Natural Seawater

[brandonberry]

Well, I'm considering trying natural seawater once again. I used to collect it when I went offshore fishing here in NC by taking a stack of 5g buckets w/ tops and filling them up with the sw washdown hose on the way back in. It was very labor intensive unloading all those buckets and packing them in the back of my Yukon, not to mention it took 20 buckets just to get 100 gallons of water. I finally decided to give it up when I was driving home one Sunday evening about 11pm with a full load of buckets and hit a black bear. The bear definitely got the worse end of the deal, but I still had about 3 buckets completely dump in the back of my truck. You can imagine how good that was for all the gears in the fold down seats and everything.

Anyway, I bought a small boat a few weeks ago that I will be trailering back and forth to the beach. I figured I would get between 2 - 4 55g drums to take out with me and fill with water. I could then just drive the boat up on the trailer, leaving the drums on the boat all the way home. I could then just have one extra barrel at home so I could pump all the drums over to another drum to be stored in the garage. In addition I am going to get a micron filter to pump the water through when I fill the drums innitially. I'm guessing a carbon filter probably would not be necessary.

I figured the benefits would be:
- I can quit worrying about the potential for getting a bad batch of salt
- I'll save money on salt
- I'll always have mixed seawater ready to use (w/ a little temp adjusting and aireation first)

The only downside I can see is that it would take more time to collect seawter than mix it. I can lessen this effect by getting as much as possible at a given time. I'm thinking 4 drums would be my limit considering the weight it would add to the trailer. I'll need to also make sure the weight is distributed properly. I had not thought of this, but I need to make sure I don't put enough in there to cause my boat to take on water either. That would be bad.

Any other suggestions other than watch out for bears?

 

[Brian5000]

Lift with your legs; not with your back :wink:
_________________
Ferrari 328

 

[simple]

i have thought about this since i live in miami, but i opted not to do it, since it might contain harmful bacteria, or very different levels of ph, calcium, etc. when compared to my tank water..if you do it though, id love to hear how it goes

 

[brandonberry]

I had a lot of success before when I used collected water. The main issue was to make sure I got far enough out so that it would not be affected by freshwater runoff. You can generally tell by the color of the water up here. In Miami, you should be good once you get a few miles out into the Gulfstream waters. It doesn't get much better than that. The pH does tend to drop in collected water that is kept in a sealed container due to the slight dieoff of bacteria and release of CO2. This can be fixed by aireation prior to use and even a pinch or two of lime.