Of Soap and Sea Water

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

One of the things that people, shipmates and others that have spent time at sea, have mentioned is that
regular soap doesn’t work in sea water. There are several (relatively) expensive concoctions that claim to
be “sea soap” sold in yachting and outdoor stores however most of the people I’ve talkd too swear by Joy
dishwashing soap.

Unfortunately Joy isn’t available anywhere around here so I started doing some research and found that
the common element amongst all these sea water usable soaps is coconut oil.

So off to Safeway I go looking for coconut oil based soaps and lo and behold there are lots! It seems that
the trend to “organic” cleaners has meant that many soap products are now made, and proudly proclaimed
to be at that, using “natural coconut derived” oils.

But would it work in sea water that is the question.

Time for some science said I :-)

Being in the middle of the continent means sea water is a scarce commodity, google to the rescue.  Sea
water is about 35g of salt per Kg of water. So, after whipping up my own personal bit of the great briny, I
tested three different dishwashing soaps, two Organic Earth Friendly ones and one generic lemon based
one. Surprisingly all three worked although of the three the one with the highest level of coconut oil (ie
first on the ingredients list after water) worked the best.

It will be interesting to see how this stuff works on real dirty clothes in real sea water.  At least being
organic and “Earth Friendly” and all it’s unlikely to eat my skin if I use it as shampoo too.
On a “man this is expensive note” I filled my anti-malaria prescription…
$350.00 later !!!

Good thing I’m able to save some money on the soap :-)

Thanks for reading.
KJ

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