Life on board a sailing yacht and in the harbours offers many a bizarre encounter. Author Steffi von Wolff tells us in her commentary"Wolff's territory" regularly talks about her experiences as an on-board woman. Not always meant seriously, often satirically exaggerated, but always with a lot of heart and a wink. This time it's about cleaning-mad boat owners.
From rags, brushes and cleaning agents
At first I thought mice were on board when I was woken up at half past six on a Saturday morning by a slight scratching noise. That was a long time ago. I now realise that my husband is already awake and uses the morning dew to fiddle around on the boat as if he was being paid for it.
He crawls around on the deck with a sponge to remove the night's dirt.
Then everything is nicely softened and dissolves better",
he says, and a freshly tapped beer couldn't make him happier.
In one of the baking crates is a large folding box containing his utensils: Microfibre cloths in pastel colours, round cloths, hexagonal pink cloths, green and white striped sponges, red sailboat-shaped cloths, black brushes in three sizes, and a battery-powered brush that looks like a giant toothbrush, "it's great for getting into corners". Then there are drying cloths in all sizes and colours, glass cleaner, super glass cleaner, scouring milk, saddle soap, a soap from La Rochelle for the deck (it's actually human soap and it's very expensive, but I'm not allowed to use it), gall soap, all-purpose cleaner, floor cleaner, all-purpose floor cleaner, gall soap all-purpose floor cleaner and cleaner for everything. He hoards power foam, super power foam and power foam for almost all plastic surfaces, except for sensitive ones, where there is soft foam, and if you want to make him happy, you simply give him a chamois leather or a mop with a telescopic stick and four different cleaners.
Yes, my husband is a cleaning fiend.When I met him and was on the boat with him for the first time, I thought he was suffering from mysophobia and was afraid of being in a relationship with a dirt-phobe. On the other hand, that wasn't a bad thing, because I don't like cleaning myself.
There's just one catch: his addiction to cleaning is limited to his boat. On harbour days, he may well start cleaning at six o'clock, turning the bathroom into an Ibiza foam party by eight o'clock, and after breakfast, the dishes are washed immediately so that nothing dries out, and if it does happen, there is a "superclean" crust remover. It's not like that at home. He has never emptied the hoover or cleaned the bathtub, which is often explained with the words "it's still clean".
Everything is clean on the boat too, but he sweeps and sweeps and is so unbelievably happy when he can clean and has bought new cleaning products. There's a new one that's never been seen before,
Active foam everything is sparkling clean and never streaky cleaner
on the market, it lands on our ship.
I was almost relieved when we were visiting friends on their boat and Andreas used various cleaning cloths to wipe up after me. When I lifted the coffee cup to drink, he came along with an extra absorbent cloth to wipe away any marks. When I stood up, the upholstery was cleaned with a lint brush.
He doesn't even know where the bucket is at home",
his wife Susanne confessed to me. "But he goes crazy here." Another sailor told me that her husband didn't want her to brush her hair on board, and you were only allowed to come on board with shoe covers, which meant that everyone slipped and fell on the always freshly swept floor.
Shoe covers? We need them too!",
my husband said when I told him about it.
Now we have white, yellow and red shoe covers, power spray for cleaning the covers, and I'm thinking about putting one on my husband just like that. I'm simply sweeping away my concerns that this might not be the right thing to do.
Have a nice weekend!
