Living on Spruzzo

Marking our location on the map

Space

Spruzzo is 16m/52′ long and 4.6m wide in the middle. There is a back cabin that we use as a master bedroom that sleeps 2 or 3, a front cabin that sleeps 2 or 3 and 2 other sleeping spaces in the boat. There are 2 bathrooms (heads) and a combined kitchen and living area. The bathrooms have a built-in shower curtain which turns the space into a shower.

I can stand up anywhere in the boat except in the passageway between the back cabin and the central part of the boat. I hit my head going through there maybe 10 times before just ducking the entire way. In any case we have a large boat for 2 people and it is still not very big.

The top of the boat has a cockpit that could easily sit 6 or 7 people, and there are cushons on the back of the boat to lie on except usually you want to stay out of the sun in the summer.

As they say, the boat is small but your backyard is huge 😉

weather/environment

In some ways sailing is a bit like camping. Your ‘tent’ is quite a bit more substantial than a cloth tent, but you are much closer to the outside weather in your floating home than you are in a regular dirt house.

Also, the sails of your floating home need a mast (or 2 if you are a ketch), wires to hold up the mast (your rigging) and all the rope/lines to control your sails (running rigging). Your lines will sometimes want to vibrate when the wind is a certain speed and direction. They will make a very annoying slapping sound on the mast which will reverberate through the boat and also annoy your neighbours. If this happens at 3am you will be woken up by the sound and will have to go outside (in the wind and rain if you are unlucky) and have to address the issue (tightening something or using a bungie cord is usually the fix).

My point here is that the weather will affect you very directly. It will control where you can easily sail. If the winds are very high or the waves start hitting your boat from the side (say if the wind shifts and moves your boat at anchor but the waves/swell is still coming from the direction your side is now pointing) you will have trouble sleeping and you will need to getup and do something.

I guarantee you will be very conscious of the current and future weather if you live on a sailboat.

water/power/waste

Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink! I think that is a line from a poem. Spruzzo can carry 1000l of water (and 600l of diesel). Freshwater can be obtained from a marina (almost all provide fresh water….sometimes for an extra charge) or from your watermaker. Almost all liveaboard sailboats will have a watermaker which is a reverse-osmosis filter connected to a high-pressure pump (800+psi) that forces the saltwater through a filter which is so fine that dissolved salt cannot pass (apparently filters out viruses too!). I haven’t researched the filters but this sounds neat and they are expensive. Spruzzo can make 160l of freshwater/hour with our watermaker but we need to run our diesel generator to do this.

Speaking of power, Spruzzo has a 220V AC power system and a 24V DC power system that run different things. Appliances run off of the 220V typically and boat systems run off of the 24V DC system. Spruzzo has a motor to furl the jib, an electric windlass, a motor to furl and unfurl the main, a motor to haul out the mainsail, and 3 powered winches for the jib sheets and the main sheet. The mizzen is manual because it is small. Spruzzo also has an electric autopilot (actually two so we have redundancy) and the usual boat instruments and chartplotter. We also have small fridge./freezer and a larger fridge/freezer, an excellent espresso machine, a dishwasher and clothes washer, heat and AC in each cabin. And a wi-fi router for the boat of course because we must always be online 😉 and a TV and DVD player and a few laptops and cellphones. To summarize, we can use a lot of electricity during the day.

As an aside, we have AC in each cabin but right now we cannot really run the AC off of the inverter. We have a 2KW inverter that can power our 220V appliances from the batteries, but it seems to stop working (I’m sure a breaker is breaking) after a while….so if we want to run AC we need to have the generator running. We have had some hot nights but have not yet resorted to starting the generator….a fan has been good enough.

If we are at anchor I usually run the generator for 2 hours in the morning to fully (or close to fully) charge the batteries, about 1 hour mid-afternoon as a top-up and another 1 hour before bedtime to ensure the batteries are fully charged for the night. The generator runs off of a 3 cylinder Kubota diesel engine and uses 2 litres of diesel an hour to run. So every day I use about 8l of diesel just sitting to charge my batteries. (We are going to spend a mint on a dingy-davits and solar arch which will almost eliminate this. I don’t like running the generator.) If we are in a marina you can almost always ‘plug in’ and get shore power to the boat.

For energy storage we have a truck battery as a starter battery for the main engine and generator, and 6x12V 120AH truck batteries that act as our 24V 360AH house bank.

In terms of waste, grey water from the bathroom sinks, kitchen sink, dishwasher and clothes washer drains into a central bilge that is pumped out automatically when full. (We cleaned this a few months ago maybe for the first time in the 17 year life of the boat and it was a bit more horrible than you are thinking.)

Black water from the toilets goes into holding tanks. You have to sail 6 nm offshore to empty the tanks.

Physical waste (organics, paper, plastics, glass and metal) need to be sorted and disposed of. We have 4 separate bins for waste on Spruzzo.

anchoring vs. marinas

In the Mediterranean it seems that people winter in a marina from October/November to May/June and then sail around during the summer. There are many, many Greek islands (where we are now) and it seems an infinite number of places to anchor.

The benefits of being in a marina are:

  1. you are secured to a dock so no worrying about your anchor dragging or someone else dragging into you
  2. easy to get from the boat to land to shop and move groceries/etc
  3. can have boating services around, say if your engine stops starting and you want help
  4. you probably have power so no running the generator and you can run AC all day if you like
  5. easy to get rid of your garbage
  6. access to a nice shore shower

The cons are:

  1. You are very close to other people.
  2. The shore can be noisy.
  3. The marina water may be smelly and you will never swim in a marina.
  4. They are expensive, around C$100/night in the summer.

