Water Bottle, Wobble

Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina – 2 nautical miles sailed

Besides a risky morning trip to the nearby gas dock to get fuel and water, we were stuck at anchor all day with steady 30 knot winds gusting up to 35 at times. The chop was so bad we could go nowhere in the dinghy, and even if we could we wouldn’t have wanted to leave the boat unattended in the high winds. So, we read, we listened to 99.3 The Zurf (a local FM station that plays entire classic rock albums with no ads and no talking, what??), I started working on the family’s tax returns, and Ana cozied up to her hot water bottle.

Do you know how difficult it is to find old school red rubber hot water bottles these days? Ana tweaked her back a few weeks ago when we were having a Disco Night on SeaLight and she tried this crazy move that didn’t go as planned. Since then she’s been desperately searching for a hot water bottle to help loosen up the affected area. I’ve been offering her back massages, but she has thus refused as she knows those “therapeutic oil massages” from your partner tend to lead to other things that maybe aren’t so good for the back pain.

She first tried a pharmacy in Marsh Harbour, but they only had those microwaveable bean bags, which really wouldn’t help because we do not have a microwave on board, nor any DYI plutonium or uranium to provide the required levels of radiation. She checked in every other store in the Abacos we visited but no dice. When we arrived in the US we were sure it was going to be a breeze finding one. We went to Walmart – nothing but bean bags. Went to some independent pharmacies – bean bags. Went to a hippy health store. Bean bags, but the beans were imported from an Ecuadorian farmer collective and supposedly held the heat longer, but that was a bunch of bunk as I could see where the “Made in China” tag had been ripped off. To make it worse, one day we had to do an Amazon order for a new set of portable navigational lights for the dinghy, but they were only about twenty bucks and we needed to get the order over $35 for free shipping.

“What do we need for the boat?” Ana asked me, after finding an Amazon delivery location right beside the dinghy dock in Charleston, where we would be in a few days.

“More Yanmar fuel and oil filters,” I said without thinking. She added them to the order, but they were not deliverable to that particular location.

“Not gonna work, what else?”

I thought long and hard but there was really nothing I could think of.

“Why don’t you order something you need?” I asked her.

“I can’t think of anything.”

“How can that be? At home there are Amazon packages arriving every second day full of stuff that gets magically absorbed into the house with no noticeable enhancements to our standard of living. How can you not need anything now? Have these months of minimalist living changed you?”

“Nope. I’m getting more mascara and conditioner. But I just wish I could think of something I really need.”

Three days later we're opening the door to the Amazon delivery box and Ana says, “The water bottle! Why the hell didn’t we buy the water bottle?”

I had no answer for her.

After calling every store in Charleston and surrounding area, she finally struck gold at a CVS pharmacy. We hurried over there and found an authentic, old school, brilliant red, rubber hot water bottle for eighteen US buckaroos. She was so happy. And she hasn’t parted with the hot water bottle since. She fills it with boiling water at night, puts it on her back, then lies there in the bed making ecstatic moaning noises as I’m trying to sleep. She fills it again in the morning for more heat therapy as she’s plucking eyebrows and listening to news podcasts. The other day she found a rope in the cockpit locker and lashed the hot water bottle to her body so she could enjoy the soothing heat while vertical. Lately she’s been putting it on her face and her belly and sitting on it during meals so I don’t think her back even hurts anymore.

Boating brings out the simple pleasures in life, I guess.

Oh, and if anybody's wondering about the strange title for today's journal, it's the punch line to an awful joke my dad used to tell. He invented Dad Jokes. He'd be delighted to tell you one.