Captain Chris Zasky of the 77’ custom sportfishing vessel Divine Intervention shares his firsthand experience with the Arid Bilge System in this exclusive testimonial. Built by Sculley in Wanchese, North Carolina, Divine Intervention is a robust, ocean-going powerhouse that underwent extensive retrofitting to elevate performance, comfort, and cleanliness onboard. Among the critical additions? The Arid Bilge System and its eco-friendly oil alarm companion.

In this testimonial, Captain Chris walks us through the technical and operational value of the system, focusing on moisture management, odor elimination, and leak detection. With eight pickups installed across key compartments, the system quietly and efficiently maintains a bone-dry bilge, protecting sensitive components like gyros, generators, and chillers.

See below for a transcript of the entire testimonial.

Good afternoon, this is Captain Chris Zasky aboard the 77-foot sport fishing vessel Divine Intervention. This is a 2008 Sculley Wanchese-built boat out of North Carolina. I’m here to talk to you today about the Arid Bilge System and why we selected it particularly for this boat.

This is a 77-foot custom sport fishing boat, 80 foot overall. It’s a big boat, so it requires a lot of air conditioning. We have two big chiller systems onboard, which is necessary to get the temperatures we’re looking for and keep the boss comfortable on the inside.

The downside is that there are chiller pipes that run throughout the boat that sweat. Even with two-inch-thick insulation around those pipes, they still create a lot of condensation. All that water and condensation drains down into the dark depths of the bilges. I was adamant when the boss bought this boat two years ago, that we find a system that would operate automatically to get the water out of the boat and keep water out of the boat.

It keeps the inside of the boat smelling nice. There are many areas in this boat that you can’t get to on a daily maintenance routine. There are plenty of other, more important things to be doing than climbing into the bilges every other day to disinfect and clean out water.

Another big reason we wanted the Arid Bilge System installed was to keep those bilges clean. It’s important for leak detection in the engine room. Again, this boat’s so big, it’s hard to access every bilge regularly. The smell in the boat when we got it was pretty horrific. Might’ve been mildew. We did a lot of mold remediation on this boat—spent tens of thousands of dollars cleaning and finishing the bilges with Awlgrip paint.

One of the big retrofits we did was we put gyros in the back end of this boat in the lazarette, which was a black hole when we bought the boat. We put about $400,000 into that lazarette between paint, sanding, fairing, fireboy, the two Mitsubishi gyros, and an AC system so we could not only manage the humidity but also maintain ambient temperature down there.

The Arid Bilge System was a perfect complement to what we were trying to achieve in that lazarette. Watertight hatches, keeping the moisture out. We spent quite a bit of time and money down in that lazarette. This system really completed that by keeping the bilges perfectly dry.

One of the other big components with this system was the Eco Oil Alarm System, which will allow me to focus on other things while I’m running the boat, especially offshore during tournaments. If I have an oil leak or some sort of contamination leak, whether it be hydraulic oil, which we’ve had. We blew out a hose on the bow thruster and I was notified within minutes that I had a leak by that Eco Oil Alarm System.

So if I have a diesel, oil, hydraulic leak, or any kind of contamination in any of the eight bilge sections where we have those pickups, I’m notified within minutes by an audio alarm at my helm. That’s invaluable to me. 

The other big plus is that nothing goes overboard. If we were to have a big diesel leak, the Eco Oil system picks it up, I’ll be notified and we can shut everything down and take care of the leak before it ever makes it into the ocean or intracoastal.

We’ve had this boat for two years. One of the reasons why I was adamant about having this Arid Dry Bilge System put in was, it’s a big boat first of all, it’s got a lot of dark, hidden crevices and bilges that you can’t really get to. The boat is cooled by two chiller systems. Throughout this whole 80-foot boat are chiller pipes that sweat. There’s a lot of condensation. It’s not exactly an efficient system to cool the boat, but for a yacht this size, in order to get the air conditioning, the BTU’s that you need, you’ve got to have the chiller system. The downfall of that is you have a lot of sweaty pipes that run through this boat. That’s a lot of extra condensation water down into the bilges in places you can’t really get to. My initial investigation into bilge drying systems led me here. I talked to the boys and laid out a pretty good plan of how and where we were going to install it. You know as well as I do that these boats can hide water on you and have wet spots you just can’t get to on a normal daily maintenance routine. We installed eight pickups in this boat automatically picked up and dried out by the system. 

One of the major problems that we had with this boat when we bought it, one of the big discoveries, was regarding the chiller pipes that run through the ceiling and sweat terribly, especially when the salon door was open. We found that these lights [in the ceiling above the salon] were filling with water. There was no drip pan, nothing to stop that water or pick that water up or even to get the water to shed off of this cathedral ceiling.

So we custom made a drip pan to catch the condensation from the chiller pipes and put one of the pickups in that pan up in the ceiling. When we first opened it up, it was black and wet in the ceiling. So once we custom built that pan and put the Arid Bilge System in there, it’s bone dry. You could open this up, it’s dry, beautiful, you can work with it, it keeps the smell down. There’s no other way we could have achieved what we were looking to do, to stop all that damage that was being done up here. That pickup in here was absolutely necessary and still works fantastic.

We are in the machine room, this is where kind of the brains of the Arid Bilge System is. It was a great location to put it, we have plenty of room down here. You can hear it just kicking on now. Here is your central vacuum system. All the seven pickups throughout the boat are picked up from here and then discharged into the Eco Friendly box.

This is basically a contamination and clean water separating box. Everything gets dumped into here and gets separated. The water gets separated out, goes into a sump box, and the clean water then gets put overboard. Any of the contaminants that you might pick up in any of the seven locations in the boat will get deposited into this Eco Friendly box. Once they get to a certain level, it’ll set off the sensor and shut the whole system down. Once that contamination makes contact with the sensor, the whole system will get shut down and you will get an audio alarm at the helm. At that point, obviously, you’re notified that you have a problem and you can go fix the problem before anything goes overboard. Not a single drop, which is really invaluable.

For the cost and efficiency of the system, if you didn’t have it and you got caught discharging diesel or hydraulic fluid or anything overboard, I don’t even want to begin to imagine what the fines would be like. Of course you don’t want to put that stuff in the water anyway.

The system is very efficient. You can hear it running right now. Looks like it’s picking up from the forward machine room right now. This room, when we bought the boat, was very dirty. Had a lot of mold. All these chill pipes you see on the ceiling were moldy. The stagnant air down here stunk to high heaven, but as you can see now, I mean you could almost make a crew’s quarters out of this area now. It’s very clean. It smells wonderful. It’s dry. It’s an amazing system.

Keeping the engine room dry and tidy will help maintain all components

Captain Chris Zasky’s experience aboard Divine Intervention is a powerful case study for how the Arid Bilge System can transform even the most complex marine environments. Any vessel with sensitive onboard systems can benefit from precision moisture control and proactive leak detection. Not only the systems, but also all the surfaces including headliners and painted surfaces, benefit greatly from moisture protection. 

With its low power draw, automatic reliability, and optional eco-protective features, the Arid Bilge System is a smart safeguard below deck.