Bathroom Basics for Non-Sailors

Speaking of boat bathrooms... the first thing you need to remember about bathrooms on a boat, is that you don't call them bathrooms. Oh sure, you can say bathroom and everyone will know what you're talking about, but they'll probably snicker and giggle behind their hands, arch their eyebrows at other people who happened to hear you, and basically, you will become the "butt" of all their non-savvy sailor jokes. On a boat, a bathroom is referred to as the head. It may be the forward head, or it may be the aft head, but it's a head, not a bathroom. Heads on boats are not the spacious "throne rooms", which many Americans have grown accustomed to. They are tiny little cubbies in which, once you enter, you can easily touch all four walls without moving your feet even a millimeter. They have tiny little sinks, a tiny little window, a tiny little toilet, and a tiny little bit of a permanent stink. Probably from their tiny little holding tanks which travel with the boat wherever it goes. 

Using the head on the boat is not quite like using the bathroom at home. When you use the toilet on the boat for instance, you cannot flush the toilet paper. Our captain says, "Nothing goes down that toilet that you didn't eat first!" The toilet paper goes in the garbage can. (Right now, that's not so different for us, because in Mexico, you can't flush the toilet paper either, no matter what toilet you're using.) When you're ready to flush the toilet on our boat, there is a little red lever beside the bowl that must be flipped up in order to flush. Once it is up, you have to pump the handle to flush water into the bowl. When you've successfully flushed water into the bowl, the red lever must be flipped down and the handle pumped again, in order to drain the water and everything else from the bowl. On our boat, this last step has given us and our guests some pretty exciting moments, (and probably elevated some blood pressures to dangerously high levels) because it doesn't always work so smoothly. Another thing our captain says is, "Don't be embarrassed if you can't get the toilet to flush and have to ask for help. 'It' happens!"

Keeping the head clean is not a job for the faint of heart. It's so small in there and full of pipes below the toilet, that no matter how clean you think you've got it, there is always just a hint of that unpleasant smell that never seems to go away. 

 

It's no wonder that cruisers get pretty revved up at the prospect of using a "real" bathroom. At the marinas, it's one of the first things Sandy and I check 

out. Our current bathroom in Marina de La Paz is lovely! Not only is it clean and pretty, but it has some rocket-powered fans overhead that keep the air moving and the place cool! (That's our marina bathroom in the picture.) We look for the good bathrooms all over town. La Paz has some notable bathrooms, but the one at the top of my list, is the one at Applebee's Restaurant. Yes, Applebee's. A couple nights ago, several of us went to dinner and then decided to get ice cream. We were walking down the malecon, and as we passed Applebee's, Susie veered off and headed for the entrance. She said to me, "They have the best bathrooms in here!" So in we went. She was right. The place was palacial and we oohed and aahed as though we had just checked into a 5 star hotel!

Like everything else involved in living on a boat, the head provides a challenge, but hey... I've been on boats that don't even have a head. Why, we know people who sailed all the way from Hawaii to Vancouver BC with just a bucket, which makes the heads on Faith seem like Applebee's in my book!