Bjorklund Log: Diapers On Board

When sailing with two one-year olds, diapers, LOTS and LOTS of diapers are a fact of life. This post is about diapers and may not be interesting to many of you, but when we were getting ready for this trip, I scoured the internet looking for information on sailing with kids in diapers and didn’t find much. This is my contribution to others out there looking for tips on sailing with kids in diapers.

Since our boys came home from the hospital they’ve been in cloth diapers. Cloth fits with our philosophy on minimizing our impact on the environment, as well as our pocket book. When the boys first came home they were really little, so we used regular old preemie sized cotton pre-fold diapers (what you think of when you think of cloth diapers) with waterproof covers. We washed them ourselves and they worked pretty well…particularly since you change diapers so frequently with newborns. Once they were big enough, we started using a higher tech option for cloth diapers, Fuzzi Bunz and we adore them. Strong words for diapers, but they truly are miracles, especially since we had the experience with the cotton pre-folds at the beginning. The Fuzzi Bunz consist of a nylon cover with a waterproof coating that has a polar fleece inner shell. The fleece and waterproof nylon create a pocket for an absorbent liner to be inserted. The absorbent liner is microfiber and holds a lot of fluid, and with fleece next to the baby’s skin, the moisture is wicked away similar to a disposable diaper. The pocket configuration also allows for customization in absorbency, because you can put more than one absorbent liner in, or you can use liners made of different materials like hemp or cotton. For overnight we use one microfiber insert with an additional hemp liner since hemp absorbs an amazing amount of liquid.

Hand me downs of enough fuzzi-bunz for one kid and baby shower gifts of enough fuzzi-bunz for a second kid made it possible for us to have a full set of fuzzi-bunz for two kids. We were really fortunate, since they aren’t cheap. Though even if we bought all 40+ fuzzi-bunz we have by ourselves, we’d still be lots of money ahead over disposables.

When it comes to washing cloth diapers at home, it is as simple as pulling the absorbent liner out of the pocket and scraping any solids into the toilet, since we have a front loader washing machine at home that doesn’t agitate the diapers as much as a top loader would, we do an added scrubbing step with a dish scrubber (used only for this purpose!) to get most of the solid residue off. Then throw them in the washer with half the amount of soap…it’s VERY important to avoid soap residue since it will cause the microfiber inserts to repel as opposed to absorb liquid. We also use a special soap, called Country Save for this very reason. Wash on hot and toss them into the dryer on low heat. Bing, Bang, Boom you are done. Between the 2 boys we go through 14-16 diapers a day, and we have enough diapers to go 2-3 days between washing.

On the boat we were committed to continuing to cloth diaper, for the reasons stated above (environmental impact and cost), but also because we simply do not have enough room on the boat to store disposable diapers, both clean and dirty, and in some of the remote places we have been and are going, there is no way to dispose of the diapers so we’d have to hold onto stinky dirty diapers for a long time.

So, how do you deal with washing diapers on the boat? When we are in a town with a Laundromat, it’s easy, just wash them like we were at home. However in Northern B.C. and SE Alaska, towns with Laundromats are few and far between, so that leaves the only other option of washing them by hand. This is where I searched high and low for information on sailing with kids in diapers and didn’t have much luck. When you are living on a sailboat (particularly a small, simple sailboat like Yare), you live a life constrained by what you can carry. When it comes to freshwater and electrical power, you need to be very minimal in your usage. We carry 55 gallons of freshwater and though where we are cruising now you can fill up just about any time you get fuel, you still have to be mindful of your usage. As far as electrical power goes, we have a 330 amp hour house battery bank. To put that into context, the lights we have on our boat are very efficient fluorescent lights designed especially for boats. With our battery bank, we could run 5 of those lights for 33 hours before we would need to recharge. Try and run something like a hairdryer and you would go through those amps faster than you can say jack rabbit.

