Is It Time For a Watermaker?

Watermakers get a lot of ink in boating magazines, including this one. But lots of boaters don’t really need a watermaker, or the hassle of maintaining one, because there’s clean drinking water as close as the dockside freshwater spigot. So why do we write about these things, and why do you, our readers, keep reading about them? Because watermakers say cruising and tropics and living off the grid, things that the majority of boaters, this writer included, dream about doing someday. Undeniably, however, there is a minority of boaters out there for whom watermakers make a lot of sense—the folks who visit the Bahamas periodically, for example. Or the shores of Old Mexico.

Not so long ago, in the days before the advent of small, affordable watermakers, offshore voyagers aboard small or mid-size boats didn’t have a choice. They started with a limited number of gallons of fresh water, used mostly for