A little bit of water can go a long way.

Personal hygiene on a boat can be a challenge. It’s interesting to live on the water and to have so much water around us and not to be able to use much of it. We have two water tanks of 40 gallons/ 151 liters each plus two jerry cans on deck of 5 gallons/ 20 liters each of drinking water on the Imagine and want to try how long we can go with that and what it feels like to use so little water.

Since we started our travels, we are really hyper water conscious. These 90 gallons are all the drinking water we have. We drink it and use it to cook, wash, take sponge baths with it and clean. We already had learned while in the marina, how to wash dishes with the minimum use of water. We wet a sponge, put dish soap on it, soap everything in. Then we rinse in a champagne-fountain fashion, with the smallest pieces on top and the largest dishes on the bottom, we let the water flow into the next thing to be rinsed and the next and so on. Only at the end we throw the water away or use it to wash pots and pans. Now we even wipe dishes, lick forks and spoons clean and rinse pots and pans in the cockpit with ocean water. With all of this we conserved so much that one tank lasted 10 days! In the marina we emptied one tank in seven days, but we took showers ashore and filled filtered water in bottles at the grocery store. We use a bottle with a mister to spray the toilet after use and we have flow stoppers on the galley (kitchen) faucet and the one in the head (bath). Under way we use with two people about 4-5 gallons a day.

Today we had a solar shower for the first time. We let then sun warm up about 1.5 gallons/5 liters in the solar shower bag and hung it up high in the cockpit. First we wet our body and hair, soaped in everything and rinsed of. Only about 1.5 liters were gone, so I washed my hair a second time and rinsed off again. It was very easy and fun. That second time was pure luxury and we decided that one solar bag is plenty for the both of us. The shower made me feel really good. What a difference a shower to a sponge bath makes! I feel good about that we can have showers, warm showers and use very little water while doing so. I was worried about that because, as I said, most cruisers have watermakers, and I felt compelled to believe that I needed one too.

We decided against a water maker for now in the name of experimentation. We don’t have a water heater on board either, so we bought a solar shower from a camping store, which essentially is a black water proof plastic bag that heats up the water inside while lying in the sun and it has a hose with a shower head with shut of knob right on it.

There is another reason why most cruisers today have water makers: it gives them independence from marinas, they don’t have to conserve water and they can control what water they are drinking. The price for a unit is from $4000 upwards and is run by either the engine or a generator only a small unit from Katadyn runs on 12 Volts. Some units make little water per hour with little power, but need to run a long time to refill a tank. Other units make a lot of water per hour and need a lot of power. In the end both types need about the same energy to make one gallon of water.

When we bought the boat and prior to the first use, we cleaned our water tanks with chlorine free bleach (about 1 cup per tank, let it sit for a couple days). Right then, we took the Imagine sailing, so it shook the water with the bleach around in the tanks and then we emptied the tanks completely. We also add one table spoon of bleach in both water tanks about every 3 months, in warmer climates we probably add bleach probably more often. With all these precautions we haven’t had any illnesses and such yet (Update JUNE 2017: still not two years in). When filling the tanks we use a water filter on the intake hose, which filters everything out, and also use special drinking water hoses. We have another filter under the sink in the head, a high power filter from Brita, we exchange once the water flow starts slowing down. For our drinking water, we take water from that faucet and boil it before filling our water bottles with it (Update JUNE 2017: we don’t filter the water we are making ourselves)

UPDATE JUNE 2016

First we decided against the luxury to have a reverse osmosis water maker on board, which makes drinking water out of salt water, but then a refurbished ‘Little Wonder’ watermaker was available in La Paz and we jumped on it. At half the price of a new one, every watermaker is just as good as it’s membrane and hoses and these were replaced. Or so we thought.

On our way out from La Paz we were making ok water, one week later the water meter reading was above 500 parts per million and not drinking water standard anymore. We found out that watermaker membranes have a shelf life and don’t last longer than a year or two. Our ‘new’ one had obviously expired, we used the water for showers only until we got a spanking new membrane in Puerto Peñasco.  Now we are making water at 135 parts permission per million. Yeah.

The reality is that we are making water when we are underway, because we need to run the engine or the generator to run the watermaker. We are making only 4-5 gallons per hour, which is what we use in one day. Some cruisers have watermakers, which make 25 gallons and hour, but those have large membranes and need more space and power, which we don’t have. So we are living with this compromise.