Outfitting an oceangoing sailboat is neither easy nor simple, particularly when the boat is old and even more particularly when you live aboard. It so happens that underneath the very bed we sleep in sit most of the cords that power our 120V electrical outlets (household outlets), pressurized hot and cold water lines, navigation cables, and our port side diesel fuel tank. Furthermore, the quarter berth / navigator seat, aka “my office”, is situated on top of the battery bank, and immediately adjacent to the electrical panel and engine block which, as you might imagine, are also necessary to uncover when working on systems. Total chaos!
The big push this week will be to finish replacing 100% of the electrical wiring, fuse boxes etc., as we found much of the legacy system to have either been installed at construction 34 years ago, or subsequently jury-rigged in the haphazard way those things tend to be done. Given so many of our systems’ reliance on electrical power and our overwhelming desire not to burn down the world, it seemed logical to rip and replace everything. Don’t worry, we have professional help for this piece! While we’ll have to rely on ourselves to repair things in the Blue Beyond, it is good to know everything will be done correctly and all mapped out ahead of shoving off.
The other essential life system is water. This boat sat unused for ten years, so we assume the water tank is host to a multitude of bacteria, among other nasties – but even when we do clean the tank (which we will), it will not prevent airborn contaminants from entering through the vent or deck fill, or indeed from taking on contaminated water from the shore. We will accordingly only drink water that first goes through a carbon and/or charcoal filter and then gets zapped by an ultraviolet purifier before emerging from the galley tap. So long as we stay on top of replacing the filters, safe drinking water should not be a problem for us.
Storage capacity is another problem: our tank holds 100 gallons of fresh water, enough for a little over two weeks’ worth of human and pet consumption. That’s more than enough for weekend cruising, but not if you aim to spend weeks and months at anchor, out away from marinas and municipal water sources. It would truly suck to find that perfect, uninhabited Bahamian Cay that you have all to yourself, but have to run off to Nassau for lack of drinking water!
Collecting rainwater is one obvious, if unreliable strategy for sustaining a ship’s water stores. There are several commercial solutions for this, and straightforward ways to rig one’s own collector using a few inexpensive things. It is axiomatic that if you depend on the rain, it will not rain. So I would not want to rely on this method for self-sustaining cruising.
Enter the Reverse Osmosis Water Maker. It’s a little intimidating, what with so many pipes and filters and pumps, but it is really a simple machine that squeezes saltwater through a membrane whose pores admit water but NOT salt, thereby creating fresh water from the sea. It’s a little power hungry, but capable of producing 6 gallons per hour of pure fresh water. That means running the water maker one hour a day will keep our tanks pretty close to full!!! You may ask, “where is the catch?”: maintenance is the answer. Even the best water makers are finicky creatures: filter hungry, demanding of attention, and sometimes responsive only to archaic Latin incantation and not to the usual remedies.
But, just to be sure, we will carry at least 10 gallons of spare potable water, in blue jerry cans lashed to the deck, which would be less than two days of consumption at normal usage, but quite a bit longer assuming survival conditions (no showers, dish doing, etc.). This, by the way, we will also do with diesel fuel, in yellow cans. 10 gallons of diesel is good for 14 or 15 hours of motoring at full speed, enough to make it 50-100 miles in the event we run out of gas: more than enough in the Bahamas.
There are ways to cut down on our admittedly conservative water usage expectation. Forget regular showers, for example. Jump in the ocean, soap and shampoo up, rinse with seawater, then jump out and rinse with a bit of freshwater (far less than a shower would’ve taken). The other one is using saltwater to do the dishes, and just rinsing with fresh water. We plan to install a salt-water foot pump in the galley to facilitate such, but in the meantime it has sufficed to put the dirty dishes in big netted bags and throw them into the tidewater for a few hours, tied to lanyards attached to the boat. Presto Tidal-Change-O, clean dishes. Lazy? Maybe. Life is hard, but it doesn’t have to be any harder than necessary!
That’s it for now, have a good week!