Someone trashed our boat – dan
It was me. As we put more of our stuff on the boat it becomes more and more complicated to work on her systems. So when installing the latest two systems lots of things ended up getting tossed around the boat in the process.
The past week’s boat projects have a common theme; water, precious water. It’s the stuff-of-life that’s second only to air as a vital requirement for sustaining life. In our day-to-day land living we tend to take water for granted; turn a valve almost anywhere and out comes a seemingly endless supply of clean, potable water. No such illusion exists on a sailboat. Gypsy holds 120 gallons of freshwater in her holding tanks. That’s a generous amount for a sailboat but still much less than the average American daily consumption of 176 gallons per person. At that rate of consumption Gypsy’s water reserves would last us less than 15 hours and we’re hoping to be able to stay “out” much longer than that as we visit some of the more wild, remote and sometimes waterless tropical islands on our planet. To that end we’re taking a two-pronged approach; first of conservation and second of acquisition.
One of the ways that we’ll be conserving fresh water is by washing our dishes in readily available saltwater. To make that easer I’ve plumed in saltwater to our galley sink. I was able to convert the cold box drain foot-pump, which sits at the base of our galley sink to do double duty - to power the new saltwater line to the galley sink as well as serving as a drain pump. I was also able to use a faucet that came out of our decommissioned head to serve as our galley saltwater faucet. The end result is that with an easy bit of toe taping, we now get a steady stream of saltwater to do dishes with. Whenever we need to clean out our cold-box we just need to turn two valves under the sink to convert the foot pump back into a drain pump.
The second project is a bit more complex and not quite done yet; a water catchment system. Rather that installing an expensive, complex and power hungry reverse osmosis system that is becoming popular these days, we opted for the much simpler, time-honored method of catching rainwater. We’re diverting the starboard deck drain via a “Y” valve into our starboard 60g holding tank. The ½” aluminum rod that you see in the photo that is running into the “Y” valve is a 30" long extension device that will allow us to operate the valve form outside the lazarette.
The universe has a way of putting things together sometimes. In the midst of working on our boat’s water projects we ran into Gary Poe who is the Executive Director of Windows on our Waters environmental education program (click here for a link to that organization). Gary was in the midst of preparing the TidePool Cruiser mobile experiential education trailer for their next school program. He told us about his travels and how he and his organization work hard to raise school children’s awareness of the vital issues of ocean & watershed protection. We talked of our favorite ocean places and we agreed to the tragic fact that the ocean is actively dying. It became clear that he is a true ocean lover which made his next statement all the more shocking; we’re doing the right thing with our sailing trip; that we should see the world’s oceans now before they die. That echoes something I’ve been feeling myself and am horrified to think about.
It’s supposed to be playing at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies this Tuesday. The details of that screening are a bit sketchy but we’re going to try to see it if we can.
48 days...
