When people find out that my wife and I live on a 45-foot Morgan Ketch, their reaction is always the same. The men look at me with admiration and ask how I talked Suzanne into it. The women all look at her with pity and ask why she agreed.
But my secret was simple – I didn't talk her into it. She led the way. It's a good thing, too, because had she gone unwillingly, the problems we encountered while living on just 30 amps might have been a much bigger.
We had lived together in a respectable, suburban house in Richmond, Va., complete with 200 amps of power , before we came to the conclusion that we wanted to disappear as liveaboards. So, in August of 2005 we purchased a 1978 Morgan and moved aboard with our 17-year-old son, Ken. While we did take his desires and needs into consideration, we rationalized that this would be a relatively short adventure for him and a true lifestyle change for us. It was our decision.
Before we moved on board, one of the most enduring sources of family tension had been Ken's habits of walking out of a room and leaving on all the lights, the television the computer and sundry other electrical appliances. Nothing we could say seemed to break the impenetrable shield of teenage complacency.
FRANK MUMMERTFrank and Suzanne Mummert decorate Rockhopper's cabin for Christmas (those lights don't draw much).But we didn't really worry, because we thought we'd be moving on board after all the boys left home. I have two other sons from a previous marriage and neither of them was still in the nest. So we basically gave up the fight and resolved to snap switches and mash buttons every time we found a room ablaze with wasted electricity. "Just wait," we'd mutter to ourselves. "Someday they'll have kids of their own."
Then, Suzanne and I met and fell in love with Rockhopper (not her original name). We knew we had to have her, and we stayed up late into the night and schemed how to get her. We even painted the house and weeded the garden in preparation for the sale that would give us the $70,000 needed to buy her. Unfortunately, she came into our lives one year too early.
MOVING ON
Moving on board proceeded with little concern, especially after a survey gave us a fair appraisal of the issues we faced on the boat – or so we thought. We knew that the air conditioning unit in the aft cabin needed a new raw water pump, and that the burners in the electric stove needed replacement. No problem. We had a discount from West Marine and money left over from the sale of our house. We could fix anything, we reasoned. We were going to be liveaboards!
The first issue that faced us was the air conditioning. It was the end of a particularly brutal summer.While the boat had come with a Cruisair portable thru-hatch unit, it could only be used to cool one end of the boat at a time. If we got the pump fixed, our end of the boat would be the comfortable one. So Suzanne decided that the portable should be placed on the other end of the boat. She called it "incentive" to work on the AC.
A first attempt to repair the original pump ended in failure. So we happily trotted off to West Marine where we discovered that upgrading from a 25-foot sailboat to a 45-foot sailboat did not result in things doubling in price. Double would have been wonderful. Triple would have been acceptable. Quadruple was OK. But "quintuple the price" quickly became our new normal.
It took an afternoon to get the new pump in and an evening to get the new pump out and then back in correctly. Once the pump was running correctly, and actually flowing through the Mermaid air conditioner, we flipped the switch to "cool" and waited for relief. It came quickly – and ended the same way.
The pump's strainer was so clogged that it was unable to pump enough water to cool effectively. After resetting the high temperature/low flow tab on the AC unit I flipped it back on and watched the amp meter as the AC unit started. It drew a solid ten amps. I whistled through my teeth.
FRANK MUMMERTKen stretches out and watches television, but the computer and the stereo are off.
Suzanne wanted to know what the problem was. I explained that there wasn't a problem exactly, just that the air conditioner seemed to draw "a lot of amps."
THE 30-AMP CONVERSATION
"What," she asked, "is a lot?" So I told her. She looked at me quizzically. Ten amps was not a lot – our smallest breaker at the Richmond house was 15 amps – and she knew that we had had several 50-amp breakers.
"Just how many amps does the boat use?" she asked.
"Well, the boat doesn't really use any amps, technically," I dodged.
"OK, how many amps do we use?"
"That depends on what we're running now, doesn't it?" I parried.
"How many amps can we use, all at the same time?" she said, her tone icy.
I was caught.
"Thirty," I said. She looked at me with horror.