Now the question is, how do you wash diapers with minimal freshwater, next to no electricity, and have them dry in a rain forest setting that gets something like 14 feet of rain a year? That is a huge question. It seems there are very few people out there who have cruised with kids in diapers in this area who have put information about it out there. I did get in touch with one couple who left Kodiak, AK with a 10 month old and ended up in Australia to ask what they did about diapers. They very helpfully put together a post on their blog, read it here. Their method of keeping the poop and pee diapers separate and dragging them behind the boat and then soaking the poop diapers in napi-san works great for them (and they are in the middle of doing it with their second kiddo on a new boat). They are using cotton pre-fold diapers. Since we are using the high tech fuzzi-bunz, we can’t use napi-san as it is a chlorine based sanitizer and that can’t be used with the synthetic fabrics. So, we had a choice, go with the pre-folds we have and leave the fuzzi-bunz at home, or come up with a method for the fuzzi-bunz. We decided we just couldn’t leave our beloved fuzzi-bunz behind for a couple of reasons: the diaper rash we experienced with the cotton pre-folds when the boys were super little, and the fact that you would need to use more diapers per day per kid with the prefolds (since prefolds keep the wetness against baby’s skin and need to be changed more frequently to minimize diaper rash)…times two for twins!

I did some research on hand washing gadgets and bought a hand washer and a spin dryer. When they were delivered to the house, they both looked kind of hokey and the spin dryer looked WAY too big. I bought the wonderwash and the spin dryer from the Laundry Alternative. The spin dryer looked so huge that I was planning on sending it back, but that was one of those chores that didn’t happen in the whirlwind before we left, so we threw both gadgets on board with the idea that we would try them and if they didn’t work, we would get rid of them at some marina along the way…hopefully someone would want them. So far we’ve been using the washer, but we probably could get away with a bucket and a plunger just fine, but man oh man are we glad we have the spin dryer! It’s turned out to be worth the space it takes up, and the power usage is minimal even when you take into account the inefficiency of converting our 12V DC battery power into 120V AC power with our small inverter (we really only have DC power on the boat…we just have a small inverter for charging our computers since we haven’t sprung for the DC computer chargers, and now for the spin dryer). The dryer doesn’t have a heating element, so the clothes aren’t completely dry when they come out of it, but things stand a chance to actually drying in this damp climate. It also helps with rinsing the soap out of the clothes since we spin them before the final freshwater rinse to get as much soap out as possible.

All that said, here is our method for washing diapers aboard Yare:

1. Scrape solids into head (toilet).

2. Scrub poopy diapers with dish scrub brush in salt water.

3. Rinse all diaper shells and absorbent liners in salt water an additional 2 times.

4. Heat salt water for washing (since we have the diesel stove going most of the time to heat the boat and for cooking, though slow, this doesn’t take any more energy than we would use anyway)

5. Load pre-soaked diapers in wonderwasher with hot salt water* and small amount of soap.

6. Rotate wonderwasher with handle for about 5 minutes.

7. Spin wash water out of diapers and liners with spin dryer.

8. Use 1-2 gallons of fresh water for rinsing salt and soap out of the diapers.

9. Spin rinse water out of diapers and liners.

10. If it’s nice out, pin diapers and liners all over the boat so you look like the Beverly Hill Billys. If it’s not nice out, pin the absorbent liners on drying rack (made by Tor, more on this below) and string bungy cords all over down below to hang the shells on.

* Quite honestly the salt water is usually only warm. By the time we get enough water hot, it has usually cooled down to pretty warm, due to the logistics of heating large amounts of water on board. As I was making our plan for washing the diapers on board, I was worried about sanitizing them. In general, the three ways to sanitize diapers are using a sanitizer like chlorine bleach (not an option for our diapers), UV radiation from drying in the sun (not something we can always count on in this climate), or washing in hot water. To keep from leaking, the wonderwasher requires warm or hot water so I was planning on using hot water to wash the diapers in order to sanitize them. It hasn’t worked out that way, but we haven’t seemed to have any problems with the diapers or the boys bottoms, probably because we dry them in the sun when we can, and we wash them frequently in Laundromats with hot water.

We have a cubby that we built specifically for the cat litter box and since we left them at home for this trip (sniff, sniff) we had a cubby we weren’t used to using and it happened to be close to the engine. Tor installed an engine driven heater from Sure Marine REAL heater (much like the heater in a car, if the engine is running, you can turn a fan on and it will blow hot air out because engine coolant is running through the heater) and put a duct right into the cubby. He built a rack that looks an awful lot like an oven rack and we can pin the absorbent diaper liners on it and after a few hours of motoring, they are bone dry.

When we aren’t anywhere near a town, we need to wash diapers about every other day with two kids. Washing every other day works out to two loads in the WonderWasher. We will however go out of our way to find a washing machine!

It’s a lot of work, but we are happy with our system and haven’t had any major problems. We do have a couple of packages of disposable diapers on board in case diaper rash ever gets out of control. But we haven’t used that many, even when Odin got diaper rash from hell from one dirty diaper.