What I'm going to do now is I'm going to nip down to see Graeme of Artemis 3.
He's finally settled on a particular water-maker. Now you'll know the brand,
but he's gone for a slightly different set-up. I haven't come across anyone
with this set-up before. Have you got time for a quick half-hour interview?
I have yeah. Do I still look cool as well? I'm going to the bins to do the last bin run in Asia.
In this episode, we're going to be talking to Graeme about his new reverse osmosis water-maker.
And we're going to be asking you guys if you think this water-maker solution is the best water-maker
a cruiser could wish for. But before we do that we want to introduce Lee and Jason to you, great
friends of ours that have been with us all the way through lock-down here in Sabah. But they made the
decision that they wanted to return to Australia, a two and a half thousand-mile epic journey.
Yes, and make no mistake, bear in mind this happened during lockdown, so the whole of Indonesia was
locked down. And that meant they could not stop anywhere on their journey. It's going to be quite
tough because we haven't done any night crossings in a year and a half or something now. The busy
shipping channel that goes down from Singapore down to Australia runs down that way, so yeah
it's going to be fun. Plus all the fishing hazards on the way. The Java Sea's just littered with them.
But it'll be good to get back to Darwin. The entry process into Australia is a nightmare, so
that's going to be fun when we get there. After the long trip we're going to get escorted off to
detention for two weeks in a hotel quarantine. Well these guys generally have pretty good
winds, certainly at this end of Borneo we've got north easterlies set in. Looking a bit cloudy over
there. But we've had some great winds, and that's going to take them all the way down
towards the western tip of Borneo and then after that, they go over the Equator. And, of course,
that's where the winds change. Basically, this is the best time of year for them to go so they're
doing the right thing. It's going to be sad to see these guys go, they've been our neighbors
so we've had to put up with their toilet noisy noises... Here's the thing, as liveaboards you
know we have said goodbye to so many people and then seen them again somewhere down the
line. And I've said it before but the cruising world is a small one. And at the moment we have
no plans to go to Australia, but you know with the situation changing all the time who knows?
Because we no longer have Millie, which was the reason why Australia was never on our plans. If things
start to open up, who knows we could head down in that direction. As I said, never say never.
[See you in Sydney. Come on my mardi gras float...]
You've got a bit of a reception here. Yeah, we actually do have friends surprisingly.
We are gathered here today to send off Lee and Jason for their next adventure going back to Australia.
Cruisers have a special bond and even more so since we shared this space during lock-down.
And we became good friends with Lee and Jason.
Now make no mistake, this was a monumental two thousand five hundred nautical mile journey.
What's your job Liz? What are you doing? I'm just fending...
I didn't know you could do that, Lee! I can, actually, I've got hidden talents.
I'll probably crash in a minute [no pressure! ]
Now under normal circumstances, if you were doing this kind of trip you would island and day hop.
But don't forget, this was done during lock-down so the whole of Indo was completely off-limits.
This was going to present problems, not just with provisioning but if they needed to refuel as well.
They've since made it to Darwin safely. But it wasn't without its problems. They hit pretty
rough weather in the Java Sea, they had a near knockdown, they lost their spinnaker halyard
on the second day and had to sail on a reefed headsail only. And yet while not being able to
stop to refuel could have been an issue, they used less than 240 liters for the entire two and a
half thousand-mile journey, sailing pretty much the whole way. Now if you remember Jason and Lee on the
rally last year, they were always the fastest boat. They have a Jeanneau 44, I think she was built in 2010.
I could be wrong there but she's a very fast boat. So the fact that they used less than 240
liters over 2500 nautical miles is incredible. And they were hitting some pretty fast speeds.
When they stopped at Pulau Alor for a couple of days respite, they had an incredible experience
they met face to face underwater a wonderful dugong. Yes, this wasn't just a sighting,
this was a close encounter with the dugong. They've got some incredible footage of them swimming with
the dugong. Amazing. I know. Anyway well done Lee and Jason. And by the way, they are selling SY Santorini.
