Isn’t It Cold?

January 7, 2015 by Jesse K on s/v Smitty 6 Comments

This is the first question we always get asked when people find out we live on our boat in Boston Harbor.  So I thought I would give some specifics on the subject. Today we are in the middle of a cold snap.  It’s been in the teens the last couple of morning and hasn’t gotten over 30 degrees fahrenheit.  We are in wind chill warnings, its predicted to be -2 with the wind chill.   We are even starting to get some nice ice build ups in the marina.   Today I even got texts from friends and family asking us if we wanted to stay with them.  Nice offers but it really isn’t bad on the boat. We left for work before 7 am and only left our radiant heater on medium.  I came back to the about at about 1 pm.  Here is what it was like. The outdoor temp on the display is actually under our clear shrink wrap.  So that 45 is the result of some good greenhouse effect from the clear shrink wrap.  It was actually about 22 and less than 10 with the windchill. Like most people we try to reduce our energy use and only have the boat at a minimum temperature when we aren’t on board.  I turn the heaters on high and within 30 minutes it was nice and comfy. If we leave both heaters on high it will get into the 80s. There are some different things that we hadn’t thought about.  Like last night we were woken up by something banging into the hull.  After thinking about it we realized it was ice.  The ice forms on the inside of the marina, near land.  When the tide goes out, some of the ice goes with it and some of it was hitting against our hull.

One quick update.  I left the heaters on high for as long as I could stand it.  In about 3 hours it was over 80 degrees.  It was too warm for me to be comfortable and I had to end the experiment.