The Science of Dinner.........

When you live on a boat, life is different. These differences more or less revolve around the fact that your house floats; it's entirely disconnected from land. Thus there is no gas, water, or power company to rely on. You essentially make/store your own, and so your life revolves around using/maintaining the systems that make life "normal".

For example, dinner last night.........first, some music. We like music and hate commercials. We've been XM radio devotees for years but XM doesn't broadcast south of the Bahamas (we're 75 miles north of Venezuela now). So, we have a Wifi antenna which extends our range and we stream XM through our on-board computer to our entertainment system.  This is all powered by our 630 amp hour 24 volt battery bank.......essentially 12 truck batteries wired in series and in parallel.

So we've got tunes.......what's for dinner ? Pasta with pesto and smoked sausage ! Yum. We turn on the propane tank (located in the propane locker and sealed off from the rest of the boat). Hate when the back half of your yacht explodes due to the ignition of trapped propane ! A solenoid acts as a safety valve which we activate inside.  We also have installed a propane sniffer which detects propane leaks in the galley. This is now activated too. After that, our stove works pretty much like yours.

We make our own water (out of ocean water !!!) with a reverse osmosis water maker (147 liters per hour) and have about 900 liters on hand.  Kirstin activates the water pump, and we draw some of our yummy water into her pot. Water is on the boil.

We're a little down in battery power (reading 24.8 amps under load) so we turn on the 5 KW diesel generator. Now we have 220 volt power, in addition to the 110, 24, and 12 volt power available through the batteries and inverters. Kirstin turns on our convection microwave (also works just like yours). Since the generator is on, we also turn on the hot water heater so we won't be taking cold showers later. 

How about wine ? We have 3 refrigerators (each 24 volt) which are chilling some cheap Chilean chardonnay that was on sale. Some Coke Zero completes the beverage list.

We always dine outside, so we unfold the cockpit table, bring up the electric candles (for mood), and spread our non-skid pads down so that the rolling of the boat won't send pasta all over everything. Dinner is two hours, so we first watch the sunset, then continue dining under the stars; just the sound of the ocean, the music, and the soft purr of our wind generator in the background.  We could get used to this.