Drum roll please

[bottleinamessage]

Tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of being full time liveaboards!
What a year! Thanks to all of the great friends we've made and the help and encouragement they have provided.

We love this life!!

[sluissa]

Congratulations!

[spencer53]

Originally Posted by bottleinamessage

Tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of being full time liveaboards!
What a year! Thanks to all of the great friends we've made and the help and encouragement they have provided.

We love this life!!

Way to go! My wife and I just recently marked our 4th year. Neither of us has ever looked back. It is a wonderful life. Many more good years to ya.

[SkiprJohn]

Congratulations!!
Good for you folks. What gear do you like best? What could you do without?
Kind Regards,
JohnL

[bottleinamessage]

Thanks and WOW....OK. Here's a few of what comes to mind.

We have alot of "stuff" on our boat. No excuses, it's now our home.

Stand alone deep freeze. We stock it with great steaks, lamb chops, chicken breasts and ground meat before departing the states. Can last for several months. We underestimated it's value early on.

Watermaker...160gal/day. Works well, wish I'd opted for more GPD.

Genset....Fischer Panda 4.2KW

Bow thruster. We're not kids anymore, so for docking/picking up a mooring it's such a great help

Autopilot...Raymarine 7001+ smart pilot with the S3G course computer.
Love it!

That's just a few that come to mind.

Here's a link to our blog...it tells much more.

Travels of SV Far Niente

[jdoe71]

Originally Posted by bottleinamessage

Watermaker...160gal/day. Works well, wish I'd opted for more GPD.

Holy crap! 160 Gal/day on a boat? We lived in a house for 10 years with a well that could only produce .3 Gallons per minute. Learned to get by without using a lot of water. Currently we have a well that does 20 GPM, we use an average of 90 gallons a day. We know this for sure because our softener tracks water usage. Low flow valves/low volume appliances on everything helps.

All due respect that seems like a crapload of water. Do you make that much daily or every few days? Trying to decide how important a watermaker would be to us down the road, we are not yet living aboard. Our boat carries 50 gals, we can go 5-7 days easily on that, think we can do better if I ditch the electric pump and go foot pumps. A little brisk in the spring and fall for keeping clean though...

[bottleinamessage]

160GPD = 7GPH x 24 hours. I originally thought I could run the WM off the solar panels while at anchor.. Wrong! Frig and freezer (and other stuff) run as well. So you end up running the genset 3 to 4 hours/day to replenish usage. Bottom line is you run the genset 2X times to top off batteries while making water. Next time I'll go for 300 GPD. If anyone might be interested in a used 160 GPD unit when we return stateside next year, send me a PM.

Jay

[bottleinamessage]

.3 GPM X 60 mins = 18 GPH X 24 = 432 GPD. Right??

You're current usage is 90GPD? At 7 GPH production you'd be running my WM about 13 hours/day.

We use about 30 GPD =/-. Just the facts of the matter.

[Kanani]

Originally Posted by jdoe71

Holy crap! 160 Gal/day on a boat? We lived in a house for 10 years with a well that could only produce .3 Gallons per minute. Learned to get by without using a lot of water. Currently we have a well that does 20 GPM, we use an average of 90 gallons a day. We know this for sure because our softener tracks water usage. Low flow valves/low volume appliances on everything helps.

All due respect that seems like a crapload of water. Do you make that much daily or every few days? Trying to decide how important a watermaker would be to us down the road, we are not yet living aboard. Our boat carries 50 gals, we can go 5-7 days easily on that, think we can do better if I ditch the electric pump and go foot pumps. A little brisk in the spring and fall for keeping clean though...

I've never been a big fan of water makers. Most people that I knew, that had them, didn't use them for one reason or other (usually broken).

If it works, it's great, just don't bet your life on it, on a long ocean passage.

We carry 300g and have gone 59 days (Capetown to Annapolis) without rain or any other sourse. We probaby could have gone longer had we conserved or took on rain water. We saw no rain (very little wind) in the So Atlantic. We took salt water baths and sprayed off with a "Plant sprayer" with about 1 qt of fresh water. By the time we saw rain, we were at 15 degrees N, had plenty of wind and doing 165 mile days. No time to take on rain water. We got to Annapolis with about 50g of water and we were showering every day for the last 10 days.
I thought about putting a WM on my aux diesel. Every time that I talked to long time cruisers that had them, they would say, "Why?"


BTW.....congratulations bottleinamessage

[jdoe71]

Originally Posted by bottleinamessage

.3 GPM X 60 mins = 18 GPH X 24 = 432 GPD. Right??

We use about 30 GPD =/-. Just the facts of the matter.

Right. Trouble is that we had no reserve, so you had to take it at that rate and 1/3 GPM trying to do laundry doesn't work too good, same for a shower!

30 GPD sounds reasonable to me if you've got the means to replenish it which you do.

[David M]

Originally Posted by bottleinamessage

Thanks and WOW....OK. Here's a few of what comes to mind.

We have alot of "stuff" on our boat. No excuses, it's now our home.

Stand alone deep freeze. We stock it with great steaks, lamb chops, chicken breasts and ground meat before departing the states. Can last for several months. We underestimated it's value early on.

Watermaker...160gal/day. Works well, wish I'd opted for more GPD.

Genset....Fischer Panda 4.2KW

Bow thruster. We're not kids anymore, so for docking/picking up a mooring it's such a great help

Autopilot...Raymarine 7001+ smart pilot with the S3G course computer.
Love it!

That's just a few that come to mind.

Here's a link to our blog...it tells much more.

Travels of SV Far Niente

Nice.. I like your philosophy that cruising does not have to be Marine style camping where the only things you are allowed to bring is what you can carry on your back. I hope you did not forget the LCD TV and a library of DVD's. I hope that one day my floating condo has all those goodies.

[S/V Elusive]

JDoe - that is the RATE .. not the amount.

[MarkJ]

Originally Posted by bottleinamessage

Tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of being full time liveaboards!

Originally Posted by spencer53

Way to go! My wife and I just recently marked our 4th year.

Congrats to you all. What wonderful milestones

Mark

[Morgan Paul]

Tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of being full time liveaboards!

Congratufuculation

[bottleinamessage]

Now that you mentioned it, we do have a 20" LCD Sharp Aquas w/ a DVD and a VCR. Library has about 50 DVD's. Christmas day is "Christmas Story" day. You'll shoot your eye out!!!