Wolffs Revier: Sailing without WC

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 the sensitive topic of "emergency urination for women" on board a yacht without WC.

Sailing without WC

"And then I couldn't go to the loo the whole time!" yells the neighbour on the boat opposite, who has been arguing with her husband since we docked about an hour ago. I understand the woman so incredibly well, because I still remember it like it is today. It was the first time we had sailed day and night for a whole weekend. Wonderful, I thought at the time.

My husband was delighted that his old friend Gerald had invited us onto his new boat. "It will be so nice to sail into the night and then stand outside by the wheel and ponder, look at the stars, and then at some point the sun will come up."

That's when you start crying.

I was happy too, even though I had previously preferred to sleep at night instead of crying, but it was something you should have experienced. So one fine Friday we travelled to the Baltic Sea to sail day and night with Gerald and his new girlfriend.

"Gerald's boat is totally minimised," enthused my husband during the trip. "All the superfluous weight has been removed or not even installed."

"But we can make coffee and something to eat, can't we?"

"Sure." It sounded as if that wasn't important.

The boat was indeed very reduced. So very,very. Somehow it didn't seem to have any furnishings apart from thin mattresses. There was supposed to be water and astronaut food to eat. When I jokingly asked why we weren't feeding ourselves artificially with probes, Gerald looked at me as if he was seriously considering the possibility.

Well, what don't you do for love? My husband was so happy, so I put up with the freeze-dried stuff that supposedly heated up when you pressed on it.

I remember that we all went to the toilet in the harbour again, and then we set off around midday.

Anne, Gerald's girlfriend, was sailing for the first time, and when the wind picked up, she was green in the face. The clear and unromantic message was.

Please always bucket with the wind.

"You're nice," I said to Gerald.

"Yes, what," he said. "Should I get out a spinet and sing like a minstrel that the coughing cube should please be placed so that it doesn't fly in our faces?"

Really.

The boat was slanted and then more and more slanted, and I also felt sick, and I was thirsty and - Anne and I had to go to the loo urgently, finally more and more urgently, right, to the loo.

"Can you please straighten the boat a little, we're going to the loo quickly," I asked.

Then came this sentence, synchronised by the two men:

There's no loo here.

I looked at Gerald like an apparition. "Excuse me?"

"There. Is. No. Loo."

I looked at my husband. He shrugged his shoulders.

"Nobody told me that." I realised that I was getting angry.

How could a shipNo loo be?

Anne was just as horrified as I was.

The men had it good. They could simply hold on to one of the shrouds and pee in the Baltic Sea.

And thatother - When I think about it, I still spontaneously close my eyes - was done by the two of them hanging their bums over the railing. Despite the wind.

"You can do it like that," said Gerald.

"I think I'm on fire," I replied. But I had to go so urgently. Anne too.

Finally, Gerald reluctantly got a bucket out of the back box, and we were supposed to sit on it one after the other.

I started and felt humiliated, even though the men kindly turned round.

And Anne, well, she wasn't so good with her motor skills.

The bucket fell over with this and that and everything ... well.

Gerald went crazy.

It all eats into the wood, leaving stains forever, and it stinks forever, oh God, how awful.

They filled the bucket a hundred times with Baltic Sea water to clean up the drama. Anne howled.

"You'll never sit on the bucket again," we were told, and the men then made such moronic suggestions that we were on the verge of simply peeing in the cockpit.

"You can make your hands so that you can get in there and then put everything overboard ..."

"How is that supposed to work? Especially with the wind," Anne now said crossly.

"Or you can sit in front of the drain here and control it so that it goes straight ..." My husband was also very creative.

"Are you crazy? There'll still be something on the teak deck," Gerald rebutted. The wind picked up. Anne released Cube Cough in the right direction and then sat down. I sat down with her. And so it began that we invented loo alternatives in the absence of a loo, not without angrily lashing out at our men in between. Unfortunately only verbally.

Remember this, good people:

1. We women can't just pee anywhere and all we have to do is unzip our pants, and we can have a great chat at the same time.
2. We may have a different sense of shame than you, and we don't care if we squat on buckets in front of you while the boat is leaning more and more, we are afraid that the bucket will tip over and of course we are to blame if the valuable teak deck is "etched forever".
3. We also don't like hanging over a railing with our bare bums, possibly accompanied by stupid chatter.

But what to do? We discussed it and came up with the following results, while our bladders - we had simply drunk far too much during the day - almost burst:

1. Take all the towels you have and pee in them, wring them out and rinse them so that you can use them again (not for your face, of course, but for your next pee)
2. Fill plastic bags, tie them and stow them safely in the boat (Gerald: "If they burst, I'll kill you!")
3. Sit with your bum in the sink and just let it run.
4. Using magazines we had brought with us, which we were allowed to keep on board despite their weight, we built a kind of funnel with a long pipe leading directly into the sea.

In between our men: "Maybe you're making a fuss, how can you be so inflexible? That's not a problem. The Vikings knew how to help themselves."

Point 3 was forbidden by Gerald. Point 4 turned out to be rubbish because the paper naturally soaked through, as we realised after a water test. Point 2 failed because there were no plastic bags on board (the weight), point 1 we now wanted to try out.

By now it had become dark and a clear starry sky had opened up. Beautiful, actually.

"Tell me," my husband said to his friend. "Like me, you always have disposable nappies on board in case there's water in the bilge or something."

We looked up, desperate. A glimmer of hope emerged.

Gerald, who was hanging his bum over the railing and gazing into the firmament, nodded. "Why?"

"Well, for our wives."

Gerald said: "But they're expensive, the nappies, they're not for that now."

Yes, for what else?

I asked sternly:

Where are the nappies?

Fifteen minutes later we had the second set of incontinence nappies on, the first one was quickly used up.

The starry sky became thicker, Anne and I sat there and she didn't feel sick at all. We felt safe and secure in our nappies and our mood was suddenly good again and was only dampened by the fact that Gerald demanded nappies because water had built up in the bilge.

"Over my dead body," said Anne. "You're really getting into trouble."

PS: Anne and Gerald are no longer together. The nappies became too expensive for Gerald in the long run.

Have a nice weekend!

• To the previous columns by Steffi von Wolff

The sailing book by Steffi von Wolff:

• " Harbour cinema - My husband, his old lady and me "