Originally Posted by socamon
If you charter a boat specifically because of a watermaker, be sure that it is working before leaving base. We chartered Salt Crush from BVIYC, because it has a watermaker. I. The boat briefing, the briefer, showed us how it was supposed to operate, but couldn’t get it to make water! He tried several times, and then said the water at the base was not clean enough for the maker to work. Well, we all know that water at bases does tend to be dirtier, so we accepted his explanation. He assured us it work fine at the anchorages we would be visiting. At first stop at the new balls in Benures Bay, I turned on the watermaker. It failed again to produce. Called base about the issue, and at first, they refused to even make a service call, saying that watermakers are not covered! I then mentioned that the ice maker wasn’t working either. They finally agreed to meet us if we moved to the Bight, since they had a service call later that day.
So we moved to the Bight and waited. The service crew finally arrived with the same guy who told us all would’ve okay once we left base. He basically did the same things he did before but just managed to waste about 10 gallons of our now precious water. He then made the same excuses about water quality. He also didn’t fix the ice maker. So it was back to docking for water.


We had a similar situation last year. We did a 4 week charter on Blue Kite a Helia 44 from Virgin Island Yacht Charters. One of the main reasons that we chose this particular boat was because it had a watermaker.

There were only 4 of us on the boat and we are all used to being very frugal with water, however as the boat has fresh water flush toilets you are always going to be using freshwater.

After 3 days of running the watermaker for only an hour a day, it came up with a message that the filters needed to be changed. We were not to stressed as we were in the SVI and were going to be going back to the VIYC base in the next three days anyway, before continuing our charter in the BVI, so knew that we would have enough water until we got back to the base.

At the base they replaced the filters, but the attitude was that we must have abused the watermaker. I asked them to give us spare filters as we still had another 3 weeks of our charter to go. They refused and said that we were not "qualified" to change the filters.

Sure enough the new filters only lasted for about 5 hours of use. When we contacted the base, we were told that the watermaker was not an essential piece of equipment and that there was no shortage of places in the BVI where we could get water.

On our return to the base, I presented them with bills that we had paid for water, and asked to be reimbursed, pointing out that on a 4 week charter, we were entitled to expect the watermaker to work for the full 4 weeks. It was not about the relatively small amount of money, but about the principle.

VIYC refused to reimburse us, and as result of their attitude to the watermaker issues, I would never charter with them again, which is really a pity, as besides the watermaker problems, Blue Kite was a really nice boat.

This year we have booked a 4 week charter with CYOA, starting next month, and are holding thumbs that the watermaker on the Lagoon 42 works for 4 weeks!