KAJO ’20

Since the grandparents of Saskia (my girlfriend) have a sailboat, KAJO 6, and are not using it anymore, we decided to try to live on it this summer.

KAJO 6 is 9.5 m long steel sailing yacht (or 31 feet in retarded units) and weights about 7 tons. I’ll simply call it sailboat since yacht sounds so snob and boat so humble, simple and cute.

The name of the sailboat are the initials of Saskia’s grandparents names since you are wondering. And not kajo as in es gascho bier. But yes, there are always a couple of beers in it. And 6, well, because it’s the 6th boat they have. The first one they had was a kayak and at each iteration the size of the boat gradually increased.

I guess it will be a little bit of a challenge to live on the sailboat, that’s also a reason why I’m doing it. Living together on such a small space with my girlfriend won’t be easy, mostly because my girlfriend and I have never lived together. Further, I’ll have to commute for about two hours to go to work each way. But I’m fortunate enough to have a job which allows me to work on the train. To remedy this, I’ll probably sleep near my workplace once a week or so in an airbnb or with friends. 

Saskia and I plan to live on the sailboat until it gets too cold, probably until September / October. After that, we need to look again for a boring apartment. Maybe together. Or maybe not. It depends on how well we stand each other.

Because of this COVID-19 thing (did you hear about that? Maybe it’s just some local pandemic), the toilets and the showers were temporarily closed until a couple days ago. Without them reopening, it would’t have been possible to do this. I’m glad the authorities are regaining some common sense.

During my staying on KAJO 6, I’m bringing only a handful of things with me. Hygiene articles, some kitchenware (Spätzli-Blitz FTW!), a vacuum cleaner, a blanket, running equipment, photo development stuff, some electronics and some clothes. Speaking of clothes. We will have to find a solution for washing them. I imagine that we can wash them in a bucket with some washing powder / soap. Maybe I’m too naive. Otherwise we have to wash them by friends or family members. Or stink the whole summer. 

The Kitchen on KAJO 6 is composed of an alcohol stove and a small mobile camping fridge. Unfortunately no (real) oven, just some kind of camping oven which we can put on the stove. We will try to make some pizza and other yummy things in it. We will let you know how well that goes.

While we stay on KAJO 6 we want to whip her into shape. There is some work which has to be done, like repainting the whole deck, repaint the benches and other wooden parts, repair parts of the roof, install a solar panel to power the fridge and a lot of small details.

Enough for now, I’ll let you know how the whole situation evolved.

Cheers Mirco