They're currently in Australia in the Northern Territories, so if you're interested in a really,
really fast Jeanneau 44 get in touch with Lee and Jason. Check them out on Instagram and Facebook.
They go by the name of @aussiesailors
A very good morning to you. About time we did a little update... and
here come the ducks. So I'm just doing a bit of vlogging to camera using some new gear so this
is as much of an experiment as anything else. But I figured let's put it to good use and discuss
some progress that has been happening in the marina. So we've been here for a little while,
another lock-down of course. It looks beautiful at the moment, but there's some shitty weather
coming through. The situation we have here at the moment is that we're on this sort of semi-lock-down.
And it does mean that we can't really visit places. We know of people that have gone out to
anchor at some of the islands here. They've been approached by the park rangers who said you can
anchor here, but you can't go ashore, you can't do anything, which is a bit of a shame. So we're not
really missing out on anything at the moment whilst we're in the marina. Graeme popped over
this morning to say that he is getting some stainless bars made for his new jerry cans
which he's putting on the side of his boat. We do the same, thing we carry
five on each side amidships and then another four at the back of the boat. Those ducks are noisy
aren't they? So what we're going to do is we're going to get some stainless bars made. The idea
is that these bars will sort of hold these jerry cans in place. We don't normally have
a problem with the jerry cans until the weather really starts to pick up. If we start getting waves
over the boat, or if we're really healing over those jerry cans potentially can get dislodged
and start to fall over. So by putting a stainless bar around we will hopefully hold those in place.
Well look what's happening this morning, that's Liz, she's sorting out the courtesy flag which
is a real mess. Alvin keeps having a go. And as Alvin very kindly gave us a new one,
and he keeps saying when are you going to sort it out... So this morning, on a nice breezy day,
we've shoved Liz up there. I think I might go and make a cup of tea now, leave her to enjoy the view.
So that's that job done, pretty straightforward of course. What I'm going to do now is I'm going
to nip down to see Graeme of Artemis 3. Now, he has been window shopping for
water makers and he's finally settled on a particular water maker. You'll know the brand,
but he's gone for a slightly different set-up. I haven't come across anyone
with this set-up before, so I'm hoping we can have a quick chat with him and ask him why he went for
this particular product. Good morning Jamie. Welcome to my yacht. What I've decided to buy,
because I live in the Philippines and sail around Asia, and we don't have the luxury of docks where we
can get fuel and water easily, I've decided to buy a large water-maker. And what I've done
with Rainman, I bought their gasoline portable water-maker. It's a gasoline engine, a direct drive
into a pump and I bought their largest capacity reverse osmosis system. So it makes
140 liters an hour. This must be 10 meters of this, so I can put it straight into the tanks directly.
And this one is the reverse osmosis tubes. Quite well packed actually. There we go. So in my case
what I want to do is have the water-maker in my back locker take it out, put it in the water,
takes 10 minutes, and make the water. Now I store 400 liters of water on my boat, so once a week
I want to take it out and make water. So maybe on a Sunday morning
I get up I make water for four hours, and then put it away again and I'm good for another week.
So that suits me. Then we have the issue of storage with gasoline. Having worked in the oil
industry in construction, i know a fair bit about tank repairs and oil. Petrol can be
dangerous but like lpg gas, if you manage it well it won't be a problem. I've got to store
petrol on the boat for my outboard, what better way than to put a few more tanks
on the side as a bracket so I'll carry 40 liters of petrol on the side of the boat. It's fresh air,
I don't smoke. The chance of it blowing up is damn remote, like almost zero. The tanks,
I'll uv covers over them. Now if they do eventually
split, all the fuel will just roll down the back of the boat and off into the water. Which is not
good environmentally. So in terms of 'all risk' I think it's such a small risk. And for petrol
to explode it's going to have a certain ratio of volume to mix before it
self-explodes. It's very hard to get them to burn like that, so the the advantage of going mechanical
is two one liter of petrol makes 140 liters of water. That's quite good. Four liters of petrol
a week pays for my water. And then if I have a generator that breaks down, I can't use the
water-maker. But this one is totally independent. Right, let's open it up.
