All in a day's work

While brushing my teeth I notice the water pressure was pretty low, then non-existent – funny we thought we had just filled that tank not more than 3 days ago. Upon inspection the next morning, it’s not the water level in the tank but another leaky pipe; which is now fixed.

Tom has completed wiring new charging and starting circuits and moved on to the leaking water pump on the generator (everything seems to be leaking) As he attempts to close the seacock (to inspect the water pump) it snapped off (oh s**t) For those of you non-boaters the seacock is a valve connected to a through hull, which is exactly that - a hole in the hull with a valve attached to it. So much of the machinery aboard operates with sea water and in order to work on them you need to close the seacock. Well this one was so rotted it simply broke when touched. We spent a good part of Tuesday hunting down a new valve and through-hull, and then made an appointment for a ‘mini-haul’ with the yard for today. (A mini-haul means we stay in the slings of the travel lift until our work gets done, roughly 2 hours) In the meantime Tom stuffed a nut-driver wrapped with a rag into the hole to stop any further water from coming into the boat. It’s not a comforting thing to have a hole in the bottom of your boat stuffed with a nut-driver and rag when you on the water. We both got up and checked it numerous times last night and it remained dry.

Today, with the help of our friend Bill, we hauled the boat out of the water and replaced the through-hull and valve. One troubling thing we discovered was the zincs on the shafts we installed one year ago were completely disintegrated, so we replaced them too.

We did not have a very graceful dockage upon returning and while attemping to tie us off I snapped off an entire fingernail (*$#@! ouch!!).

Since we’ve turned the boat around here in the estuary we don’t get much of a cross-draft but more mosquitoes. Our mosquito netting at the back doors and front hatches works great.