deg; 37. 947N, 153° 29.910W

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