Generally you want to anchor out as much as you can. I’ve spoken to people who *only* anchor out during the summer. We are not there yet but I aspire to that. When you are anchoring in a beautiful protected harbour in a gorgeous Greek island, of which there are thousands, you are literally living the dream. We have already shared anchor spots with US$130M mega-yachts. We were even beside the super-yacht that got some US politician from North Carolina in trouble! (I was going to swim over but I could see it was a family affair that week 😉 It is like living in a postcard. Crystal clear water, beautiful sunsets, wonderful food and drinks that you prepare yourself…..amazing!

The trick to anchoring is 1) find the right harbour depending on the winds overnight (preferable you want to be blown away from shore and 2) protected from the waves/swells. You sometimes cannot do both. Then you have to find a free spot over ideally sand or mud and anchor properly. We use Navily to find anchor spots. It is very popular and useful in the Mediterranean.

getting around without a car

The best thing we did when we first moved to the boat was buy folding bicycles. Marina di Ragusa is *HUGE*. We were on the last dock (as one of the bigger boats) and had maybe an 800m walk to the washrooms and showers…..so the first thing we did was get bikes.

I was a big bike convert in Toronto (I biked downtown to work for sometime) and I really enjoy biking around the places we go to. Probably walking is better for you, but the increase in speed makes it more interesting for me and I like that I can cover more ground than just walking.

people you meet

I have probably met 60 or so people so far (hopefully I will remember faces if not names) and only 2 of them I didn’t like. Everyone you meet cruising will have chosen this lifestyle and will be a bit like you who has also chosen the same thing. It is a bit like the first time I walked into my first engineering class at Waterloo…I looked around and saw that I had found my crowd! Everyone is very self-sufficient, a bit adventurous and interested in helping other people.

food and alcohol

The tomatoes I ate while I was in Canada 99.9% of the time were a fraud. They were something in a tomato shape. Almost every single tomato I have had in Italy or Greece has tasted like it came fresh from a garden.

Victoria used to tell me that Greek salad in Greece was so much more delicious than what we had in Canada. I took this to be harmless puffery from a Greek girl who fondly thought of her food from home as being better than what we were eating in Toronto. A Greek Salad in Toronto was OK but no big deal.

The first time I had a Greek salad in Greece I couldn’t believe how good it tasted. The feta in Greece is amazing! The feta in Canada tastes like white paste with a faint cheese taste. Honestly no comparison. When you combine garden grown tomatoes, real olive oil and real olives and onion it is so delicious that I would eat it as a main happily with some bread and wine.

One of my favorite snacks now is toasted bread covered in olive oil and salt and pepper. The olive oil is so good! I think people just care more about food here. When we were first driving to the boat through southern Italy I had one of the best sandwiches of my life from a GAS STATION FOOD COUNTER! The bread was fresh, great cheese, great tomato and nice ham.

In Marina di Ragusa there was a local family who would sell oranges from their farm when they ripened to people at the marina. We bought 10 kg the first time. (They were not that cheap.) The oranges were so good I almost died. I am not exaggerating when I relate that they were the juiciest, sweetest oranges I have ever had. You might think they tasted better because I’m outdoors, or less stressed, or in an exotic location but that is not it: they were simply fresh from a tree after ripening and they were what you would eat in a Michelin 3 star restaurant if they served you an orange. I bought these on the side of a road.

Italian food that I have eaten here in local Italian restaurants, has much more subtle flavouring than what you would get in Toronto. The pasta here is amazing of course (please order pasta here and not pizza, the pasta is life changing the pizza is just OK and mostly for the tourists) but you are not overwhelmed with a bunch of flavours…it is more subtle. Pasta, cream, tomatoes, some other flavour….you have to pay attention but everything tastes so good and balanced.

To be fair, Toronto gets the prize for food variety. Very hard to get decent ‘foreign’ food in Sicily or anywhere small. I miss my Indian/Chinese/Japanese food sometimes and I miss bagels.

Very decent wine you can buy in a grocery store for around C$7. In Canada the same thing would be $12 to $15. I really think Canada has messed up one of the simple pleasures of life by over-taxing alcohol. In Sicily I found some decent Polish pilsner beer in 1.5L plastic bottles for less than C$2. One of those bottles became my primary source of water every day when I had one of them with my dinner!

where you go

I loved Malta. Looked like a fortress island, which it once was. I had no idea Malta was so small (I think the population is now about 500K) and I had 2 Maltese kids in my engineering class! Hey Joe and Pauline! Toronto had a big Maltese population that I didn’t know about. Sicily was great to drive around (limited to us because of Covid) and Syracuse had a beautiful port but anything we saw was eclipsed by how beautiful the Greek islands are. You see pictures, but nothing replaces seeing and experiencing the real thing. We are still making our way down the Ionian side (and I will add updates as we go) but the Greek islands are very, very beautiful and they provide lots of little harbours to anchor in.

The wonder is, though, that you can really go anywhere there is water and wind. Victoria likes to stock up on food so I’m sure we could survive for 30+ days on the boat from a calorie perspective. It would be horrible to run out of beer though we don’t carry that much of a supply 😉