June 15: Day 12: Harmony Island Marine Park Anchorage

Galley Mechanics, Water Math, and the Harmony Islands

We woke up to another nice day, though the blue sky hasn't quite broken through yet. We were up around 7:00 AM, and my first task was to tackle the dishes I was just too tired to handle last night. Thankfully, the cleanup went fairly quickly this time.

Doing dishes on a sailboat when you’re trying to conserve water is a precise, three-step process. Because of the effort involved, we sometimes leave the dirty dishes until the end of the day, unless the pile gets bigger than usual. Our two freshwater tanks were completely full when we left home, but now our starboard tank (which is tucked under the settee) is down to 3 out of 9 dots—roughly one-third full.

To save our fresh water, we have a system: Greg fills a black bucket about three-quarters full with seawater. I pour two-thirds of that into a white Rubbermaid dish pan with some dish soap, and the remaining third goes into a plastic bowl to rinse the heavy food scraps off the dishes before they even touch the soap. Finally, I put warm, fresh tap water into a stainless steel bowl, which serves as the final clean rinse before drying. Since we aren't out on the wild west coast of the island on this trip, I’ve been known to skip the seawater step occasionally, but dishes definitely eat up the most water. It's always prudent to conserve when you can!

[Photo: The legendary three-step boat dishwashing station in action.]

We haven’t hit a place where we can reprovision yet, and if we burn through our water too fast, we'll be forced to duck into a marina just to fill up. We brought a couple of extra bottles of water just in case, but we don’t anticipate any real issues. Greg actually just suggested that we could always collect some beautiful, fresh water right from a waterfall. (We have a filtering system between our tank and the tap) It’s a great idea—and it means we can take a refreshing waterfall shower while we're at it! There will be a perfect one where we’re heading tomorrow, though there is actually one quite near where we are anchored right now.

Princess Louisa Inlet, which we last visited three years ago, has absolutely no provisioning options either, and we plan to stay there for about three days. After that, it’s a two-day trip back. Of course, we could push through and do the return leg in a single day, but that would mean spending more than eight or nine hours on the water. We are on vacation! We have no desire to motor or sail for that long in one go, and I don’t think Artemus would appreciate a marathon day like that either. I prefer a sweet spot of about 3.5 to 4 hours of motoring a day—maybe 5 if absolutely necessary.

Keeping to that relaxed pace, we arrived here at the Harmony Islands around 1:30 PM. We’ve stayed here before, and it serves as the perfect, reliable stopover before making the final push into Princess Louisa Inlet. We are stern-tied once again, sharing the anchorage with a few others. As you can see, there are five other sailboats tucked in here with us, and just a bit further down, two powerboats.

[Photo: Settled in at the Harmony Islands on another stern tie. A busier but beautiful stopover with five fellow sailboats and a couple of powerboats for company.]

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