Let’s see – oh yeah, I was talking recently about the two biggest problem topics of conversation among yachties. Water makers and toilets. Recently we’ve made water for three different boats around us. All nice folks, one with a bad acting Specta unit that’s a bit older, so one might expect a problem here and there. The other two boats, both with fairly new Osmosea units which have been nothing but trouble. Meanwhile our CruiseRO water maker just keeps chugging away.
The toilet topic popped up over sundowners recently. Our good friends on SV Due South, a Kiwi family of six, recently had a blocked head problem but not the kind that we usually dread. The really icky kind is downstream of the toilet bowl, perhaps a clogged pump or other plumbing downstream of the pump. A little over a year ago we had a stopped up holding tank outlet valve leading to an overflow of raw sewage via the holding tank air vents. While troubleshooting I had to physically empty the holding tank from inside the port engine compartment, draining the “contents” into a Home Depot Homer bucket a few gallons at a time. Took about 10 cycles to get it done, and by golly I didn’t spill a drop. I also didn’t throw up, which everyone thought was pretty impressive.
Turns out that blockage right at the outlet was due to chunks of solids that had been caked to the insides of the holding tank finally breaking loose in a rough anchorage and clogging up the big ball valve on the exit hose. There is a known problem with urine combining with sea water salts to form calcium deposits on holding tanks and the related plumbing, but ours is a freshwater head so I still don’t know how it happened. Hopefully it never happens again!
SV Due South had a much more bizarre problem, this one on the intake plumbing of their saltwater flush head. Something managed to get into the thru-hull for the salt water intake and partially block the hoses, but with enough strong pumping by their 4 young boys things seemed to clear. That is until they noticed tiny little octopus arms and other parts begin to extrude through the little holes around the inside of the toilet – the ones that help distribute the flush water around the entire bowl.
Guess what? Dead little octopus begin to smell pretty nasty after a day or two, and it takes a few days or weeks for the decomposition process to complete and clear the octopus bits through the system. In the meantime, Wendy the mom has decreed that she will not be using the smelly head (they have 2) but the boys are welcome to continue their activities in there. Those are some tough boys.
I dinghied down to the village here at Amanu last Saturday to access the public wifi signal and look after some banking business. Turned out to be pretty fast internet so I downloaded the YouTube videos of the first few Prada Cup races. Due South has a little LCD video projector and a makeshift screen, so Perryn and I figured out how to set it up on JollyDogs. Sunday evening we had the crews from every boat in the anchorage over for “race night”, and we managed to stuff 19 adults and children into our saloon to face the screen suspended in the cockpit. Popcorn and cookies were passed around, and Gavin from SV Slingshot offered technical commentary on how the boats work. Hats off to anyone who can make a boat go almost 40 knots in only 8 knots of breeze.
We had a blast! In retrospect, we must have looked like one of those Volkswagen Beetles stuffed full of clowns. Now the wind is blowing so after the kids get home schooled each weekday we’re all out kite boarding. This tribe knows how to party.
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