Ode to recycling and woodbutchery

By Petr Šimon & Jana Benešová

We’ve spent last few days trying to further improve our living quarters on Janna. Even though frequent rain showers or outright downpours were against us, we’ve managed to move ahead a bit.

Gutted galley

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Two months back home on the dirt

By Petr Šimon & Jana Benešová

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Settled in

By Petr Šimon & Jana Benešová

Kaohsiung is battered by the southwest quadrant, well, is has almost abated, so there’s just an occasional rain squall or a wind gust. We’ve spent the night surprisingly well. It was blowing quite hard, Janna was rocking like mad, but I slept like a baby. Only from time to time did the screeching of our fenders or the howling wind in the rigging wake me. Seems like our rigging is a quite one. The howling always comes from the other boats. Perhaps the windspeed is not high enough… but while moored in Hong Kong we set through few storms and it blew hard. Jana didn’t get much sleep, but she looks cheerful anyway — ah, right, so she says, that she’s actually pretty dopey:

“I woke up every hour since midnight. Whenever the boat tugged harder on her mooring lines, I checked the whereabouts of the typhoon on the iPad. Once I was woken up by a splash of rain which got in through the half-open companionway. That’s what I call a rouse!”

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Hodman’s Blues

By Petr Šimon & Jana Benešová

Metamorphosis

By Petr Šimon

My metamorphosis (Notice the blue object I’m getting rid off in the left side of the picture)

Location: Taiwan

Current weather conditions: more than 30 degrees during the day followed by tropical nights

I’m lying on the port settee (Petr is sleeping on the starboard one) and in the middle of the night I suddenly turn over. Mind you, it’s not that easy though. First, I have to unstick my hair from my sweating neck and spread them over the pillow behind my head so that it won’t stick to my face again…

Or picture this: We are about to drive our scooter and I have to untie my ponytail and plait my hair in order to put the helmet on my head…

Or: I’m mixing a salad, seasoning a soup, kneading bread dough, working with epoxy, painting or varnishing… the list just goes on and on – each time at least one of my hair finds its way into the mixture or spoils the job…

Or just yesterday: I’m carefully scanning our almost clean cabin floor and suddenly, in the corner in the direction the fan usually blows, I spot a wisp of blond hair – it certainly doesn’t belong to Petr…

Once again I find myself musing about the times eight years ago, when I also had my originally long hair cut short. In order to really make the move, I went through some photos taken during my ” Sinéad O’Connor period”, but even at that point I have basically already made my mind. Do you still find it too extreme a decision despite the different situations described above? Just picture this: We’ve just sailed into a beautiful anchorage with crystal clear water. Once our anchor is lowered and we are all settled down for the rest of the day, without thinking twice Petr just jumps directly into the water, while I observe him enviously from the deck considering whether I should follow his example, even though it means getting my hair wet and then getting rid of all the additional salt that might get into the boat. One thing is for sure, I won’t be doing this kind of reasoning with a crewcut! Plus this way we get rid of not only my comb and rubber bands, we no longer need to have a bottle of shampoo on the boat!

You can see the whole metamorphosis here: Picasa album

Back on board

By Petr Šimon & Jana Benešová

After two months of “holidays” back home in the Czech Republic, we are back on board. Kaohsiung welcomed us with heat and rain squalls produced by a tropical storm on its way to Hong Kong.

Even though we’ve left the boat in all that tropical heat completely closed for two months, she smelled good and there was just a little bit of dust and mildew here and there.

When we left Kaohsiung in late May, we moved out of our tiny condo, where we were writing our theses and we dumped all our books that we could not part with just yet and two folding Dahon bikes into the main cabin. We’ll sort that out when we get back, we thought.

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Now we are back and the boat is a mess. Not to mention that now that we have filled the water tank, bought few stores and unpacked our bags, we are close to sinking. For two days we were sorting everything out and at the end of the sorting we ended up with one huge Costco bag full of books that will be loaded back on board when we head to Hong Kong in the autumn (you can’t send surface packages from Taiwan to Europe anymore and air is too expensive), and two smaller bags one with Czech and one with English books, which we donated to a friend. Bikes are now locked at the stern and covered with black garbage bags — a sight to be seen. True harbour gypsies!

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So the real living aboard thing is happening. Perhaps we got used to the space and comfort of our folks’ places and the cool and clean air of the good old Bohemia. Now, once again, we carry our water in jerry cans, we check our batteries regularly and worry about every amp consumed. We watch the weather more closely, it’s the typhoon season here after all…

But all the little discomforts allow us to enjoy everything else with much more intensity.

It’s time for a round of refit that turns our little boat into a comfortable home. So far we only had time for important upgrades that made our boat safe to sail. And sail her we did. From Singapore to Langkawi and back again and on to Borneo, Philippines, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Now comes a little bit of interior redesign, new dodger, some awning system, and few other projects. And when the typhoon season is over, let the cruising begin: east coast of Taiwan, perhaps we’ll be able to pop into Okinawa, then Hong Kong for a haul out and onto Philippines! Let’s see how it goes…