One of the basic realities of life on board a boat is a limit to storage….this impacts on our voyage scope and extends to everything…food supplies, fuel tanks, batteries, water capacity…and even the toilet has a limit! So one of our key tasks is to increase storage/capacity where ever it’s possible…or make sure we can ensure continuous supply! (NB: please exclude the toilet, continuous supply is assured here)  

In terms of fuel for the engine and gennie we bring diesel on board and store it under deck but one of the reasons we love a good bluster and a nice sunny day is it recharges our batteries and gives us enough energy to minimize generator usage. So to enhance capacity here Ralph installed an extra battery and with both a wind generator and solar panels feeding into the system we should be pretty sweet (all thanks to the technical brilliance of Cap’n Ralph).

We’re also looking mighty fine on the water storage/capacity side!! We have a water-maker on board that can desalinate 30 gallons an hour and considering we don’t use much more than that a day it bodes well.

This is all great but it’s important to bear in mind that we still need to fuel our generator and engine. The gennie is needed for the water-maker and will be needed for our air compressor (when we get one- otherwise no diving for us)… so we still need to bring on board extra diesel! Luckily we discovered a garage that can supply us with castaway 20 litre fuel containers (gotta love a freebie) and we’ll be able to store 4 or 5 of these babies in the bow nicely which will give us over 200 litres of diesel on tap.

As it happens these containers will also assist us with our other storage issue…namely the toilet holding tank… an extra 5 litres holding capacity should give us an extra movement or two!

Lastly… food storage is still on our list of considerations…(please excuse the jump in topic…  I really hadn’t intended to link food and sewage together but I suppose it has a natural synergy of sorts) but at this point I’m naively betting on a few more nights of fishing like last night!!...3 trevally in 3 minutes and the biggest mother of a salmon-tailed catfish that I’ve ever seen….. Actually we let the catfish go (we would have been eating it for a week)… but if we had a bigger chopping board and a little more fridge space……I’m not so sure it would have been given a second chance!