My son Vincent made a very generous donation to my boat/sailing kitty and his only stipulation was that I must install a hot water system and shower so he could enjoy the luxury of it when he's sailing with me. This caused me a bit of head scratching to start with. The obvious thing to do was to install a calorifier. Basically an insulated cylinder that is heated up by the hot water produced by the boat's exhaust system via a heat exchanger.
However, this approach posed two challenges for me. The first was where to install it. Even small capacity ones are fairly bulky. It should be as near the engine as possible and reasonably accessible for maintenance. The best candidate was the cockpit locker but I really didn't want to lose loads of stowage space there. Another option was under the cockpit sole but the same drawback applied - that was emarked for emergency water stowage and the series Drogue (a series of small drogues on a long line that one deploys over the stern of the boat in a storm so as to keep the stern of the boat facing the waves).
The second was the installation. I wasn't sure I could manage it myself and didn't want to spend a lot on getting it done professionally.
I also didn't want to rely on the engine to heat the water. What I needed was something fairly small that I could power from the boat's 12v electricity supply which now comprises two 100 Amp hour lithium batteries and 350 watts of solar panels (and a wind generator but we need to replace the regulator so we're not getting much from that). So after searching the internet I found this and installed it. It's only got a 5 litre capacity but set to hot it provides enough water for two modest showers and as you can see it's small enough to fit in the loo!
Anyway we had a cup of tea reorganised some stowage and made ready for sea. It had thankfully stopped raining. We got our anchor up around 0815 local time and headed out to sea. Dawn had arrived at about 0700 local time but it was still rather grey. We had to pause at the entrance to let a freighter in and then we left.
You can just make out the coast in the background. That large light blue bag os a sail bag containing a spare jib. Once we've turned the corner around the top of NW Spain, we'll have the wind behind us (and quite a lot of it too) all the way to Vigo (roughly where the red smudge is in the photo below)...
The plan then is to rig the spare jib on a pole on one side of the boat and the genoa on a second pole on the other side. I've not done it before (I only installed the necessary fixing point on the mast for the two pole halyards in the spring). This is the rig without the sail..
...we'll see!
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