I wasn't going to mention the mast.  After all, I'm writing about showers.  But I can't see how to tell you about showers on a cruising boat without sooner or later getting around to the bit about the mast.   But I can put it off for a while.

To begin at the beginning, one of the many, many things we evaluated in searching for a cruising boat was the type, kind, placement and functionality of the shower.  We were going cruising, not abandoning cleanliness.

Those who have read C's Choice know the 'we' is a deceptive overstatement when it came to choosing our boat.  But I signed the check and with it inherited total responsibility for everything wrong with the boat, the weather, etc...  Showers were, are, can be very important to the success or failure of a cruise.

Of course, sooner or later everything about a boat becomes crucial to
the success or failure of the cruise;   becomes subject of lengthy and minute examination;  becomes, on some days,  a bone of contention.

Crossing large distances at  six miles an hour gives more than ample time for close and detailed contemplation of all sorts of things, as does sitting in a progressively smaller cabin during a week or so of rain.  Damp, bone chilling cold also helps the process along.  Everything gets examined and lo and behold,  nearly all of it can be improved.  And should be.  And worse, should have been.

But that all comes later.  To begin with we were satisfied.  Even pleasantly surprised.    Because our choice, Cynthia's choice, C's Coice, came with six showers.  Five of them were sun showers and we'll get back to them later on.  The other shower was a pretty standard fixture for boats of this size:  A flexible hose connected to a handheld shower head, hooked up to the boat's fresh water system.

This 'shower' was in the head.  The lavatory.  A small closet on the starboard side of the passageway between the forward and main cabins.  The idea is that you close up the john and hide the TP somewhere and get rid of the towels and bathrobes and laundry bag and such and take your shower and the water drains down to the sump under the slatted floor and the head's bilge pump pumps the water overboard.

This is all theory.

Especially the part about the bilge pump pumping the water anywhere, much less overboard.  It simply did not do so.  And had not for some time, it later became obvious, even though previous owners had taken any number of showers.  Thus the rot.

Much later we discovered that this bilge pump was cleverly wired into the forward cabin lighting circuit.  Thus the pump would not come on unless the breaker for that circuit was on, no matter how much water is sitting in the bilge.  Or sloshing around on the sole, as a boat's floor is called.

It should be noted that the people who design boats live in Kansas.  Most of them cannot swim.  None have ever actually been on a boat.

So of course, they expect you to shower with the lights on.  Nowhere in the ships literature was it pointed out that the shower had been designed to be used only at night.  During the day there was lots of light in the head, but the designers were not aware of this.

During the day, in fact most of the while, most of the breakers are kept in the off position to prevent  accidentally running the batteries down.  Real bilge pumps are wired directly to the batteries so that they will pump out water when you are not around.

This keeps the boat from sinking unnecessarily.

I know, I know;  that makes it sound like it is sometimes necessary to sink a boat.  It may be.  Sometimes it even seems like a good idea.  Certainly there are times when keeping a boat from sinking takes far more resources than are at hand at the moment,.  Not having the bilge pump hooked up to a live source of electicity should not be such a circumstance.

The part about the mast is almost here, but there's some other stuff yet to cover first.  It goes back to when we were deciding to buy Quantum Solace as she was then known.  One of the things we had noticed was that the wood at the bottom of the aft wall of the head, behind the door, was a bit rotted and needed replacement.  We used this as one of many negotiating points.

We figured it was from overzealous daytime showering and figured it was really no big deal, but we claimed it would cost hundreds, if not thousands to pull out the bulkhead and replace it.

So we claimed the whole aft wall would have to be replaced, and lowered our offer accordingly.  Actually we figured we would simply scarf out the bottom two or three inches, wedge and glue in a replacement, then cover the wall with a new layer of laminate.  It was, after all, the wall the door opened inward against and you never saw it unless you were a guest.  Full time crew seldom close the door for privacy-- claustrophobia defeats the urge for privacy, and privacy doesn't exist on a boat anyway.

We thought this repair would take a few hours, a day at most, and maybe a hundred dollars.  Negotiations came and went and we ended up with the boat and renamed her C's Choice and began doing odd jobs to get her ready so we could get out of Dodge and into the Bahamas.

One day Cynthia's task was removing and cleaning out the water strainers, which is a nasty job in itself, especially for first timers.  I was proud of her for doing it and she was, I think, surprised that she had done it!  Meanwhile yours truly began this simple repair by cutting out the bottom few inches of the panel.   It came out pretty easily, except for where it was glued to the compression post supporting the mast.

A bit more information:  On Hunter sailboats, as on the greater majority of  boats these days, the mast is deck-stepped.  This means that the mast itself rests on the deck instead of passing through the deck to rest on the keel.  The weight and stress of the mast is passed through the fiberglass deck to a strong post that extends from the keel, through the cabin to the ceiling under the base of the mast.

The advantage is that there is no hole through the cabin top where water can and will enter when it rains or when the waves wash over the deck.

Yes, sometimes the waves wash over the deck.  That's a whole 'nother story and we're talking showers here, not sailing.

These support posts are made of very strong wood.  That's theory, too.  The Hunter had what appeared to be white oak as a mainpost, faced all round with 1/4 inch teak.  God bless the teak.

Because when I got the door of the head off so I had some room, and the bottom cut off and the bits and pieces pried out, I saw that the rot ran on under the teak facing.  And after I very carefully cut off about four inches of that pretty teak facing , I discovered that the bottom three inches of the mast post were completely rotted out.

Gone.

The teak facing was holding up the mast.

I lay there, on my belly, feet in the forward cabin, belly draped across the raised sill, head pressed  to the slatted floor.  I lay there and I cried.

It's another long and depressing story, but our first boat's engine had died the second day we owned it.  We had to buy a new engine.  With that sort of start in the boat owning business, things couldn't get worse.

Right.

Think again:  I had just bought a boat with nothing holding up the mast.

I cried.

This was supposed to be about showers, but I just can't go on right now.