A HEAD FOR RUBATO

I dislike port-a-potties. I'm not too fond of poop in any form, really, being non-scatological by nature.

- Mark Bradley

In fact I consider it a sacrilege to poop on a boat at all, but since we may all be sinners, I confess I've pooped on a boat-somebody else's, I should add.

When I obtained my Nordica 20, Rubato, it was delightfully free of toilet appliances. There was a conspicuous space under the V-berth where a port-a-potty was intended to be stored, but no evidence that it had yet been sullied.

I wrestled with a possible solution to the head dilemma. I have a hated port-a-potty on my other boat, that I purchased new in 1997, but I was never inclined to use it. In fact, I never did. The very thought of lugging gallons of putrid funk through the marina and then uncapping and dumping the filth into a toilet that I might want to use later caused the bile to rise in my gullet. I had the thing piped to a deck pump-out and ran a vent line. It was, however, only three-gallon capacity which seemed hardly worth the effort. It has been and still is an unfulfilled project to replace the thing with a real marine head and proper holding tank.

When Rubato came into my life, the prevailing advice was to live with the dreaded port-a-potty. I ripped mine out of the other boat and tried to fit it in Rubato, but the allotted space might have been for storage only, since the only way the thing fit was sideways. So, it was either going to be marine head or no potty and a supply of Imodium AD. I decided to embrace the marine head, so to speak.