Water Conservation

This post is about water, specifically, about how potable water is a very valuable and limited resource when living on a boat.  It seems counter-intuitive that water is a limited resource while living surrounded by water, but it is true.  Our boat carries two tanks of water. One holds 240 liters, the other holds 300 liters of water ( about 142.6 gallons).  Since we very rarely stay at marinas, most of the time we fill our water tanks with a hose when we stop to get diesel. We don't have to get diesel very often, so we try to make our water last 3-4 weeks.  In the USA and all the developed countries, water is readily available, generally safe, and free at fuel stations.  We have a "water key" that accesses the tanks through the deck.  With a hose, we can generally fill our tanks in 20-30 minutes.  Sometimes, due to not enough depth at the docks for our boat,  we have had to dinghy ashore and fill jerry cans with water.  This method can take us 2-3 hours to fill our tanks.  In the USA and Europe, we generally trust the water sources to be safe, but when we aren't sure, or if the taste of the water isn't to our liking, we use a variety of filters on the hose.  We use a particle filter when we are unsure if the water has anything that can cause us to get sick, a charcoal to take out impurities and make the water taste better, and we also use a chlorine filter as an added layer of protection.  Our kitchen faucet has yet another particle filter.  We also carry a few extra gallons of bottled water just incase our tanks started leaking. 

This all means we have to stay pretty conscious of how much water we have and how much we are using. 

Showers. When we are in a safe place to swim, we can "shower" every day on our swim platform, only using water from our tank to quickly rinse off.  Otherwise, we only shower about 2 times a week, even when it is hot and humid.  And, by shower, I don't mean a nice, soaking, 20 minute shower.  Oh, no!  You get wet, turn off the water, lather up, shampoo, etc, then turn the water on to rinse.  That's it! Would we like to take showers more often?  Do we miss long showers? Absolutely! But, we get used to just freshening up with a washcloth instead, and we think about our life on the boat as a microcosm of the reality of the Earth's supply of fresh water. If we all spent more time thinking about using only the water we NEED, not what we WANT, we could protect this limited resource.  In case you did not know, only 3% of the water on Earth is fresh water. Of that, only 1.2% is available for drinking. Here  is a short NASA video about the issue. https://youtu.be/4HSFKwho7MQ

Washing dishes.  In our kitchen, we have two faucets.  One brings up sea water by pushing on a foot pump. For a long time, Gary felt it was safe to use the sea water to wash our dishes.  It probably is when away from land, and if the dishes were always rinsed in fresh water and we always remembered to give them a bleach water spray.  However, that was not always the case and twice I got very, very ill while living on the boat. One time I ended up in the emergency room, very sick, unable to eat or drink anything and very dehydrated.  I don't know for sure if it was the practice of using sea water to wash our dishes or not, but since we switched to fresh water from our tanks only, I have not gotten sick.  However, using precious fresh water to do dishes means we have to be ultra-conservative when we do dishes.  I use a bowl as a basin so I can use less water and still feel like the water is deep enough to clean the dishes.  We try to only use Dawn dish soap because our sink water goes directly out of our boat, not into a tank.  We put the cleaned dishes in the small side of the sink, spray them with the bottle of bleach water, then when the sink is almost full, we use the spray handle to quickly rinse them.  In this way, we can do all the dishes for the day with less than a gallon of water.  

Doing Laundry: Usually we splurge and find a laundry mat that's close enough to walk to, but there are times when we need to do laundry onboard. Again, we try to be very water-conscious.  We used to use buckets on the back deck, but this lifestyle provides more than enough sun, so now I do the laundry in the kitchen sink when nevessary.

And, we have plenty of lines to hang our laundry on.

The Next Chapter, otherwise Known as The Sailing Life

 Now that we had our boat, we had to prepare
her for an ocean crossing.  Gary moved aboard shortly after purchase in November of 2018, and I joined him for a few days in January, 2019, following our Christmas back in the US.  This is what we saw out our bedroom portlight when we woke up that first morning.  In SOUTHERN Italy!  The place came to a standstill.

 

We were staying in the water at the Dadarrio Boatyard. Michaela, our broker, continued to help us navigate our way through not only life as sailboat owners, but also helped us navigate our way through the Italian culture.  She called to let us know that everything was shut down due to the snow.  We asked how often Southern Italy gets snow- she told us only once every 3-4 years.  Guess we were just lucky....or not?!

Did I mention that the boat has no heat? Fortunately, the previous owner had left a small space heater for us, and Gary had purchased a comforter for our bed, and we had brought a heavy denim quilt with us that Gary’s mom made, so we didn’t exactly freeze.

Gary got around by renting cars from Rome for 30 Euros a week.  Unfortunately, every 2 weeks, they required him to drive back to Rome and “re-rent” the car for another 2 weeks. This took 10 hours, round trip.   Eventually, we figured out he could fly into Brindisi instead of Rome, and rent the car from there for the same amount from a much nicer rental car business.  Gary tells me I should write a separate blog post about all his rental car experiences in Italy!

The plan was for Gary to spend January through June working on the boat, flying back to Egypt once a month or so to see me and “reset” his Visa.  Everything about that last sentence turned out to be naive and wrong!  More on that later.

Gary’s quite mechanical.  He once tore our house furnace apart.  I mean, completely apart.  I arrived home from work, opened the garage door, and found our garage full of tables filled with hundreds of little pieces of our furnace!  I didn’t know they had so many parts.  He put it back together and it worked better than ever.

I tell you this so you understand what a surprise it was to hear that Gary struggled to get anything done on the boat. Here he is in the engine room learning about the diesel engine, the filters, the water intakes to cool the engine, and all of the other systems that are in there that I know nothing about...

In the USA, you search websites for what you need to buy, find the place with the best price, order it, and it gets shipped to you, right?  Not the case in Italy.  Gary planned to do the ordering and installing himself.  Here is the only thing he was able to order and install himself.

Yes, the two television sets!  He bought them at a mall. But, anything boat related was impossible to find or buy online!  He was getting so frustrated.  Michaela and a guy at the boatyard kept asking him if he needed anything.  In our American minds, we figured that they would tack on a profit if we asked them to get us anything, and they would then want to install it, too.  But, Gary eventually gave up trying to order a generator, and he knew he needed that professionally installed...so, using Google translate, he got it ordered through the boatyard.  Much to our surprise, the boatyard SUBTRACTED money from the bill.  Since we weren’t EU citizens, they were able to subtract the VAT tax for us.  They also gave us additional discounts for having the work done by them. It worked out to be cheaper to have them order everything we needed than to try to buy things on our own.  Unfortunately, it took us over a month and a half of precious time before we figured this out!

We had a list of things we wanted to get done. Gary prioritized all things having to do with entertainment televisions first, then things for SCUBA diving- the generator and compressor. I prioritized practical things like solar power and a water maker and learning about the electronics for navigation.  I was still working full-time in Egypt, so in June when we pulled away from the dock for the first time, we were ready to SCUBA, but we couldn’t read our navigation charts to know where we were going!

Fortunately, we had two really smart crew members join us for our first three weeks who were better at figuring out the electronic navigation equipment.   More about our first crew in the next blog...

Is this larger font easier to read?  Do you like the larger photos, or does it slow down the loading of the blog?  When I wrote this blog, I chose the large font for the whole thing, but when I look at the blog after it is published, the font appears to be all different sizes.  I have no idea why. Does it look that way on your device?  Any feedback or advice is appreciated!