Water, Water, Everywhere, Yet Not a Drop To Shower In

Boating has the ability to reduce life to its basic ingredients.

Food, shelter, toilets and water.

We can raid the cupboards for tins of 7-year old baked beans for sustenance and we can walk to the nearest pub to use their toilet when the needle on the waste tank gauge is hard over and there are strange smells emanating from the toilet vent.

However, when your water tank is on its last legs, there is not much else for it, but to pull the pins and find the nearest tap, so we can suck up another 1000 litres of life juice.

We use lots of water.

We have tried to be frugal, but life on ships with watermakers or on land, connected to the local water board, has made us splash happy.

The celebration of our attempt at liquid parsimony is the boaters shower.

The Boaters Shower Dance

1. You wet yourself all over with just a few litres from the shower head and turn the supply off at the tap.

2. Soap all the important places and shampoo whatever hair you can find.

3. Stand there, naked, in a dry shower, covered in patches of soap with a white foamy head and pray that the big boater in the sky doesn't deem this, the very moment, for your head-on collision with a passing hire boater, who is steaming past at 600mph.

Even if he misses you, his wake will slam dunk your head on each bulkhead, before leaving you unconscious in the shower tray, while the drain pump sucks your noise down the drain hole.

4. Content that the moment for doom has passed, fire up the water again, do the freezing jig as the water initially comes out cold and then change tempo, to the scalding samba as the hot water turns your skin lobster red. This solo is be accompanied by frenzied running on the spot and waving your free arm around while you try to grip the wet tap to stop the torture (it burns, it burns).

5. Once frozen, scalded and soap-free, turn the water off to avoid wasting any more

6. Emerge naked and wet from the shower, just as the first mate slams open the thru-door to pass through the boat from the stern, as she has just seen the damned cat bring another headless blackbird chick into the saloon through the front doors.

7. Towel dry in the draft and in full view of the towpath, before emerging on deck, triumphant, that it's all over until the same time tomorrow.

Water deprivation does strange things to you.

We finally moored and I hallucinated that there was an odd assortment of adults standing on the grass, badly playing an equally strange assortment of brass instruments.

I must take more water with it.