Anonymous wrote:
Another thing I should have mentioned. The anchorages here are often quite silty and I like to use salt water for cooking - seawater has the perfect ratio of salt for bread making. One of the advantages we found on Badger was having perfectly clean sea water in less than clean anchorages. I'm sure the two Davids are right, but I suspect I'm a victim of early brain washing.
In the past there has been concern with failure of thru-hulls and gate valves. On charter yachts we used a NZ Ministry of Transport approved gate valve which was constructed from bronze. Unfortunately the valve stem was of brass so eventually the valve plunger would no longer go up and down because the brass threads of the valve stem turned to mush in the salt environment. I was once trying to pull an engine saltwater intake hose off a bronze seacock on a not very old French production yacht, fortunately while the boat was on the hardstand, because with all my levering to get the hose free of the nipple on the seacock the whole caboodle snapped off at the thru-hull. That would have been a very messy situation if it had happened while the boat was in the water! But I think that modern plastic thu-hulls and ball valves should be very reliable.
So maybe a couple of liters of sparkling clean Pacific Ocean bottled salt water for bread-making, and a gushing plentiful supply of slightly silty saltwater for every thing else?
When we first got 'Footprints' the galley sink drained into a 20 liter container under the galley cabinet, in the interest of no thru-hulls. It only took a couple of times of forgetting to empty the container with the result of a bilge full of dishwater that I desided that the system was ridiculous and I put in a proper thru-hull drain, (with a Hansen valve), as soon as possible.