currently at: Cave Cay, Exumas, Bahamas
current date: 30 March 2005

[Note: I submitted this post by email six days ago, and it hasn't been posted yet. If the email ever goes through, you'll see this twice - sorry!]

We haven't been updating much lately, because there hasn't been much to update about. We exited Dollar Harbour a lot more gracefully than we entered, sailed to Thompson Bay, Long Island via the Comer Channel (which is not so much a channel as a broad area of 7-9 foot water), and then pulled in to George Town to accomplish chores: groceries, laundry, propane, and rum. (Not in order of importance.) The weather patterns coincided perfectly with our needs and we left George Town in comfortable sailing weather to head north to pick up our friends who were flying in to Staniel Cay.

Rolfe and Kristen are with us now, and have been gracefully putting up with all we've been putting them through; bumping bottom in a shallow spot on the banks, snorkeling in raging current, dinghy rides through breaking waves, and sleeping in what is optimistically called the "aft stateroom" in the Caliber brochure but in actual fact is smaller than most people's bathrooms. (Possibly the rum is a factor.) And, speaking of bathrooms...

(Warning, toilet talk a-head!)

In addition to the aft stateroom our boat has an aft head, which is a somewhat strange phrase because the word "head" as applied to marine toilets comes from the traditional location of the latrines in the "beakhead" - a platform at the bow, or forward end, of the ship. (And rather than "aft" it should be "after"; aft is the counterpart of fore, and after the counterpart of forward, but most people use aft as an adjective as well as an adverb, and so do I.) We had noticed that the head was not flushing as well as it might be, and since the forward head must be reached by walking through the forward cabin, i.e. our bedroom, we decided it would be a nice thing to do to make sure it was in fine working order before our guests arrived.

So while at anchor in George Town, we rebuilt the aft head, using parts from a spares kit we have. It's not a big job, really, although there are lots of little bits that all need to be disassembled and reassembled in the proper order, and we were done in a few hours. Then we tested it: it had gone to not flushing well to not flushing at all. Oops. (Moral:  Don't fix it if it ain't broke.)

Through some experimentation we determined that in the process of removing parts for replacement or cleaning, we'd shaken free some of the crystalline deposit that builds up inside the various hoses. This deposit is made from the interaction of urine, seawater, and the fibers from toilet paper; it's tan, more or less odorless, and as hard as rock. Every few weeks we flush vinegar through the system as a way of fighting this deposit, but obviously it hadn't worked as well as we could hope. The chunks of crystal had wedged themselves somewhere downstream.

So bit by bit, we disassembled each piece of the plumbing system and cleaned it out. This was accomplished by whacking each length of hose with the handle of a hammer. Really hard. Over and over. Eventually the shower of gunk from the end slowed and stopped; we squirted freshwater through the hose and reassembled it to the system, tested it, and determined that there was still blockage further down the line. So it was on to the next section of hose. Anyone familiar with boats will know that this makes it sound much easier than it was in reality, because plumbing hose is stiff, hard to slide over the various fittings, and almost always located in near-inaccessible parts of the boat. For example, to get to the hoses, we have to move all our canned goods. Our morning project stretched into afternoon.

Finally we had all the plumbing cleaned out - or so we thought. A few days into Rolfe and Kristen's stay, their toilet stopped wanting to flush. Oops. Time to unpack all the canned goods yet again and examine the hoses. This time, fortunately, Britt quickly discovered that some crystals had lodged in the Y-valve, a sort of fork in the road that determines whether waste goes into the holding tank or is flushed overboard. Holding our noses, we cleaned out the Y-valve. And now the aft head is working again. We hope!