"Thanks for putting up with me...

…I know it’s not your typical way of living in the city.”

Mark tells me this Sunday night as we’re walking to dinner, after a weekend full of winter preparations. Saturday was spent building the shrinkwrap structure (similar to a barn raising minus the teams of Amish to help), wrapping the boat in plastic, and waving a blowtorch to shrink the plastic. This year, we waited to buy the shrinkwrap until five inches of snow had fallen – which meant that all the rolls of 26x100 were gone, and we had to settle for 20x100. Seeing as Mazurka has a beam of 13 (the width across), 20 was cutting it close. (A little too close – we got creative with some tape in the bow.)

Note to wanna-be live aboards: shrinkwrap your boat before it snows, before it’s 20 degrees, before the sleet and freezing rain and plummeting temperatures make the 8-hour job almost unbearable.

By Sunday, there was more plastic to shrink, and then chores like filling the water tanks. Mazurka holds 150 gallons of fresh water, and we need to refill every 10 days or so. In the summer at Belmont Harbor, this is easy; you take the hose hung beside your boat, connected to the spigot beside your boat, you turn the water on. In the winter, docked on the wrong side of the marina, this job is a bit more complicated; the spigot is all the way on the other side of the marina, beside the condo building. There are no fewer than seven hoses that link together and snake along the docks, through the river, and up to our dock, and if just one of these hoses is not emptied properly, the remaining water will freeze, making it impossible to fill the tanks – which is exactly what happened. So Mark turned the water on and waited for the hoses to thaw. After our tanks filled, we went through the laborious process of emptying the hoses by draping them all over the marina.

Mark also installed the de-icer, the bubbling fan extended beneath Mazurka, which keeps the water circulating around the boat (and saved us last year when the river froze). There were some other odd jobs in there, too – to be honest, I don’t know what all he did, because by mid-afternoon I was back to my old ways and hiding inside at the computer with coffee and hot soup and two large, furry, personal portable heaters.

Everything is harder in the winter. The basics of filling water tanks and emptying sewage tanks (especially when the pump out hose bursts on a cold Wednesday night) are hard enough without battling the elements of snow and ice. This is about the time when I start asking, “Why are we doing this again?”

I have come up with three reasons:

1) I like adversity and battling the elements, the worse the better;
2) There’s something very comforting about settling down into a warm, protected cabin on the water, while the wind and snow and ice blow outside;
3) Living on a boat is cool, no matter what time of year.

Still, we’re both ready for a vacation – maybe some place tropical, maybe with backpacks and bicycles, maybe this Friday….