"So, the air conditioner, running by itself," she ventured.
"Takes about a third of everything," I said, finishing her sentence.
"Well," she said, sitting down carefully on the new settee cushions. "We'll just have to be careful, won't we? We'll have to make sure we turn off things we aren't using."
The noise from the forward V-berth caused each of us to look up. The sound from the television was competing with the noise from a laptop video game for Ken's attention. And both were lost on him, drown out by his stereo headphones. We faced each other, swallowed, and went to tell him of the new world order.
A BRAVE NEW WORLD
All in all, it wasn't bad. The summer faded into fall, the Cruisair faded into oblivion, and the need for air conditioning disappeared. Heat became the new issue.
Although the boat was fitted with a Force 10 propane heater, it was never fitted for propane tanks, so electricity was still our preferred heating system. Luckily, the Mermaid unit in the aft cabin turned out to be a reverse-cycle unit with forced heat, and West Marine put a nifty cabin heater on sale before it got too cold. In addition, the flat griddle and the toaster oven we bought to temporarily replace the completely broken oven and stove provided a fair amount of heat when they were on. The problem became one of balancing the load.
Before every meal, Suzanne sent me to the AC electrical panel and we played with variations of equipment to get the optimum amount of electricity without tripping "the" breaker. Hot water has to wait on dinner and woe unto the person (usually me) who forgot to turn the water heater back on. Going to bed without turning on the water heater resulted in a powerful reminder in the morning, as the last dregs of heated water flowed out of the tap, usually just after lathering.
As for Ken, he adapted. He began to understand the importance of making sure everything that could be off was off, and everything that needed to be on stayed on.
FRANK MUMMERTSuzanne, out on a sail.As much as I would like to believe it was our gentle, loving guidance that achieved this miracle, it was not. Let's just say that there is nothing like losing a 10-page school assignment to a tripped breaker to bring a point home.
However, all things eventually change. Ken graduated from high school in 2006, about a year after we moved on board, and joined the US Army where he serves as a combat medic. He claims that living aboard had almost nothing to do with the decision, but I know that I provided lots of opportunities for him to practice his first aid skills as I installed, removed and re-installed boat systems. I do know that he was the only person in his boot camp class to actually expand his living space when he reported for duty. He is currently living in Baghdad and says he considers himself lucky to have all that space and electricity to himself.
LESS SPACE, MORE POWER
Suzanne and I, on the other hand, felt like the boat shrank after he left. It must have, since we seem to have no more room than we did when he was here. In fact, we lost an entire head when it was turned into a storage space for "someday projects."
That air conditioning unit that worked so miserably hard to cool the aft cabin is now one of those projects. We replaced it with a much larger unit this year, which cools much better. But the sea water pump needs to be upgraded again to keep up with the new system. It's always something.
Of course, we could no longer live on just 30 amps with the larger system, the electric hot water heater and the electric stove and oven. The electric stove was replaced with a Wallas diesel stove.
Since the stove doubles as a heater in the winter, it is useful from September to March. However, in the summertime, it can get a little oppressive, so we also added a George Foreman grill, on the recommendation of some cruising friends. I must say that George is quite the grill master and when the weather isn't right for grilling off the stern, he always steps into the ring.
George is also, unfortunately, a bit of an energy hog, taking up eight amps when he's fired up. This has led us into the biggest change to date: The addition of a second 30-amp power connection, with the additional power dedicated to cooling and heating. This second line lets us collect all of the air conditioning, heat pumps and space heaters onto a single set of breakers, and we no longer worry about the air conditioning coming on and taking out the water heater or vice versa. We still are very aware of our energy conservation and tend to balance loads against each other, but the overall quality of life has improved dramatically.
So why does a perfectly sane woman give up a house with all the power she wants to live on board a sailboat where blow drying her hair and making toast at the same time takes a strategic plan? I truly can't answer that question. All I can do is show you pictures of her at the helm off the Florida coast, and tell you how she sings when she's 20 feet up the mast checking rigging connections, and describe her wide smile when she steps on the boat from the pier. I have no idea why she wanted to live aboard. But I am really glad she did.