Water in the Pacific

[drcat]

Since you have already purchased a watermaker, your question for comments and suggestions is somewhat moot. If at sometime you want to replace your watermaker for a higher output one that will not bust your budget, here are 2 suggestions
1) look at seawaterpro dot com. They sell a 120vac 21 gal hr watermaker for $1500. This kit uses all readily available parts but is unusual in that it uses a low cost pressure washer as the high pressure pump. The good part is that a replacement "pump" will cost you $90 and you can get a 4 yr warranty for $17. This could be run off a Honda 2000 or a 2000-3000 watt inverter generator ($400-$650)from Harbor Freight.
2) Look at Sunpure watermakers each costing $2650 plus $150 shipping. the 1/2hp 12vdc version produces 8-12 gal hr while the 1 hp 120vac version produced 20 gal hr. See a Feb 2018 youtube video by Sailing with a Purpose who obtained one at cost for promotional considerations.

[OceanSeaSpray]

Originally Posted by Caroline Joan

I am going to spend about 2 years in the pacific.

The question is can we sail in pacific for 2 years without a water maker.
I know some islands have next to no water and what they have is not good quality. I'm hoping that we can catch all the water we require from the rain & top up in places like Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti where they have more water.

There are just the 2 of us on board our 50ft Beneteau
We have 1000 litres in 3 tanks. Of course we can take extra bottles as well.
I have made a water catcher and filter.
We use as little water as possible, ie have quick solar shower, have water pump turned off and just use manual pump.
We can go at least 2 months and can probably stretch to 3months if we use sea water for washing clothes & dishes and a bit for cooking.

I'm not sure when we travel north to avoid the cyclone season to places like Tuvalu, Kiribiti, Marshall island etc whether its realistic to be able to catch all the rain water we need over a period of 5 months (Nov - March)

I imagine that hundreds of people have been to the pacific without a water maker and smaller water tanks and it should not be an issue being without a water maker, but maybe its a climate change issue?

We will be sailing from Panama and island hoping.

Your help is really appreciated.

Rig up seawater at the galley sink and use it liberally. You will save huge amount of fresh water just by doing this. I wash most everything using seawater without issues and only use minimal amounts of fresh water for rinsing - it works fine.

With 500L/person of tankage, water capacity is a non-existent problem. It will easily carry you through atolls and places where you can't get good water for months if you manage it sensibly.

Watermakers seem to be for those who absolutely need to waste water and are prepared to put up with the energy requirements, maintenance, breakdowns and cost to be able to do it. It seems nonsensical to me. Especially as they still need a tank big enough to arrive somewhere if the contraption packs up in the middle of the pond. More weight, complications, dependencies and hassles all to be able to do it "like at home".

[Davo1404]

Having cruised around the Islands that you are going to, I can tell you that relying on catching rain water or getting from the islands can be a hard ask. A lot of the islands struggle to get enough water for themselves & the quality can be a real problem. Also remember that it is the dry season & as another poster has said that any decent downpours usually arrive as squalls. The other negative is having to lug the jerry cans. For our next trip we will definitely have a watermaker. We have decided after much research to get a Rainman portable system.
https://www.rainmandesal.com/

[Jim Cate]

Originally Posted by OceanSeaSpray

Rig up seawater at the galley sink and use it liberally. You will save huge amount of fresh water just by doing this. I wash most everything using seawater without issues and only use minimal amounts of fresh water for rinsing - it works fine.

With 500L/person of tankage, water capacity is a non-existent problem. It will easily carry you through atolls and places where you can't get good water for months if you manage it sensibly.

Watermakers seem to be for those who absolutely need to waste water and are prepared to put up with the energy requirements, maintenance, breakdowns and cost to be able to do it. It seems nonsensical to me. Especially as they still need a tank big enough to arrive somewhere if the contraption packs up in the middle of the pond. More weight, complications, dependencies and hassles all to be able to do it "like at home".

Couldn't agree more myself, but I fear that this is not a popular opinion!

We sailed from SF to New Zealand and spent years wandering around the SP in our previous boat with 170 L of water tankage. Never ran out...

Now we enjoy 800 L, and think of it as inexhaustible (sorta). Lasts us ~ 10 week without feeling constrained.

