Paradise Found

I have just spent a week sailing in Annapolis. What a great spot. Some of the best sailing conditions in terms of variety. I returned to Bermuda to find that my washing machine was (still) not working correctly. The issue with the washing machine is that the timer is broken. It won’t move on between cycles, which means that it will not stop the fill cycle, the rinse cycle etc. That means it floods. A lot. On an island where water is a commodity, that is not good.

Fortunately I have a Suunto wrist-top computer. For the uninitiated, that’s a watch – a sailing watch. It tells the time, has an alarm and a compass. But the best feature is the start-line countdown timer. So I sat next to the washing machine and timed the cycles. I then programmed them into my watch.

So until the machine is fixed, I just set the timer on my watch and listen. It beeps every minute. It beeps every 10 seconds in the last minute, and it beep-beeps at zero. At zero I then go and turn the machine to the next phase of the cycle. It’s somehow calming – I don’t have to shout “head up!”, I don’t have to listen to someone shouting “skirt that genoa!” at me, and I don’t have to go and jump on the rail. And my smelly sailing gear gets washed. That’s a great result.