Water water everywhere...

Drought in the US of A, Zeus the cat ponders, and a book on the "Red Market" might keep you up nights...

This morning on the news I heard a report that the drought in Texas was so bad that they were going to ration water at a drastic and unheard of level of 700 gallons per day per household. They also said that this was in conjunction with a ban of such uses of water as filling swimming pools or watering lawns...

Now, I'm sure, that for folks in Texas trying to make do with only 700 gallons a day is thought of as something of a hardship but as a person living on a sailboat in the Caribbean the idea of using 700 gallons of water a day is something of a WTF conundrum.

On "So It Goes" our average everyday water usage (when not making long passages) is somewhere around 3-4 gallons a day and this seems more than adequate to provide us with what is needful in terms of drinking, cooking, cleaning up, and showers...

Of course, I can see how it would be easy to use a bit more water, but over the years we have developed a water frugality (like most boat-folk we know) to the point that wasting water is just so abhorrent an idea that even when the tanks are overflowing short showers and non wasteful use of water is the norm.

Which brings us back to those folks in Texas who are suffering and having to get by on 700 gallons of water a day... How does someone living on land make the transition to a cruising or sustainable lifestyle when so used to living far beyond their needs?

Folks interested in going cruising or living aboard, as a group seem obsessed with increasing their tankage or adding watermakers (at least those who write Boat Bits on the subject) mostly because they have not sorted out that living on a boat is different than living on land. Instead of adapting to their new environment, newbies seem rather intent on adapting their new environment to their same old same land based bad habits...

Listening to John Fogerty

So it goes...