Tips and Tricks for Surviving on a Boat with Nine People

by TRINITY

This is a guide on how to survive living with nine people on a 56 foot catamaran, from my perspective. Who am I you might be wondering!? I am Trinity Slater. An 11 year old girl who barely wanted to pursue this (now exciting) adventure that wasn’t so exciting in the beginning.

Living on a boat with nine people can be tricky for numerous reasons. Like how meals have to be split amongst nine people, so we either make a lot of food or we all get small portions. While we are on the topic of food let's talk about provisioning. Provisioning is where half or all of us take a trip to the “Costco” of wherever we are at the time and we buy everything we can think of needing for the next two or so months. Now, this task can be extremely easy if you take my advice; stay home. This way, all you have to do is kindly make a list of all the things you want from the store and kindly hand the list to your parents. For me the list consists of Takis, pickles, Sriracha, olives, pop tarts, actually the list goes on so let's just move on to another controversial topic.

Space. Space is a recurring problem on this boat. Whether it's about food/storage space or room/personal space. All equally needed. I share a room with Hailey. Luckily she’s the person with the least baggage. And that is my tip for this section—share a room with a person like Hailey. I promise you she can’t say the same about me but, even with that advantage there is still minimal space. And that can cause some chaos, especially and mostly between the children! Now, something I have learned but always partly knew, is that I’m bougie. I’m realizing it more on this trip because we make friends along the way. Almost every friend we’ve made so far, whether their home is a monohull or a catamaran, are blown away by the size of our boat. The bougie part is that I feel it is very small sometimes. When there are more than two people in the kitchen, it is tight. Whether they are cooking or doing dishes. Don’t get me started on dishes!

Dishes are a challenge that we faced mostly towards the beginning of the trip but are still partly a challenge now. We came up with a schedule about a month ago but it fell apart quickly. I’m not going to point fingers, but an easy way someone got out of it was cooking every meal because cooking=no dishes. Another example of a great excuse would be falling asleep before dinner is on the table! I am very happy with the dishes situation now—Hailey does them all. It is not that unfair though because I do laundry and Maverick takes out the trash and sweeps. He definitely has the smelliest job.

Smells. Smells might not be a very relatable one for other sailors but you never know. At the beginning smelliness was a big pet peeve of mine but not so much anymore. Every so often my room will smell like a fruity sewer if that makes sense. The best way to avoid this would be to carefully inspect, smell, and make sure there are no toilet leaks before picking your room! We did not come prepared. Although Hailey picked our room so if we are going to blame anyone it would be her!

Living on a boat is definitely a challenge but is it worth the white sand beaches and the coconut mock-tails? No. But, it is wonderful in its own VERY unique ways. Like the thrill you get when you are holding a bag of fish and 3 nurse sharks are circling you. Or, the confusion you feel when you find out half the people on this boat have some sort of ocean fear. There is a quote—life is about the journey not the destination but, when you sail that is certainly not the case!

My roommate and I after surviving a nurse shark encounter