Thirsty Lady V.
A family-built boat, kept in the family.

Arid grew out of a boat-building family. Long before the first dry-bilge system, Al Baurley Sr. and his son Al Baurley were turning an unfinished hull into a 62-foot vessel.

Al Baurley Sr. owned a chain of warehouses. 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. He bought it, knowing that years of work lay ahead.

The family remembers Allen Pinnell of Merritt advising him against taking on the project because the hull was narrow for its length. He wanted to build it anyway. What followed was not simply fitting out a boat: it was turning an unfinished hull into a complete, working vessel.

Six years of systems, wiring and plumbing

Arid’s company history records construction beginning in 1986 and the launch in 1992. His son Al Baurley did the plumbing and electrical wiring. He had worked in the marine industry throughout his life and brought his technical education to the project. At Florida State University, he learned multiple programming languages and was at the top of his class.

The work demanded an understanding of the entire boat: where machinery would fit, how equipment would be connected, which compartments needed access and how those systems would be serviced years later. The breaker panel is a lasting record of that work.

Launched in Pompano Beach

Thirsty Lady V went into the water in 1992 at Merritt’s Shipyard in Pompano Beach, Florida. 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 boat became a place where the family could see, year after year, how the systems they had built behaved in everyday use. That experience would eventually lead to Arid.

03 / THE FIRST BUILD

A small tube.
A different way to think.

An incident aboard a 100-foot Broward yacht gave Al Baurley a new way to think about the problem. Fuel had traveled through a small polyethylene tube into the boat’s interior. The cleanup was substantial, but one detail stayed with him: a surprisingly small tube had moved a significant amount of fluid.

On the drive home, he connected that observation to the water trapped aboard Thirsty Lady V. Could a controlled vacuum use small tubing to collect water from scattered low points? That question led to experiments in the garage and a working pilot aboard Thirsty Lady V.

The first experiment lasted about ten days.

Its first result was memorable. The engine room became dry, and the odor initially became worse as previously submerged residue and growth dried out. Removing the water revealed another part of the cleanup that the boat needed.

That first unit was an experiment, not a finished product. Al spent roughly two years refining and testing the design. The family boat’s installation grew from two pickup zones to six, reaching from the anchor-windlass compartment to the engine room.

The original Series 9 prototype in Arid’s archive represents a later stage of that development. It is distinct from the earliest short-lived machine. The purpose remained the same: reach the low points and remove the fluid that kept collecting there.