Day 297, Year 6: The Hundredth Monkey
Date: Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Weather: Gorgeous, Sunny Day, 75 degrees F
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Having a whole day with both of us at home turned out not to be such a good idea-too much time to focus on problematic issues. All of those ‘little’ things that have been going wrong with the boat all of a sudden didn’t seem so ‘little’ any longer. It was like the pond half covered with lily pads that overnight became totally covered. The floor in the aft cabin needs major structural work. We have been ignoring that fact, but the time has come to do something about it. The teak deck is no worse than it was last week or the week before, but today it looked worse to me and we both realized that we can’t wait until we can afford to replace it. We have to do something in the meantime. We got a call from the sewing machine repair man and the cost of repairing the SailRite is going to be $200. That’s a fourth of the cost of a new machine. Ouch! Then there is the inverter/battery issue. Being on a mooring, we have to run the engine to charge the batteries and the charge is just not holding. This could mean replacing the monitor for battery charging, or worse yet, replacing the six AGM batteries to the tune of $2000 to $3000 dollars. Let’s hope the problem is the monitor as that is a cheaper problem to fix, maybe $500. Another big ticket item that is failing is my computer. I can do word processing, but when I try to edit photos or get online, the screen driver fails and there is no image. It is six years old, and it has been so faithful and hardy, being used out in the cockpit in all kinds of weather. It has been like my best friend all around the world, but I think it is time to replace it. Sadness. And then along came the realization that we have a leak in the hose that goes from the holding tank to the pump out on deck. And it has been leaking into the floor of the main cabin closet. Since the tank was pumped out last Friday, we have noticed a sewer smell that we just couldn’t track down. Yesterday Mark decided to investigate the pump out hose, so we emptied the main hall closet, starting at the top. Everything was dry all the way to the bottom and there we found a split in the hose. There should be nothing in the pipe to leak out except when pumping out, but after cleaning up the dampness at the bottom of the closet, I flushed the toilet and a little more liquid seeped out. So the tank must be full and backed up into the pipe. It was late in the evening by the time we discovered this, so we decided to make it through the night and deal with it tomorrow. We will call early to see if we can be pumped out immediately, and if so, we can then go buy new sanitary hose and install it tomorrow. If we can’t be pumped out tomorrow, then we will have to leave the boat until the problem can be fixed. Mark works on Friday, so if it is not possible to be pumped out tomorrow, the fix will have to wait until Saturday. Having to use a holding tank is always problematic. They smell no matter what you do. We have a very expensive SaniGuard filter on the air vent to keep odors from leaking overboard and we are using the very expensive holding tank treatment you buy at West Marine. Those two things usually work, but nothing can keep a sewage leak from smelling, no matter how tiny the leak. Most of the waters around the Cape are No Discharge areas by law, so even if you aren’t environmentally conscious, you have to use a holding tank and never discharge overboard. But there is only one pump out boat that serves many harbors, so it is not readily available. In the rest of the world, except for New Zealand and Australia, cruisers just don’t use their holding tanks. So we really haven’t had to deal with this since living in Boston. And there we had a pump out boat that came religiously once a week in the summer and once every two weeks in the winter. We also used our Lectro-san, an onboard sewage sanitation plant. They are not legal in No Discharge zones, however, so it doesn’t help us here. Okay, I’ve vented. I know I’m sounding very much like Eeyore, so now I’ll focus on the good things that happened today.
The first good surprise of the day was the news that only a gasket, not an entire exhaust system, is needed for our car. We’ll hold our breath on that one and hope that on Saturday morning when Midas replaces the gasket that they don’t find anything else wrong. The second good surprise was a call from Heather at lunch time. She had taken the day off to take the boys to the dentist and they decided to come to Woods Hole and have lunch with Jed. When they sat down at Captain Kidd’s, Sam told Heather she should call Oma and Granddad and invite us to lunch. So she did, and we did. We had a delightful lunch followed by a dinghy ride with Heather and the boys. We took the dinghy under the bridge and out into Great Harbor. It was such a beautiful day and it was a delight to bounce around in the waves in the harbor with our daughter and Sam and Jonah.. Sam was in the bow of the dinghy on lookout for other boats and Jonah was helping steer with Granddad. Then another grandchild delight ended the day. We had a 7 pm call with Justin to go over website issues. We called on Skype and found that Ziggy was on the other end, so we hooked up our cameras and talked to Ziggy. He showed us his new wagon that we sent to him as an early Christmas present. The Radio Flyer red metal wagon has a canopy top for shade and when it arrived Ziggy called it a tent. He sleeps and eats in it and calls it his house. Ziggy is so cute and is such a happy little guy, but when it came time to blow kisses of farewell he said he couldn’t do it because Oma and Granddad were stuck in the computer and couldn’t receive the kisses. But we got lots of smiles and that will just have to do until we get ‘unstuck.’ Ziggy went with Jo into another room while we talked about the new website with Justin. He could actually share his computer screen with us so he could show us how to edit and change things on the site. There are new slide shows to set up and manage as well as the regular text. We probably only comprehended about half of what he tried to show us, but little by little we will get it. He is fast and very good at website design, so it’s a stretch for us to understand even half. We ate a late dinner and went to bed exhausted. Hopefully some of the boat problems can be solved or not seem so overwhelming tomorrow.
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| 110817 Day 297 Cape Cod, USA–Lunch Time Fun with Grandkids |