Jim

[Fluenta]

Originally Posted by Caroline Joan

I am going to spend about 2 years in the pacific.

The question is can we sail in pacific for 2 years without a water maker.
I know some islands have next to no water and what they have is not good quality. I'm hoping that we can catch all the water we require from the rain & top up in places like Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti where they have more water.

There are just the 2 of us on board our 50ft Beneteau
We have 1000 litres in 3 tanks. Of course we can take extra bottles as well.
I have made a water catcher and filter.
We use as little water as possible, ie have quick solar shower, have water pump turned off and just use manual pump.
We can go at least 2 months and can probably stretch to 3months if we use sea water for washing clothes & dishes and a bit for cooking.

I'm not sure when we travel north to avoid the cyclone season to places like Tuvalu, Kiribiti, Marshall island etc whether its realistic to be able to catch all the rain water we need over a period of 5 months (Nov - March)

I imagine that hundreds of people have been to the pacific without a water maker and smaller water tanks and it should not be ssue being without a water maker, but maybe its a climate change issue?

We will be sailing from Panama and island hoping.

Your help is really appreciated.

Just back into internet for a few hours. We do have a watermaker (although we went without it for six weeks with six of us onboard and a baby in cloth diapers while in the Lau of Fiji. Lots of hauling jerry cans ...) but based on our experience two cyclone seasons ago here is what I expect you will find for water going north from the South Pacific:


- Tuvalu: Likely sufficient rain as SPCZ crosses the group. You might be able to buy some ashore in Funafuti but unfair to ask the outlying atolls to share theirs.
- Kiribati: Risky to rely on rainfall although we were only there for a month so maybe it does actually get some rain. Do not get water ashore in Tarawa. A single hander friend got really sick taking on water. On the other islands unfair to ask the locals to share their supply.
- Marshall Islands: Likely okay in the islands that get covered by the ICTZ. You can buy water ashore in Majuro. Majuro was fine for water while we were there but in previous years they have had shortages. The islands north of the ITCZ are quite dry - which also makes for a great place to visit if you make your own water - so I would not want to rely on rain collection and the villages can be short on water. A village in Ailuk we spent several weeks anchored by shut down a few weeks after we left as they were out of water.


We have a hardy friend that did the same trip north as us in a little Wharram cat with just him and his son. They were worried about water supplies at various points in the trip and we topped them up a few times in the northern Marshall Islands.


Safe passages,


Max
SV Fluenta
Presently Haapai, Tonga.

[OceanSeaSpray]

Originally Posted by Jim Cate

Couldn't agree more myself, but I fear that this is not a popular opinion!

It is actual practical experience. I wouldn't exactly have bothered posting it if it was a popular opinion.

[a64pilot]

I think when Jim and Ann first started cruising, a lot of things that are available now, just were not then, like watermakers. I assume even the rich couldn’t have one, cause they didn’t exist.
But guys, we are deep into the 21st Century now, something that I have to keep reminding myself every now and again when I notice how much things are changed and how different it is now.
We have inexpensive low power Radars, satellite navigation, heck even satellite telephones, all in the great scheme of things pretty recent inventions.
Sure you can do without anything you want to, or have to if that is the case, but you don’t have to if you can afford not to and don’t want to.

On one end we have members cruising with no motor and not much else really, but out there doing it, and we have members who a 50+ Ft Boat wasn’t big enough they had to have a 60+ Ft Boat, both with dual watermakers etc.
Most of us are in the inbetween.

[Pelagic]

As A64 alluded,
.....years back there were many technical reasons NOT to make your own clean water on board, along with a more primitive acceptance of what would Today, .... be called 3rd world standards!

Today, there are not!

Plus add to that the global deterioration of the shoreline water table due to increased accommodation without proper sewage facilities and you have a very compelling reason to now make your own.

[OceanSeaSpray]

There are just as many technical reasons today for not doing it: energy requirements that can't be met without fuel and running combustion engines, weight, complexity, breakdowns, maintenance and more. However it is VERY POSSIBLE and accessible.

"First world standards" are a good part of what took us where we are today environmentally, so let me have a good laugh about that one. Your generators, water makers, water heaters and the like are miserably inefficient and wasteful when compared to large-scale shore-based infrastructure.

