Woke to find a note that the water was being shut off in the marina because of a leak, but they had already shut it off by then. Im not sure why they did it this way, I think it had been leaking for ages, so a little bit more notice so we could all fill our water tanks would have helped. Still I have enough in the tanks for what I need, just can’t take showers on the pontoon, or hose the deck down, will have to resort to heaving buckets of sea water up.
So on testing my repair from yesterday, I found it was still leaking water, not a lot, but any is too much. I realise now that I just didn’t do the repair very well, I was running low on sealant, and spread it to thin, I did apply a generous amount of optimism, but that didn’t seem to be water resistant, I need to strip it all down again, much harder because the sealant I used will make it very difficult to disassemble. The problem stems from the piece of wood that sits on the cap rail isn’t flat, and it has to deal with the curve of the coaming, so it needs a lot of sealant, far too much actually and it might be best to file and sand down the wood until it is a snugger fit. All of this is a big job, so I very reluctantly did a bit of a bodge repair, I need to wait until the morning to fully tighten up the parts and re-test, I’m hopeful this will work for a while, but it’s staying on my todo list.
I bought 20 litres of fuel for our trip at the weekend (22p / litre), just to have some emergency fuel on board, I have half a tank which should be enough, but we will refuel from a fuel barge on the way anyway.
I re-sprayed the Icom HF SSB case as it was very rusty from the leak dripping onto the case for the last year or more. It looks quite smart now, but then it is black and kept in a dark corner with the lights low. Under these conditions, my paint jobs are just about acceptable. So the chart table area is looking great now. We have MF/HF SSB, VHF Radio, Radar and NAvTex, soon to be joined by iPad chart plotter and AIS Transponder which I have ordered direct from the Chinese manufacturer.
It the start of Ramadan here, which means lots of big bangs going off all night, not really sure how that works, but it’s keeping me alert.
Tim arrives tomorrow, so I have to get the boat back into a presentable form, and buy some supplies.
I took a walk and got some nice pics in the setting sun.
Paul C.
Hi Paul (say hello to Tim), I’m curious if you have any tricks for sanding the wood to fit the curvature of the hull? I know dentists use a piece of blue dye paper to detect which teeth are coming in contact with the ones above or below them. I’m wondering if there’s a similar scheme. I suppose you could just eyeball it, and sand accordingly, but I bet there’s some sort of thing you could do with plasticine between the wood and the deck, until the plasticine forms an evenly-thin layer on the wood. These are the types of problems to consider when lazing at anchor.
Hi Dermot, funnily enough I was thinking the same, I was thinking more along the lines of chalk dust, but haven’t got an answer yet, will probably just eye ball it and put loads of sealant in.
I also want to come up with a cheap way to know if bilge water is salt or fresh, there must be a litmus paper type test one can perform.
Under the heading “I haven’t tried this, but…” you could take two plastic cups (they don’t need to be plastic), fill one with sea water and one with fresh water. Grip the two probes of a multimeter, side by side. Set it to ohms. Dip them into solution A, then solution B, then into the bilge. You should notice a discernible difference between A and B because salt water has a resistance which is approximately 1/100th that of drinking water. You can gauge the rough percentage of sea water versus “fresh” water in terms of where the bilge resistance comes on the scale of readings between A and B.
Like I said, “I haven’t tried this, but in theory…”
I can’t see why it would fail, but I’m not so sure of the practicality of it. But it’s certainly worth an experiment, perhaps when I have a spare moment anchored off Fiji 😉