LandfallVoyages

As we discussed before, living on a boat means a lot of things, namely getting to play with your own shit water in far flung, yet undeniably scenic locations. I’m thinking it’s a kind of instant karma for getting to do all that sailing about in the water and the traveling all over the place and then calling that your LIFE. Anyhoo…poo. After anchors and varnish, the hows, whys, and ways of crapping on your boat are some of the most rabidly debated issues among boatowners. People literally get frothy at the mouth over it. Do you think they’ve developed a vaccine for that yet? That would be cool. They could roll it into the series of jabs you get so you won’t come down with Yellow Fever or Malaria, or the Poxy Plague while out exploring the world.

The chick we bought our first boat from let us have it with a pre-filled portable pooper. It wasn’t in the best shape. And she was kind of a nightmare to deal with. We were standing on the aft deck with the guy who brokered the boat sale, so Steve turned to him and said, “Hey Paul, do you want a free Porta Potti?” Turns out he was totally in the market for a free Porta Potti and as Steve handed it over he said, “Here, it’s full of your ex-wife’s shit.” True story.

Crap failure is an integral part of being on the water– I’m pretty sure it’s been written into maritime law. Something like: Title 33 U.S.C, Chapter 26, 856445.36.01a: Wherein it states that any boat, having been placed in the water and being in a state of semi- or continuous use, shall be subject to, at a minimum, one fecal fingerpainting failure per 45 days of usage. 98.2% of said failures shall occur between the hours of “are you fucking kidding me?” and “what do you mean they have food poisoning?”

Hence our decision to go composting. Since we already know we’ll be flinging the filth, it may as well be on our own terms. (Why do I feel like I’m tempting the universe with that statement?) The theory behind composting toilets is that separating the solids from the liquids makes dealing with head failures a lot easier. And completely eliminates the omnipresent Eau de Sewage fragrance from your boat. Our friends Terry and Sabine on Sea Raven came to the same conclusion but they didn’t cheap out, like we did. They got a Nature’s Head, while we went with C-Head. I admit to a vicious case of toilet envy, both because they got a really nice unit with plenty of bells and whistles, and because they’ve been living with theirs for a couple of months already, while we’ve been mostly crapping in the marina toilets.

I’m not going to bore you with a blow-by-blow account of the adventure and lunacy involved with removing a recently used marine septic system, except to say that it’s a GRUDGE MATCH TO THE DEATH. I felt good, pretty triumphant, truth be told, standing on the dock having just ripped that bitch out of the boat…until I noticed Terry standing on the dock, surveying the gutted remains of our old marine septic system, hangdog look on his face, trying to decide if he actually wanted to snap that shit up or if they were just going to tough it out. Turns out they’d been having some teething issues with their composting toilet. I felt a little less good. I mean, they got the gold standard alternative shitter and now they’re looking at my old regular one with covetous eyes? This is bad.

Sabine started telling me about cleaning up the hideous aftermath of their trip down from San Francisco to Ensenada, wherein five men used the toilet for a week and not everyone took care to make sure that no pee went down the poo hole. Or maybe someone mistook one hole for the other. Of the toilet, people…they weren’t at sea for that long. “Seriously, Tamiko, I almost died cleaning it up. It was horrible.” This from the girl who marched herself right over to the multimillion dollar poweryacht monstrosity parked at the end of D dock and said, “Do you mind not asphyxiating everyone downwind from you by running your generators all night and all day?” When he told her there was a problem with the shore power cord and that someone was fixing it and she should just HOLD HER HORSES, she intimated to him that it would be better for all involved if he just shut the generators down now and ran off his batteries like the great unwashed masses do. He didn’t like it. But he did it. Sabine is a beautiful, 10′ tall Viking goddess and people listen when she says stuff. She’s not exactly a shrinking violet. Or a shrieking violet, for that matter, so her meh seal-of-approval regarding composting toilets was worrisome.

The Nature’s Head is massively more complex than our C-Head and it seems that therein lies the trouble. C-Head is all about utter simplicity and the smallest effective footprint. Took only an hour and a half to install ours and it’s dead simple to use. Cleaning is also a cinch because it’s mostly a 5 gallon bucket, enclosed by broad flat planes. Guys, I don’t care how good your aim is, there’s always a splashback factor going on and I’m fistpumpingly thrilled that there aren’t any convoluted bits of molded plastic there to catch the pee splatter. Also? I love the fact that most of this toilet has non-proprietary parts that can be easily replaced with off the shelf goods at your local hardware store.

Terry and Sabine decided to buy a secondary base for their toilet, to see if that made it any easier to live with, since one of their main problems is how much of a pain in the ass it is to empty. Set them back a couple hundred dollars. If I wanted to do the same thing, I’d just take the bus across town to Home Depot and spend a few dollars for one of their bright orange 5 gallon buckets. Our urine collector is a standard plastic gallon jug. Like what you get water or milk in. If it gets funky you can just throw that bad boy out and get a new one. And if it overflows, which is sucky but not hard to clean up, it doesn’t wind up contaminating the solid waste bucket. Which is huge, because it’s the mixture of the number one and the number two that makes such horrible smell.

But, like Sea Raven found out, living with a composting head can be a lot different in real life than what you read in the brochures. Because when you come right down to it, you’re pooing in a bucket. And then keeping it for, I dunno, sentimental reasons, until such time as you can gracefully disentangle yourself from said poo bucket. I expected to find that C-Head’s marketing hype far outpaced actual performance in the field. I was wrong.

Eli says the only downside is having to aim his asshole. He’d appreciate having a butt-mounted laser sight, maybe with an automatic hands-free docking system. That has an early warning klaxon to let you know if you’re not quite lined up right. Maybe we can tattoo an arrow…but I digress. What I want to say is we’ve been living with this for over a week now and yes, it takes a little getting used to, but after a couple of tries, it’s pretty easy to use. We’ve been pooping daily in a bucket of peat moss, stirring it up and just letting it sit. I thought they were exaggerating when they said there’d be no smell, but damp earth is the most smell that’s come out of it yet. Seriously, you take a crap, stir the pot, and if you stick your nose down there it’s just a little musty smelling, maybe. Awesome. We overflowed the pee jug once and it wasn’t so bad to clean up. The worst thing that’s happened so far is our peat moss was too damp, so maggots started growing in the bucket. Nasty, I know. I was totally dreading the cleanup but honestly, I just dumped the bucket into a trash bag and rinsed it out. Took 5 minutes and it wasn’t even gross. It was just dirt. We’re installing a vent fan, so that probably won’t be an issue again.

This is day 10. I think I’m in love with my toilet. Which is good, because Steve has installed the old toilet right next to the marina dumpster with a sign that says: Best free head in Ensenada.

C-Head composting marine toilet. Note all the angular, uncomplicated goodness going on.

Nature's Head composting toilet