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Life on a 28 Footer

These days, on L’Alliance, we are spending a considerable amount of time rebuilding the fridges, re-installing the hot/cold water circuits for the galley and the shower, the sea-water sink, the drinking water tanks and filters… and by night, before sleeping, we talk about D.I.Y. watermakers, and how to integrate a diesel generator on the fuel circuit of the main engine, and possibly share the same cooling system… We are such freaks that we end up  dreaming about retrofitting our old diesel engine with some sort of Stanley Meyer’s electrolytic cells, and have all the systems on board being powered by the hydrogen that we could extract from the Ocean!! What an old dream: squaring the circle,  achieve the complete energy self-sufficiency!

Then all of a sudden our friend Jaime from the Daina III sends us a link to a documentary about a man living on his 28 feet wooden boat, with no fridge, no heads nor shower, almost no electrical systems on board, just what’s strictly necessary for navigational purposes… and he looks so happy!   Furthermore, David Welsford is not a hippy at all (nor a punk): on the contrary, he wears all the proper sailing gear, he owns an iPad, a professional camera, and he has his own .com web-page to share his adventures at sea.  The 8 minutes footage made by his friend, who is a professional video-maker, looks indeed more like a commercial rather than a documentary…  the photography is so good!

For many aspects, David Welsford is much more “mainstream” than we are, but he has the merit to be consistent with his philosophy of simplicity: he uses his money for the few things that make him happy (his boat, good food and beers) rather than following a fruitless consumerism. By doing away with the main modern cruiser’s needs, he did achieve a relative self-sufficiency on his board (a small boat has obvious limits, but as the old saying goes, “small vessel = small problems”). So thanks David for sharing your inspiring video: we are not going to stop our complex refit of L’Alliance, but certainly we will focus much more on the really important things, in order to be ready to sail as soon as possible!  (by the way, if anybody knows where to get a cheap waterproof full HD professional video camera…I would love if our clips could look as fancy as this one!!!!!!)

 

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