5 Must-Have Skills For Living Aboard a Boat with Your Husband – You Might Be Surprised

 

Living aboard a boat with your spouse can be an adventure in the truest sense—both exhilarating and potentially disastrous. You’re in close quarters, sometimes isolated for weeks, and at sea, things can get a little… tense. It turns out that seemingly trivial, everyday tasks can become huge, relationship-testing battles when your home is 35 feet of floating fiberglass. Considering 50% of all sailing couples call it quits after the first year of setting sail, those are tough odds to beat. So, here are 5 skills you need to master to keep your marriage afloat—pun intended.

1. Bed Sheet Folding

You may think you’ve got bed sheet folding under control, but when you’re in a 4-square-foot area trying to fold a queen-sized sheet, things can get complicated fast. And it’s not just about the size—this task is fraught with potential complications. If you can’t agree on which are the long and short ends of the sheet, expect mutiny.  The bigger picture is that sheet folding is like sail folding. Sure, you’re not folding sails every day, but when you are, it may happen on a dock that’s slightly wider than your berth, in the blazing sun, and with a stiff breeze threatening to send the sail into the water. If you don’t work together, it’s more of a battle than a chore, and guess what? There’s a chance the sail might end up overboard. So, if you can’t get the sheets right, good luck with those sails!

2. Doing Dishes

On land, dishes are just… there. Toss them in the dishwasher, and move on. On a boat? Not so simple. The only dishwashers are the kind with two hands. The sink is about the size of a postage stamp. You have a pot, a few plates, some utensils, and if you’re lucky, room to wash one dish at a time. Dirty dishes can not be ignored because once the sink fills up, you must start stacking them on the limited counter space. This is never a good situation. Then there’s the drying dilemma—do you dry the dishes by hand, or let them drip until they roll off the counter an hour later, making you look like the world’s least responsible boatmate? Oh, and don’t forget the ever-present challenge of cooking a meal in a rolling kitchen where the food is moving more than you are. Peanut butter and jelly might sound easy, but when the bread’s bouncing around and the jelly rolls off the counter and hides under the settee, it becomes an Olympic sport. So, divide the chores evenly between cooking and doing the dishes, and get on the same page, or chaos will ensue.

3. Making the Bed

Making the bed on land is a quick, mindless chore, but on a boat, it’s an art form. Never, ever laugh at the person who has to flop around like a fish trying to wedge the fitted sheet over the corner of the mattress. That’s the easy part. The difficulties arise when the night watches begin. Sooner or later, as a liveaboard, you will be crossing bodies of water that require night watches. This requires waking up every 3 hours or so for a night watch and the bed is constantly in flux. Do you bother to make it in the middle of the night when you’re woken from a sound sleep, knowing your partner is just going to roll right back in? When the seas are rough and you’re both repositioning like sardines, there’s no such thing as a “made” bed. But here’s the issue: if you don’t at least attempt to restore order before you leave the bed, you’ll return to a nightmarish tangle of sheets and pillows. A tiny tangle turns into an all-night mess, and trust me, this is not the time to argue—especially at 3 a.m. when both of you are sleep-deprived and, frankly, running on a short fuse. There is no simple solution to this dilemma but developing a routine you can both sleep with is essential. 

4. Grocery Shopping

Grocery shopping on land is a mindless routine: drive to the store, throw things in the cart, stuff them in the trunk, and boom, you’re done. But at sea, grocery shopping is a tactical operation. First, you need to find a dock to tie your dinghy to, locate the grocery store (which could be anywhere from a short walk to a multi-mile trek), and then—here comes the fun part—deciding what you can actually carry back with you. The struggle begins when you’re in a foreign country, staring at a shelf full of food, you have no idea what half of it is, and you can’t find what you need. After you carefully fill your one small basket with the bare essentials, that’s when you realize you need a bottle of rum for the captain but you also want flour to bake bread. There’s no room for both, so you must decide: rum or flour?  Spoiler alert: nothing good comes from this decision unless you’ve preemptively resolved it before stepping into the dinghy.  The captain is the captain onboard the boat, but when it comes to the provisioning, there needs to be a food admiral. I’m the admiral of food on our boat so I get to have the last word on what stays and what we carry home. Trust me—it would be embarrassing to get kicked out of a grocery store in a foreign country due to a shopping squabble.

5. Glasses Management (The Non-Drinking Kind)

This may sound trivial, but glasses are the true marriage happiness monster when living on a boat. On a boat, glasses—reading glasses, sunglasses, backup glasses—become the bain of your existence. You don’t want to be blinded by the sun or not be able to read charts; glasses are essential. The problem is, there’s no surface to put them that doesn’t carry the risk of them falling into the abyss of boat life. For instance, you put them down for two seconds, then a sudden wave or an emergency commences, and—oops!—those glasses are now nowhere to be found. If you’ve ever heard the unmistakable sound of your spouse sitting on your glasses because you forgot to secure them, you know the pain. It is essential to designate a “glasses home”,  (we hang them on a bungee cord on a book rack) and place them there when not using them. To complicate matters, there’s the matter of whether you both have your sunglasses before you hop in the dinghy to go to shore. A forgotten pair of sunglasses, which may mean a return to the boat when you are half a mile away, can turn a nice outing into a mutiny. So, here is the key to preventing that headache. Don’t leave it to chance, question each other before you get in the dinghy. “Do you have your sunglasses?”  

The Takeaway:

Living aboard a boat with your partner means that you need to get basic tasks down to a science. There are plenty of challenges with boat life. Minimizing the stress of daily routines will make for smoother sailing. If you don’t, you’re in for some rough seas—emotionally. Some couples think they’ll just wing it, but the statistics that 50% of couples break up after moving onto a boat don’t lie. Fortunately, we have ironed out these small tasks which leads to peace and cooperation on the bigger issues and when the proverbial poop hits the fan. To avoid being part of the unfortunate statistics, get in sync, fold those sheets with love, tackle the dishes without resentment, make the bed like pros, navigate the grocery store with grace, and, for the love of your marriage, secure your glasses. Master these, and you might just make it to the next port—together.

Best of luck on all your adventures!

Captain Dan and Alison
S/V Equus