Water, water, everywhere…

…Nor any drop to drink. Quite a worrying scenario really but this is how we might find ourselves.

We have two 290 litre water tanks and then a water maker that should produce 20 litres of fresh water per hour from sea water. A sophisticated piece of kit that really should function well given it needs to support 22 people cross several oceans. At the moment it’s producing 2 litres per hour with the salt water inlet sending bucket loads of sea water into our bilges.

Not wanting to waste an opportunity we enjoy light relief with a foot spa! We are after all an ocean racing team that deserve every bit of pampering to enable us to go faster… Honestly!

With our seriously ill water maker our engineer on board has spent two of his long off watch periods figuring out how to fix it with email conversations between us and Clipper HQ as well as satellite phone calls to the GB boat who had a similar problem and in fact rendezvoused with PSP to pick up the only spare water maker in the fleet.

We are now in the process of collecting every bit of rain water when we are hit by squalls. When we put a reef in the mainsail the crease in the sail is a great place in which water collects. And pots and pans adorn our deck.

And if our water maker does finally give up then we have five days of water for the whole crew.
If we rendezvous with another boat then the boat helping us receives redress for time lost but we don’t.
Now whilst I am all for abiding with international racing rules of sailing that clearly state that equipment breakdown/damage is dealt with in such a manner I do wonder if having informed Clipper that our water maker has not worked as it should’ve done from the start, then surely there should be some reprieve- having sent us on our way with knowingly faulty equipment?

Another learning opportunity – we are safe and have clean water, so much more than the villagers supported by the KULE foundation have available to them.

No point sweating the small stuff.