Sunrise - ARC2021 - Day #17,5 on the SUNRISE

How much water do you need for one day?
Or in our case: How much water do we need for a crew of eight for our passage? This question was completely new to all of us.

Nevertheless we had to ask ourselfs these essential questions before our start to St. Lucia.

As we don`t have a water maker on board it is necessary to calculate accurately. What do we need water for? First of all for drinking. Then making tea, coffee and cooking. We do need water for washing ourself or taking a shower. Of course we need water to wash dishes and clean up our boat. After talking about the amount of water we had to figure out which capacity we have to store water. Our vessel has three tanks of fresh water, in total 620 liters. We agreed that we wouldn´t use the water in our tanks for drinking. So we bought 252 extra liters of bottled mineral water. We calculated three weeks with 8 persons and 1,5 liters per person per day. Please note that we do have extra beverages like cola, beer, juices and wine etc.

We planned to use the water in our tanks for the rest. Due to the fact that we thought that 620 liters would not be enough, we filled ten 6 to 8 liter containers, that were left over from the prior journey, with Las Palmas tap-water as a reserve.

With all this water we were ready to start our journey. However, Captain Dirk was not sure that the fresh water would be enough for us. So we decided to save as much water as possible. How do we achieve that? For example just one shower for everybody per week. As you know we had less wind in the first week so we could save some water by making a swimming stop. Swimming in the middle of the Atlantic is a great experience and also saves the fresh water in our tanks. Then we where using sea water for cooking. For example potatoes or noodles you can cook with sea water. Just add some freshwater otherwise it gets too salty. Brushing your teeth with sea water works as well and saves a lot of freshwater.

Today is probably our last day at sea. We have approximately 150 nautical miles to go until we reach St. Lucia and the finish line. As you can imagine we all are very excited that we probably finish our trip in less that 18 days.

But what do you think: How much freshwater do we have left? Honestly we are still using our first tank of water. So we have more than 360 Liters of freshwater left in our tanks.

So maybe the SUNRISE is the first sailing vessel finishing the ARC while the crew is taking a shower with fresh water.

So we're looking forward to the finish line.