By Jackie – 
I am steaming! I am steaming even more than my laundry would be if it had been in the dryer which it would have been if that (insert swear word here) person would have kept her hands off of my washing machine and not stopped it three times!!

Okay, at this point I might be sounding like a bitter old busybody but boaters need to learn and follow a little simple laundry etiquette. Oh yes, that is a thing, and nothing will turn an easygoing boater into an angry ogre faster than messing with their laundry so you are advised to learn the etiquette and learn it fast.

For most boaters doing laundry in a machine is a luxury. If you don’t have the machines on your boat (and few sailboats do) you are either washing in a bucket or searching for a laundromat with clean machines. Either way you are looking a spending the better part of the day washing. If you do find a laundromat, and they can be few and far between in the islands, chances are that when you walk in there you are wearing the clothes that are the least smelly and dirty and that everything else you own is in one of many, many bags of clothes to be washed and dried. If you get to the machines early enough you might only be there for half a day but if you are the least bit late this boat chore could end up taking you all day. So you can imagine how crazy people can get if anyone messes with their laundry in a way that prolongs the process.

Here is a little RANT that will highlight the main points of laundry etiquette.

* we were in a marina that had three washer and three driers. The loads were pretty expensive but we were only going to be there for a day, hadn’t had access to laundry for over a week and it would be two or more weeks before we would see machines again. I made sure to be in the marina laundry room exactly when it opened. Started two of the washers (still leaving one free out of courtesy), set my timer for the length of the cycle, marked the washers and went to the adjacent gym to get a bit of a workout as I had almost an hour to kill. We were in Nassau only for the day, leaving the next, and planned to get some sightseeing done that afternoon once the laundry was done. I stopped my workout when the timer went off, noted that the third machine was now on, saw that my machines were done spinning, opened my machines to move the clothes into the dryer and noticed that the clothes were soaking wet. Water dripping off of them and pooling at the bottom of the machine. Strange, maybe there was something wrong my settings or the machines. Crap! This was going to add another hour to our schedule before we could go exploring. Groan. Go buy more tokens, set the machines again, set the timer again, go have a shower this time then head back to the boat. Once again the timer goes off and I check the machines. This time I note that there is a drier running. Check my two machines and again the clothes are dripping wet. Okay, now I am frustrated and mad. I find the Harbourmaster and let her know that there is something wrong with the machines and that I don’t want to have to pay yet again to get the clothes rinsed and spun out. She checks the machines and tells me that they are fine but that once the machine lid is opened that it stops and you have to pay to restart it. She had seen a women in the room and she had seen the woman open two machines before unloading the third. Aaaaarrrggghhh. The Harbourmaster felt bad for me so she gave me the tokens for free to run the washers a third time. That is now two extra hours added to the time for doing laundry. This time I sat in the tiny laundry room and guarded my machines through the wash and subsequent dry cycle. Funny, I did not see that other “washer” woman come in to get her clothes. To be honest I don’t know how I would have acted if I had seen her because I was crazy mad and frustrated at this point.

We wasted two hours and a pile of money that day – neither that we really had to waste – because somebody couldn’t be bothered to learn and practice the laundry ettiquette.

A FEW BASIC RULES:

1. Never touch anyone else’s machines – if a machine is running don’t open it – it might not start again without paying again
2. Mark your machines – when you put your clothes in a machine then mark it as yours by putting something on it so that you will remember which one is yours and you don’t end up opening other people’s machines to check
3. Set a timer – nothing worse than having a line-up in a laundry room or laundromat of people waiting to use machines when the previous loads are just sitting in machines that are finished.
4. Wait 5 – 10 minutes – if a machine has stopped and the owner of the occupants of that machine are nowhere to be found, wait 5-10 minutes for them to return to the machine. If they don’t return within that time then you are free to open the machine, take their clothes out and put yours in.
   – always put the clothes somewhere clean
   – if clothes are coming out of the washer never put in the dryer as you might ruin them
   – if coming out of the dryer then a courtesy fold or hang up is a good idea
5. When you screw up (hey, we all do at some point) tell the person, ask someone else to tell the person, leave a note, leave some cash for a new load don’t just leave the person there to wonder if the clothes are clean, are the machines broken, etc.RANT