Laundry on-board Sea Monster

Living on a boat, you learn to wear clothes for a longer period of time than you do on land. Washing a pair of shorts after wearing them for only one day – absolutely not! Your clothes still get sweaty and salty, though, so eventually you do need to wash them. We are fortunate to be a vessel that has a washing machine on board – quite a luxury really! Here’s what doing a load of laundry entails for us.

Wash. Rinse. Spin. Hang. Repeat.

In a little more detail:

1. Wash
   1. Fill up our Panda washing machine with about 4 gallons of water and 1 squirt of HE environmentally friendly laundry detergent.
      • My mom got us NaturOli Extreme 18X laundry soap off Amazon for Christmas and it’s worth every penny – seriously great
   2. Add in dirty laundry
      • A load fits approximately 8-10 t-shirts or thin, queen size fitted & flat sheets or 4 quick-dry, micro-fiber towels.
      • Note that if you want to use big fluffy bath towels, even one probably wouldn’t fit. They also never dry, though, so microfiber towels are the only way to go.
   3. Add in a little more water if necessary so the water is just at the top of the laundry
   4. Turn on the machine to the “wash” cycle for 8-12 minutes
   5. Turn the machine to “drain” cycle and empty out all the water
      • We use ours in our second shower, so I can just let it drain while holding the shower pump button to empty overboard
2. Rinse
   1. Refill the washer with approximately 2 gallons of new water (no soap)
   2. Turn on the machine to the “wash” cycle for 4-6 minutes
   3. Turn the machine back to “drain” and empty out all the water
3. Spin
   1. Take a few items out of the wash compartment and place into the spin basket
      • This will hold approximately 3 t-shirts, 1 towel, or 1 sheet
   2. Place the plastic spin disk on top of the clothes
      • This is necessary to keep the machine spinning balanced or else it sounds like a rocket ship which is going to launch from your boat
      • To me – it basically works like magic, but obviously there’s some science to it
   3. Turn the machine on to the “spin” cycle for 3-5 minutes
4. Hang
   1. Remove clothes from the spin compartment and hang up outside somewhere to dry
5. Repeat
   1. Repeat the Spin and Hang steps until that load of laundry is finished
   2. Repeat all steps for your next load, because there’s no way you’re only doing one load at a time unless you’re doing laundry every day

Even with a machine, it’s still a fairly labor intensive process that requires almost constant attention/action. All together though, it only takes about 30 minutes per load which isn’t too bad and still much better than hand washing!