Yachting World

IAN BAYLIS ON RUSH

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“Our approach was fairly simple,” says Ian Baylis, who was sailing one of the most performanc­e-oriented boats, the Pogo 12.50 Rush with his family.

He describes his 12V Schenker Zen 50 as “a cracking machine, very quiet and with a low current draw – we were running it on our Watt&sea hydrogener­ator easily. We carry 440Ah of AGM batteries and typical current draw is around 20A.”

They wanted to avoid carrying disposable water bottles across the Atlantic for environmen­tal reasons. “The 12.50 has 200lt of water tanks to port and a further 100lt to starboard. We decided to keep the starboard tank isolated permanentl­y and only use the port tank, our theory being that starboard was our emergency drinking water if needed.

“We carry a spare water pump and… if needed, we could run the pump from the engine battery or manually extract from the tank with a hand pump,” Baylis explains. Their crossing took 18 days, all under sail, including four days drifting, and they arrived with the spare 100lt untouched.

“The old adage ‘use it or lose it’ seems to have stood us in good stead over the years and we are never shy about using water and running the watermaker. On the crossing we all had daily showers and even freshrinse­d the cockpit a few times. We averaged around 100lt consumptio­n a day and ran the watermaker when the Watt&sea was operating, although in theory our batteries can cope without a charging source if well charged beforehand.

“Arguably the watermaker has paid for itself in saved docking and water costs, in some places it’s a very precious commodity.”

 ??  ?? Pogo 12.50 Rush
Pogo 12.50 Rush
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