What people don't quite realise immediately when they start bolting down all kinds of gear on board is that, ashore, there are utilities companies to run, maintain and replace the equipment. On board and abroad, THEY become the utilities company, on top of being the demanding customer. When ocean cruising, a lot of services simply can't be purchased, because they are not available. The Pacific is full of cruising boats "stuck" with their owners wringing their hands while waiting for parts to arrive from overseas at great expense to fix up systems that could have been done away with in the first place.
After a while, we frequently see that customer becoming a little less demanding and a little more intelligent. For example, using seawater - which is in unlimited supply - instead of fresh, where it makes no difference, begins to make sense.

There have been many great developments for cruising that meet real needs, like solar panels and LED lighting. Not all needs are real however and it not because something is possible that it will deliver net benefits and should be done.

[Mr B]

Whoo Whoo, It works,

10 HP motor, pressure washer, $320-00 Total cost including delivery,
Connected it up to my watermaker pressure vessel,
It pumps out 4800 PSI with 9 LPM,
1 GPH, 98 octane Petrol, Its cheap water.

I connected it up with a quick fit garden hose type connector, But a high pressure one, $23-00 for the fittings, in stainless,
Its a brass pressure pump thats worth 100 bucks to replace, Buy them any where,
My gauges work fine with it, So i dont need extra fittings to reduce the pressure.
All I need to do now is make a new exhaust for it, A quiet one,
Easy peasy for me,
And a hell of a lot cheaper than the 12 volt DC motor for the pressure pump I have,
You can see how much water its putting out at the valve,
I can always reduce the pressure if its letting salt water thru,

I will run it thru all the filters before it goes thru the pump,
It also takes away the thru hull as its self priming to two metres,
One less hole in my hulls,

Cheers, Brian,

[2big2small]

Originally Posted by OceanSeaSpray

There are just as many technical reasons today for not doing it: energy requirements that can't be met without fuel and running combustion engines, weight, complexity, breakdowns, maintenance and more. However it is VERY POSSIBLE and accessible.

"First world standards" are a good part of what took us where we are today environmentally, so let me have a good laugh about that one. Your generators, water makers, water heaters and the like are miserably inefficient and wasteful when compared to large-scale shore-based infrastructure.

What people don't quite realise immediately when they start bolting down all kinds of gear on board is that, ashore, there are utilities companies to run, maintain and replace the equipment. On board and abroad, THEY become the utilities company, on top of being the demanding customer. When ocean cruising, a lot of services simply can't be purchased, because they are not available. The Pacific is full of cruising boats "stuck" with their owners wringing their hands while waiting for parts to arrive from overseas at great expense to fix up systems that could have been done away with in the first place.
After a while, we frequently see that customer becoming a little less demanding and a little more intelligent. For example, using seawater - which is in unlimited supply - instead of fresh, where it makes no difference, begins to make sense.

There have been many great developments for cruising that meet real needs, like solar panels and LED lighting. Not all needs are real however and it not because something is possible that it will deliver net benefits and should be done.

While overall I agree with the spirit of your post you seem to lose sight of the facts a little bit.

Generators aren’t that wasteful for example. They convert most of the energy stored in fuel and deliver it locally. There’s no loss due to transportation which is the bane of shore based installations.

In contrast solar panels are very wasteful and convert only roughly 20% of the solar energy into power. The difference is that solar is unlimited and not polluting but it is a very lousy technology. Plants manage to garner pretty much all of the solar energy with photosynthesis.

And of course if you don’t use the generated energy properly then you do get a sense of waste with a generator running on fossil fuels, but not with wind or solar energy. However it is the same waste.

So I can see taking a stand against fossil fuel equipment on a boat but only from a pollution point of view.

Furthermore there’s hardly any equipment on most yachts that can’t be run exclusively on solar power (assuming sailing in an adequate latitude and season). You can run a washer, a dishwasher, a watermaker, a waterheater (for a single shower a day) with about 1kW of solar panels.

There’s even somebody (on this forum?) who runs A/C from solar. Granted he usually doesn’t stay out more than 3 days and it doesn’t matter that much to him if the batteries can’t remain perfectly topped off. But all he’d have to do is add a couple more panels.

You can install 1kW of panels on a 38’ mono and probably even on smaller. On a cat you could easily install twice as much. Energy is no longer an issue except for high latitude sailors.

