Life on a Boat: the Marina Bath House

As I eluded to in an earlier post, we chose not to use the bathrooms (heads) on our boat, and use the marina facilities instead. Why? Well, we found that there were a few, shall we say, unpleasant, side effects of using the head on your boat. The main one being the slight odor that seems to radiate from the pores of the toilet piping/holding tank. Even after we went all OCD and flushed out our holding tanks, we’ll get whiffs of it every now and then, which is enough to give me that “ick’ feeling. Some people claim they never have this issue, but I don’t believe them. That unpleasant "head" smell is actually due to flushing with raw water (or seawater)! It's not what goes into the head that makes the smell, it's the thousands of tiny microbes in the sea water that get trapped & die in the plumbing when you flush. How gross is that? We plan on doing a complete bathroom overhaul here soon which includes flushing the holding tanks, and replacing all of the hoses and valves to give us a fresh start. Literally. And only flushing with freshwater from our faucets and not any more sea water. Until then, we do the 30 second walk up to the marina bath houses. It’s worth it.

Yes, we do usually take the girls with us. We like to use the handicapped shower room since it’s so big and can accommodate us all. Plus, it gives them some much needed time off the boat, and they love laying on the cold tile floors.

We were pleasantly surprised as to how nice the facilities are here, which was a big factor for us when choosing a marina. We didn’t want to feel like we were getting ready in a dorm bathroom every day! Here there are separate rooms for toilets and showers, and separate toilets and showers for men and women. The handicap shower room is unisex, and huge (!) so we all pile in, including the dogs.

Our routine consists of one of us taking a shower while the other grooms – brushes our teeth, puts our contacts in, plucks their eyebrows – ok, so that’s just me (hopefully). Then we switch spots. The dogs lay on the floor and don’t move an inch, just enjoying the cold floors and the change of scenery. We enjoy the endless hot water and the rain shower heads. As Cousin Eddie would say, “It’s somethin’ really nice.”

And that’s how we roll round here.