So this comes down here. That's the intake
of the water. This one here is thrown in the water with the strainer. And then there's...
Oh yep, right there, you plug the high pressure hose into this from the pump.
Into your reverse osmosis filter. Bob's your uncle! It's not too heavy, it's
about 20 kilos, a bit more - about 20-24 kilos. That's a negative on the thing, but in my back locker
I'll just go from boom to boom, that's it, so that's not too bad. Being portable, it's just simple to
operate. So when you flush it you just physically manually flush the system put it in,
put it out. You use freshwater from here to flush it. It couldn't get more simple, which appeals to me.
So there we go, Graeme's new Rainman water-maker. Very impressed with the way it's packaged.
Something that he said off-camera which I should have got hin to say to camera, was
the consideration of what kind of power you need to run your water-maker. He made the point that
of course, this is a completely self-contained unit so literally those two boxes contain everything
you need to power the water-maker. Bear in mind of course, that other water makers may have to
use 220, 240 volt electricity or 110 depending on where you are, which might mean using an external
generator. So suddenly you've got an additional piece of equipment that you're having to run. Maybe
you're running it through your inverter as well, perhaps through the engine. So his point was that
you only have one unit in order to produce 120 liters an hour, and i think that's a point worth
bearing in mind. I was especially interested in his opinion on petrol because I think as cruisers
we're all taught that petrol is one of those evils that potentially can be very dangerous.
He's obviously thought this through and realized that the way that he stores petrol and looks after
it and manages it, as he says, it's a pretty safe option. So let us know what you think about both
the Rainman and your opinions on the solution that Graeme has come up with in the comments below.
Oh, hey! Great! "You better crack one open, Graeme!"
Obviously from Australia! That was such a nice touch throwing in the beer stubbies a the end.
I mean they obviously know Graeme. It was the main reason he bought it. No, that's not fair!
A very pretty unit, I've got to say it looks a lot prettier than ours. What do you think?
Yes, I mean the Rainman is really well made. And, by the way, they're very popular in southeast
Asia because they're Australian. You have a lot of cruisers with this set-up. The question is would we
go for something that Graeme has, where you have this auxiliary petrol-driven engine? I didn't like
the petrol idea, no matter what he says I don't know... I'm comfortable with carrying the petrol.
Okay. But I think it's difficult for us because of course, we have a Honda 2kva generator anyway,
so it would be a bit silly to buy a water-maker with an additional generator. Now Lee and Jason,
who you saw earlier, also have a Rainman and they have the set-up that I would have gone for. Because
they have a separate Honda generator, they just have the osmosis tubes, the high pressure pump.
Right. They don't need that auxiliary generator. What I do like about it, just breaking
in there, is the amount of water they can get an hour compared to what we get from our very
old-fashioned water-maker that's been with us for 10 years. Yeah I wouldn't say ours is old-fashioned.
I mean you know water-maker designs, they've moved on a little bit, but just as a reminder we have a
12-volt water maker it's called a Schenker 30. It's a modular system that produces round about
30 to 35 liters an hour. But it's only drawing 8 amps of course, so we can run it off the
solar panels. But it does mean of course we have to run it for that much longer. With these higher
powered water-makers you know they only have to run it for an hour and they've made 120 litres.
So that there is that. I think the other issue I would have is the fact that you're carrying an
independent generator specifically for the water maker. I'd be interested to know if you could use
the Rainman generator as an auxiliary generator for other jobs. Yes it's the old space thing on a
boat isn't it? If you're going to have a big piece of equipment like that, it needs to be able to do
more than one job ideally. Thank you Graeme for showing us this. And by the way Roy our
friend who's next door to Graeme was so inspired he's gone out and bought the same model as well!
And he's been running it regularly in the marina believe it or not. They're both very happy
with it. But what do you think? Is this the kind of water-maker you would go for? Or would you prefer
a different style of water-maker, maybe engine driven or 12 volt? Let us know in the comments.