… at least not for less than 60 cents a gallon.
Juno’s water tanks hold 125 gallons. In New England, where water is freely available at marinas, this amount typically lasts us for two weeks of cruising. We use it for hand washing dishes, showers, rinsing saltwater off the boat, and for water in the toilets (heads). Why use fresh water in the heads? Mostly to keep odors down. The critters in ocean water, when mixed with everything else, boost the odors, especially if the holding tanks can’t be emptied for a while.
On this trip we are in water conservation mode. The drive to conserve water is both financial and practical. Refilling our tanks at a marina, when we can find one, costs about $75. While not a huge sum, there is a principle involved. We can find free water some places but it means filling up 5 gallon containers on shore and transporting the water (42 lbs) back to the dingy then to Juno.
The gin clear water is excellent for extracting nearly pure water from salt water through a reverse osmosis (RO) filtering system. Water is produced on most of the islands this way for the residents, which is one reason water is seldom free. A couple of islands and a few Bahamian businesses provide spigots of free water, likely in an effort to encourage cruisers to come ashore. RO systems are available for boats and many full-time cruisers install them. We considered installing one and change out 50 gallons of water storage to double our diesel fuel capacity to 100 gallons. However a modest system costs $4,000. It also takes a lot of electricity so we would probably need spend another $7,000 on a generator. You can buy a lot of water for all that. Finally, an RO system is one more thing that can break down. We regularly hear cruisers on the radio asking for advice or access to parts to repair their broken water makers. If we do this sort of cruise again but to more remote islands where the only water available is what you can collect from rain, it will be a reasonable consideration.
So how do we conserve? Sadly Juno is suffering a bit without a regular wash down. However the fairly frequent rain showers at night give the deck a decent rinse. Then, using salt water to flush the toilets is a no brainer. Flushing either goes straight overboard if we are not in a harbor, or it goes into a holding tank that we empty in a couple of days. Full showers are a thing of the past. Besides, being in the ocean every day, there wasn’t much need for our at-home routine of a shower every other day. At least as far as we could tell. For the first couple of weeks we didn’t even rinse the salt water off after swimming. We did notice that the residual salt on our bodies at night seemed to make the bedsheets feel damp, so we afforded ourselves the luxury dribbling enough water on our skin and hair to get the salt water off after swimming.
Dishes are a bit more work. First Sarah (most often) washes them in a bucket of salt water. She then rinses them under a very slow stream of fresh water. At first she used a a spray bottle for rinsing dishes but that seemed a little extreme. We still use it to get the salt off the metal parts of the boat and the vinyl windows.
How has this conservation worked out? In the first two weeks in the Bahamas under this regime we only used 10 gallons of fresh water. We've loosened up some of our restrictions, but even so, our only marina water purchase so far was for 70 gallons. This was after having two more people aboard and not having access to free water for a while. Even under these water restrictions we are still much better off than the 600 million people around the world without a reliable water supply*. So all-in-all our water conservation lifestyle is quite easy.
* https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-sanitation
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