Hot and Cold

Oriental, NC

NoLL

Rain rain go away, come again some other day. Nobody likes rain except farmers, right? Who wants rain when you’re out on a boat? We do under the right circumstances.

Late at night, when we are snuggled in bed and the big T (Tarwathie) rides at anchor, it is very peaceful and soothing to hear the pitter patter of a gentle rain on the deck above our heads. It makes you sleep even more soundly.

What about when it’s stormy, cold, bumpy, and the wind howls? Well, in those circumstances we have the anxiety of worrying about whether the anchor will hold or not. Nevertheless, the more miserable it is outside, the more delicious it feels in our nice warm bed. We burrow deeper into the covers and cuddle even closer.

Come morning, like today, it is not easy to get up before dawn, dress in our rain clothes, and go outside to stand a watch at first light. I don’t mean to suggest that we suffer. On the contrary, we bend over backward to pamper ourselves. Notwithstanding that, sometimes one has to brave a little discomfort in order to gain in the near future. This morning we moved from Broad Creek to Oriental.

We have had a propane fueled cabin heater for 3-4 years now. We don’t feel the need to use it very often. Even when it is cold and miserable outside, it is usually comfortable inside Tarwathie without heat. We use the heater perhaps 4 times per year. On very cold mornings, we turn it on for 20 minutes to warm up the cabin enough to convince us to get out of bed. After that, it’s not needed.

The secret is that so much of the cabin walls are hull area below the water line. No matter what the outside air temperature, the inside air temperature stays close to water temperature. That moderating factor helps us avoid the need for heat or cooling.

Many cruising yachts do have air conditioning. That’s hard for us to understand. We are so stingy with use of battery power, that we can’t imagine running an air conditioner on the batteries. Of course that adds to the reasons why we go so far north in the summer and south in the winter. If we tried to winter in the Chesapeake or to summer in Georgia we might have an entirely different view on heating and cooling.