There Are people buying very expensive new boats, half a million or more, foregoing the genset altogether in favor of 1kW solar combined with an about 600 Ah battery bank and a beefy inverter. I think this is the future.

Do you have batteries in your boat? Then you are as polluting and wasteful as the next solar equiped sailor. What about fossil fuel heating? Now that’s a waste; blowing hot air into badly insulated and badly closed off spaces.

As for people being stranded waiting for parts, it can happen to any boat regardless of it’s level of equipment. Breakage that keeps you pinned down has pretty much always to do with the rigging or the engine, hardly ever with the non-essentials such as A/C even though I have seen people let themselves loose a season over this.

So while it is unquestionable that the more equipment you add, the more time you’ll spend fixing it, I don’t necessarily see it as a bad tradeoff if it's done intelligently.

[Pelagic]

Originally Posted by OceanSeaSpray

There have been many great developments for cruising that meet real needs, like solar panels and LED lighting. Not all needs are real however and it not because something is possible that it will deliver net benefits and should be done.

Quite happy to disagree with your premise that dependable access to clean water is an unnecessary need, when cruising.

I have been using R/O units since the early 80‘s and learned early that slow manual ramp up in pressure, proper ramp down, flutter, backwash and good pre-filtration meant a pretty trouble free piece of equipment.

Many units are installed as an afterthought making them difficult to observe.

If operated by just pushing a remote button and dependence on alarms, I agree they will become a problem just waiting to happen.

[Kenomac]

Originally Posted by OceanSeaSpray

There are just as many technical reasons today for not doing it: energy requirements that can't be met without fuel and running combustion engines, weight, complexity, breakdowns, maintenance and more. However it is VERY POSSIBLE and accessible.

"First world standards" are a good part of what took us where we are today environmentally, so let me have a good laugh about that one. Your generators, water makers, water heaters and the like are miserably inefficient and wasteful when compared to large-scale shore-based infrastructure.

What people don't quite realise immediately when they start bolting down all kinds of gear on board is that, ashore, there are utilities companies to run, maintain and replace the equipment. On board and abroad, THEY become the utilities company, on top of being the demanding customer. When ocean cruising, a lot of services simply can't be purchased, because they are not available. The Pacific is full of cruising boats "stuck" with their owners wringing their hands while waiting for parts to arrive from overseas at great expense to fix up systems that could have been done away with in the first place.
After a while, we frequently see that customer becoming a little less demanding and a little more intelligent. For example, using seawater - which is in unlimited supply - instead of fresh, where it makes no difference, begins to make sense.

There have been many great developments for cruising that meet real needs, like solar panels and LED lighting. Not all needs are real however and it not because something is possible that it will deliver net benefits and should be done.

When and if a watermaker was to break down, the owner is never left “stuck with their owners wringing their hands waiting for parts to arrive.” Spares are kept onboard AND it’s not like the water storage tanks have been removed, the boat still has the capacity to store as much water as a non-watermaker equipped boat of the same model.

[spearfish3]

I am fairly certain that comfort and perceived safety margin would win in favor of a watermaker for me. We all have different priorities. Comfort and safety are two of mine. A little extra maintenance is just the cost of admission.

[OceanSeaSpray]

Originally Posted by 2big2small

Generators aren’t that wasteful for example. They convert most of the energy stored in fuel and deliver it locally. There’s no loss due to transportation which is the bane of shore based installations.

The energy density of diesel fuel is 45MJ/kg = 12.5kWh/kg. A small diesel engine on a boat consumes roughly 240g/kWh, so it only produces ~4.2kWh per kg of fuel. That is a 33% conversion efficiency. Small alternators are around 60% efficient only, so that is now an overall efficiency of 20%.

Oops! No better than a solar panel, except that the fuel is not free and unlimited and the stuff going out of the pipe doesn't do anyone any good. We do one hell of a lot better ashore fortunately.

Energy should not be an issue for a boat cruising in the tropics as you write quite rightly, but I see a great many of them where they do manage to make it an issue through their daily consumption.
On a multihull, one could certainly install enough capacity to have spare energy to make some water and it could even be quite useful at times. There is a difference between useful and necessary however, considering that it becomes yet another thing to look after.