MARKET MILESTONES

A new line of high-tech water systems gives boaters another reason to keep the spigot on

-  CAPT. JEN COPELAND

Terms such as "cutting-edge technology" and "fully automatic" often cause a captain's ears to perk up. Whether it's related to electronics or transmissions, or any system for that matter, anything that makes our lives just a little bit easier is definitely worth a second look.

Osmosis, according to Merriam-Webster, is the movement of a solvent through a semipermeable membrane into a solution of higher solute concentration that tends to equalize the concentrations of solute on the two sides of the membrane. It was first observed in 1748 by Jean-Antoine Nollet. For the next 200 years, the naturally occurring phenomenon was observed only in labs, but by 1950, the University of Florida and the University of California had been able to successfully reverse the process to make fresh water from seawater. Reverse osmosis was originally geared toward making drinking water for municipalities, and made its big watermaking debut in Cape Coral, Florida, in 1977, with a total output of 3 million gallons per day. Juxtapose that with the fact that a single modern onboard watermaker is capable of producing nearly 1 million gallons of product water per year, and you gotta love good ol' American ingenuity.

Today, it's practically unheard of for modern-day sport boats to be delivered without a watermaker or purifier of some sort, and for a technology that took so long to enter the recreational-boating market, that same technology has taken a fast track to something we now can't live without.

Three companies refuse to take the "good enough" mantra and continue to define the flux limits, making desalination and purification of water faster, and pushing the current technology to work better. And in the words of author Arthur C. Clark: "The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them, into the impossible."