Before Arid Bilge Systems, there was a boat Al Baurley Sr. and his son Al Baurley spent years building: Thirsty Lady V. Her story begins with an unfinished hull in Hollywood, Florida, and runs through a family workshop, a launch at Merritt’s Shipyard in Pompano Beach and a stubborn problem below deck. The boat brought the Baurley family’s boatbuilding experience and the idea for Arid together.
Al Baurley developed Arid’s first Dry Bilge Machine to remove water that remained aboard Thirsty Lady V. The earliest experiment lasted only about ten days. Making it dependable took roughly two more years of work. The story begins with the family boat and the practical problem that prompted the first prototype.
Explore the complete Arid company history, with archive photographs and the product timeline.
An unfinished hull beside I-95
Al Baurley Sr. owned a chain of warehouses and had the determination to take on a substantial boatbuilding project. In the 1980s, he found an unfinished hull in Hollywood, Florida. As the family remembers it, the hull was visible from I-95. Its long, narrow, racing-style lines caught his attention, and he bought it.
Not everyone encouraged the idea. The family remembers Allen Pinnell of Merritt advising Al Sr. against taking it on because the hull was narrow for its length. Al Sr. wanted to build it anyway. The unfinished hull became the starting point for a custom boat, with years of work still ahead.
Al Baurley Sr. and his son Al took that unfinished hull and turned it into the 62-foot boat that became Thirsty Lady V.
Six years of building, wiring and plumbing
Arid’s company history records construction beginning in 1986 and the boat going into the water in 1992. Those dates represent about six years of work. Al Baurley handled the plumbing and electrical wiring, building the systems that would make the bare hull a working boat.
He brought a lifelong involvement in the marine industry to the project, alongside his technical education. The work meant understanding the boat as a complete system: where equipment would fit, how it would be connected and how someone could reach it again for maintenance.
The breaker panel below is a particularly personal part of that history. Its labels read “Liberator” and “Baurley Marine Works Inc.” It is a physical record of the family’s work, with the AC and DC distribution laid out for the equipment aboard the boat.
Mack engines, Hamilton jets and a shallow draft
Al Baurley Sr. wanted jet propulsion. The boat was built with Mack truck-engine marine conversions paired with Hamilton jet drives. Shallow draft and fuel efficiency were important goals for the project.
The family reports an operating draft of approximately two feet three inches for Thirsty Lady V—a distinctive feature for a 62-foot boat. That figure describes the family’s experience with this vessel.
These machinery photographs show the boat during maintenance. One engine has its cylinder head removed, and the separate stern photograph shows the jet-drive equipment out of the water. This is the hands-on side of owning a custom boat: knowing what is installed, how it fits together and what it takes to keep it working.
Launched at Merritt’s—and kept in the family
Thirsty Lady V splashed in 1992 at Merritt’s Shipyard in Pompano Beach, Florida. After years of building, the boat was ready for life on the water.
The original intention was to sell the finished boat. The family remembers Al Sr.’s wife wanting to keep her after the years they had put into the project and their life together. They decided to keep the boat and enjoy her as a family.
The family returned to Merritt’s for hands-on maintenance in the years that followed. The photograph of Thirsty Lady V ashore later in this story was taken there—the same shipyard where she first went into the water.
The water left behind
For all the work that went into Thirsty Lady V, water still sat in the bilge. The smell was persistent, and damp areas were deteriorating from the inside. Al Baurley Sr. would bundle newspapers and put them into low compartments to soak up the water. That was a temporary response to a problem that kept coming back.
Al Baurley wanted a way to remove that last accumulation automatically, including the water in compartments that were awkward to reach by hand.
That distinction shaped the idea. Conventional bilge pumps have an essential job moving larger amounts of water, but residual fluid can remain after they stop. The first Arid experiment addressed that remaining water aboard a boat the family knew well.
The technical background behind the idea
Al Baurley brought a background in computer engineering to his work on boats. At FSU, he learned multiple programming languages and was at the top of his class. Alongside that technical education, years spent working with boats gave him firsthand experience of the problems owners faced below deck.
The Broward incident that sparked an idea
An accidental diesel release aboard a 100-foot Broward yacht gave Al a different way to think about the problem. A small polyethylene tube had carried a significant amount of fluid into the yacht’s interior.
The damage required cleanup, but one detail stayed with Al: how much fluid had moved through such a small tube. Could tubing and controlled vacuum be used deliberately to remove the water left in a boat’s bilge?
That question connected the Broward incident to the recurring problem aboard Thirsty Lady V. Al began experimenting in his garage, developing a system that could collect fluid from low, difficult-to-reach compartments and bring it to a central unit.
Al installed his prototype aboard the boat. The next day, his father called with a result that was difficult to overlook.
An unexpected first result
The smell had initially become worse.
The engine-room water had been removed, and the growth it had covered was drying out. For the first time in eight years, the engine room was dry. Removing the water had exposed what had been underneath it.
The trial showed that the machine could remove the residual water, but the first unit was short-lived. It held together for around ten days. Turning that early result into a system that could continue working aboard a boat required further development.
Two years of refining the design
Al spent roughly the next two years making changes and testing the system. As the machine was refined and reengineered, its operating life increased. That work became the foundation of the modern Arid Bilge System.
The archive also preserves the original Series 9 prototype installed aboard Thirsty Lady V. This early hardware belongs to the system’s development, before the product line reached the range of sizes offered today.
From two zones to six
The installation aboard Thirsty Lady V developed as well. Its original two-zone arrangement eventually became a six-zone system, reaching from the anchor-windlass compartment all the way aft to the engine room.
Those locations reflect a practical consideration in choosing an Arid system: water can collect in more than one place. Separate compartments may need their own pickup locations, connected by tubing to the central unit.
The family boat’s progression from two zones to six is one example of that approach taking shape. The installation grew to address individual areas across the vessel, extending the work beyond one part of the bilge.
A family tradition of hands-on maintenance
The family’s involvement with Thirsty Lady V extended beyond construction and the development of Arid. Working on the boat became a family tradition, connecting generations through inspection, maintenance and the work below deck that visitors rarely see.
That hands-on experience is central to Arid’s company history. The electrical panel, the engines, the jets and the hours spent in the bilge all contributed to a practical understanding of the problem the system was developed to address.
Music: “Ultralounge” by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Edited to length; fades and level adjustments applied.
Bringing the system to other boats
By 2004–2005, Al was producing a small number of large early systems for friends with large yachts. The next stage was to make the equipment smaller and more affordable, opening the approach to a wider range of boats.
The product milestones followed that development:
- 2006: Series 9 sales began at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show.
- March 2007: Series 4 was introduced at the Palm Beach Boat Show.
- February 2009: Series 2 joined the line.
- 2015: Series 1 followed.
The sequence moved from large early installations toward more compact systems. A wider choice of sizes made it possible to consider different mounting spaces and numbers of wet areas while keeping the same basic purpose: removing residual fluid from the locations where it collects.
See how the system works today
In the video below, Alfred Baurley introduces Arid’s product line and demonstrates the approach to removing residual fluid.
Arid works alongside the boat’s conventional bilge pumps; it does not replace emergency pumping equipment. Removing accumulated water also does not repair a leak, so identifying and correcting the source remains part of caring for the boat.
Explore Arid’s company background, or read how Arid works to learn about the current system. For an installation discussion, contact the Arid team with the locations where water collects aboard the boat.
