Fresh Water

Fresh water is quite the commodity when you are cruising. All the water around you is salt and unprintable! Some islands will charge you for fresh water. In the Bahamas, you can expect to pay $0.50 per gallon of potable water and $0.15 per gallon of non-potable water. 

While fresh water is expensive, there are other ways to get it. We collect rain water, and it has been raining almost every day for the past few weeks. We collect between 20-40 gallons of water each day!

This keeps all our water tanks full, and when they are completely full, we begin to do chores that are water intensive. Our first order of business when we have too much fresh water is a daily shower!  

We usually shower once a week, but with this much fresh water we can shower every day! That makes us smell much better and feel much better too.  

The next order of business is laundry. Laundry on the boat consumes a lot of fresh water. The washing phase with all the soap uses a few gallons, and the rinsing phase can take even more water to get all the soap out! Having all this rain makes us feel confident in washing our clothes as we replenish our fresh water supply. 

No, we don't have a water-maker. We never had to go through the expense of purchasing one, nor the headache of maintaining and operating one. Instead, we just taste the deck water during the rain and when it tastes fresh, we open the tanks up and let the water pour in! 

Paradise

Our next anchorage after Johnny jumped ship was pure and perfect paradise. Once again, it was just Maddie and I. We could walk along the beach holding hands as we listened to the waves as all of our cares and worries washed away with the outgoing tide.

Maddie and I explored the tiny island and watched the waves crash in from the Atlantic side onto the steep cliff faces where powerful waves turned into mighty spray. We then returned to the calm beach overlooking our boat Wisdom.  

We had a nice picnic dinner on the beach as we watched the sunset. Everything was perfect! 

Finding Land

With modern navigation software, GPS, and chart plotters, finding land may seem really simple. While all of these electronic devices are convenient, there is still a very easy way to spot land in the Bahamas from far away without the aid of technology. All you need to do is look up at the clouds in the sky!

Clouds over deep water will look darker because they are reflecting the deep blue of the water beneath them. Clouds over shallow waters will look turquoise as they are reflecting the light colored water beneath them. 

The coulda over the deep water on the left look like regular clouds, but the clouds in the middle have a turquoise hue to them, and these are over the shallow waters where land can be found.

The Bahamas are truely amazing because the flats will be 20 feet deep or less, and then you will sail off a cliff and be in water that is 8,000+ feet deep. Yes, water that is over a mile deep, right off the islands! Thanks to the clouds, you will be able to find your next island chain to explore long before you see the flat islands on the horizon. 

Rain and Laundry

While anchored in Great Harbor Cay, Bahamas, we noticed something a bit unusual being done on a catamaran. Usually, cruisers will do their laundry and then hang them up to dry on the lifelines. This cruiser put their laundry up during a rain storm and let them get thoroughly soaked in the rain!

At first, my mind interpreted this as "they forgot to take their laundry in before the rains came" but they intentionally put them out as the rains were coming and even into the rain itself! They wanted their clothes to get soaked! 

It took me a moment to capture what was really going on here: they were rinsing their clothes with fresh water. 

On a cruising boat, clothes will get salty, no matter how hard you try to keep them salt free. Either a rogue wave, spray, or simply handling a wet line; salt will find its way into your clothes. Rinsing the salt out can consume a lot of water, and rain will provide you with such a resource. 

After a long rain, all the salt will be rinsed from your clothes and you will have clean laundry. Once the rain finishes, simply let it hang out a bit longer to dry and you will have clean and dry laundry! 

Next time you see rain coming, consider doing your wash cycles and then hang the laundry out for the rinse and dry cycles. It will save you a lot of water and time! 

Valuable Cruising Items

Two items that I thought we wouldn't need but now greatly enjoy having are a generator and an outboard. A portable generator makes cruising so much more care free. You can run the fridge, and leave the lights on a few hours longer without worrying about the batteries. Without the generator, I would look at the weather to see if we could keep our lights on or if we had to shut the fridge down. We only had solar panels and relied heavily on the weather to provide us the power needed to sustain our battery banks. A week of cloudy skies meant a depleted electrical system and a nightmare to recharge. 

Now, I don't worry anymore. All I do is wait to see if the sun will come out. If the batteries get a bit low, I fire up the generator and charge everything back up! 

The other indispensable item we now carry is an outboard motor for the dinghy. For seven months, I have been rowing us to shore. It was slow but it did work. We timed our land adventures by the tides, only traveling when the current was slack or in a favorable direction. We would anchor close to shore to minimize the distance needed to row, but there were still times when I would have to row us over a mile to make landfall. 

The outboard has changed all of this! It lets us chug along at a slow speed while not getting exhausted. Our little outboard is only 2hp, enough to push our 7 foot dinghy at hull speed (3.5 knots). Not setting any speed records, but it also doesn't burn much fuel in the process. 

Now, a popular size outboard is the 9,9hp and 15hp. Both of these will push your dinghy along at a remarkable speed, but they have one major flaw to them: weight. A large outboard is heavy, and will require a lifting mechanism to get it on and off the dinghy. Our small 2hp outboard is so light that Maddie can lift it with two hands, and I can easily carry it with one hand! Going small might not be very flashy, but it gives you the convenience you are looking for without the burden of heavy machinery.