Off the Grid on the Water

–by ARLO

It is a good thing that everybody else was huddled belowdecks on their boats as we ran out in our underwear to plug in the water catchment hoses during the tropical rain squall. Because we only carry a limited amount of water, we try top up our tanks whenever it rains. In fact, on Debonair, all of our consumable resources are limited. In addition to water, we carefully manage our supply of propane, food, diesel, electricity, and other stores.

Everybody who goes cruising on a small sailboat has to make choices and compromises about how much of what to bring, and everybody makes different choices based on what they want most. Some cruising boats have lots of solar and wind generators, watermakers and powerful dinghy engines, and flat screen TVs. Some boats have no oven or fridge. Those are the ends of the spectrum, and we are probably somewhere in the middle.

WATER

Probably the most critical of our resources, and therefore the one that we conserve the most, is water. We carry 140 gallons in four tanks. We don’t have a watermaker, so we only use freshwater for drinking, cooking and brushing teeth. Our rainwater catchment system directs all the water that hits our mainsail and cabin top into our tanks.

If we have spare rainwater that we caught in jerry cans or buckets we use it for washing clothes and showering, although the latter is not always a priority because of daily swimming. With all our normal conservation techniques, the four of us use about three gallons a day. At that rate, we have enough water to last us 45 days. Aside from rain, our other way of refilling water tanks is by filling jerry cans ashore and then siphoning the water into our tanks. We can also fill up when we are in marinas, but we haven’t done that since San Diego. For those of you who worry about us, know that we also carry an emergency hand operated watermaker that can produce six gallons per day.

PROPANE

We have two twenty pound propane tanks aboard–each tank looks like the one you have for your barbeque except it has side-mount brackets so they can be installed horizontally on deck under a special cover. Each one lasts us a month and a half. We’re careful with propane too. For example, here in French Polynesia, when my mom bakes bread (about once every third day), we always put something else in the oven then too. With three months of propane, we have a relatively long cruising range compared with other boats of our size. Here in French Polynesia, we have been filling with butane which works equally well for our stove.

FOOD (The Best Supply Aboard)

Back in Alameda, we loaded five full minivans worth of food on board. At the time, that was enough food for four people for five months. Then in Mexico, preparing for the crossing, we fillled the taxi driver’s whole trunk, not even counting the 220 green bananas that we bouth from the local banana farmer. Despite some reprovisioning along the way and some fishing success, after the Pacific crossing, the Marquesas, and now especially in the desert of the Tuamotus, we are probably down to about two or three months worth of food. As we use up different items, we mark them off in the logbook, with a map of the boat’s lockers and a number and letter for each locker (e.g. one can of tuna from S7). When we arrive in the Society Islands, we will do a big restock. I can’t wait for the subsidized sardines again. Oh yeah, and the fruit and vegetables too.

DIESEL

Debonair has a 75 horsepower diesel engine, and we carry 140 gallons of diesel. At 2200 RPMs, our regular speed, the engine burns about one gallon of diesel per hour, and we make about six knots of speed. At that rate, we have a range of 840 nautical miles. (One NM is equal to one minute of latitude and 1.12 statute miles.) Although we carry a lot of fuel, we try to conserve it. We don’t run our engine while in harbor for generating electricity; we just run it when we need it to move the boat. When we have gone a while without refueling or are about to leave on a crossing, we need to refuel. In the States and in Mexico, we could usually fuel up at a fuel dock with a hose, but in the South Pacific, we usually have to refill by taking jerry cans to a gas station (different jerry cans than we use for water, of course!).

ELECTRICITY

When we run the engine, the alternator charges the two 500 amp hour batteries beneath the sole (floor). When we first get settled in an anchorage and shut off the engine, we will usually be all charged up from the engine time. The batteries will then last easily for a week, but we can stretch it to two weeks before we need to charge again. We are extremely careful with our electricity usage on board. We only use the absolute minimum cabin lights, and we prioritize running the navigation computer and our running lights at night (red on the port bow, green on starboard, and a white stern light). Our less prioritized electricity usage includes other computers, our VHF radio, a fan, charging devices and running the fridge, which we only do when we have enough power. Aside from running the engine, our only other way to charge is two small solar panels, although at the moment, these don’t seem to be working.

OTHER STORES

Apart from all the other categories of consumable resources already mentioned, we have a lot of other stores on board. These can be split into two categories: spares and materials. Spares are things like light bulbs, float switches for our bilge pump, fuel filters, rubber impellers for the engine cooling pump, spare parts for the head, the galley pumps, the windvane, etc. Materials includes things like bolts, screws, lengths of rope, plywood, planks, and shock cord. If we brought spares for everything, we would sink the boat, so we chose carefully. We have had to buy some spares along the way and get a new relay switch for the engine shipped to the Marquesas, no easy task, but besides that, we have done pretty well on our compromises. Among many other items, we had the rope we needed to replace worn rigging, and the hardware we needed to make a set screw to fix the windlass, and even when our snorkel mask strap broke, we fixed it with some inner tube material.

It might be fun to be on a megayacht for a two-week charter and have all the luxuries of wifi and high-capacity watermakers, but that really doesn’t give you the full experience of cruising. I am also glad that we aren’t cruising with even simpler supplies than what we have now. We would always have to be stopping in at ports and cities to resupply. We will soon be heading to the Society Islands on a three day passage, where once again we will be in the land of plenty, but it’s good to know that we can live off what we have got.