Oh God, I bought a Boat.        

A sporadic journal tracing my adventures with the increasingly wonderful sailing vessel La Mouette.  BTW, I hate the term Blog.  What a lazy, ugly construction.  Blogger.  Sounds like one more thing to fear in the night.  MILF, now there's an acronymic daydream.  What follows is in reverse chronological order, naturally.

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The Only Good Head is the One That Actually Flushes What It's Supposed to. 

Installing the World's Best Marine Head. . . . in progress.

As this is one in a series of essays on sanitation, some will find the subject matter distasteful.  My plumber friend Mike tells me the technical terms for the goods at issue are "fecal matter" or "human excrement."   I don't think that really helps much.  Shit is Shit.  You produce it every day and the last you want to care about it is when it disappears into your head.  IF it disappears into your head.  Which is exactly the problem.  Most heads are designed so poorly or people spend so little money on them that the prospect of going #2 on a boat is enough to constipate most landlubbers.  Particularly after you tell them the rules.

Two of my lovely granddaughters, ages five and seven, or perhaps it was my son or daughter-in-law, for no one admits to this if they can escape first, plugged poor La Mouette's (former) head so thoroughly with fecal matter that it took me half a day and several tries to get it unstuck.  Actually I am happy they were ignorant enough of the potential consequences of taking a shit on a boat that they felt free to do so.  I do not want them to fear the head.  I want a head that does what it's supposed to, to take care of business and be neat about it.

In the sailing classes in which I have participated much time has been spent on cautions for avoiding the dreaded Plugged Head.  Differing opinions were offered on how many squares of TP were reasonably safe.  Which in any case turns out to be not enough to really serve the purpose.  The "deposit only what has passed through you" rule is reasonable if overly polite.  There is a limit on what you can expect of something that accomplishes as much in as small a space as a boat.  That limit does not include flushing cigarette butts, matches, bobby pins (to clear out relics from the 50's) or tampons, cleansing pads or dental floss down the head.  La Mouette has a neat little wastebasket in the head lined with a crisp little paper bag for receiving those items.  There are spare paper bags readily available without even the need to ask.

Actually, any toilet tissue that does not contain reinforcing fibers will dissolve quite readily in the holding tank.  It is only the marginal fixtures that choke on TP.  Given sufficient flush water, tissue is no problem.  So you will no longer find single-ply "marine" toilet tissue on my boat.  I think that is the least you can provide a guest in a delicate moment: tissue that does not dissolve on your hands.

Before describing my ideal head, the one I just bought and installed on La Mouette, I'm going to digress at length so you can fully understand why I dislike the other options.  This is not prose for the squeamish.

The typical head fixture on a small boat has a hand-operated pump to the side of the bowl.  The bottom of the bowl and the bottom of the pump are connected by a tube not much over an inch in diameter with two right-angle bends.  News flash: only small, firm lumps of fecal matter can be sucked through a narrow tube and around two corners.  Plus you'd better flush as you go.  To much deposit or lumps that are too large will not leave the bowl at all without breaking them up mechanically or letting them sit until they soften up in the bowl water.  Yuk.  I used to keep a box of disposable plastic knives in the head for the purpose of slicing the deposits down to size  On the other hand, if the deposit is too gooey it will just settle in the horizontal part of the pipe, the worst clog of all.  The only solution here is persistent work with a length of coat hanger wire.  By the time you succeed the bowl is brimming with brown soup.  Double yuck.  Knowing this do you still want to chance a dump on an unfamiliar head?  I doubt it.  

Of all the small, manually operated heads I have had the best results with the Raritan.  I think the long lever on the pump offers enough mechanical advantage to pump vigorously while seated, which is the secret to making side-pump heads work at all.  Motorized heads with a macerator built into the unit rely on "macerating" the fecal material with stainless steel blades to make it pumpable.  This type of macerator has two impellers divided by a stainless plate.  One side pumps water into the bowl and the other side empties it. Sometimes the sides are coupled so some of the waste water is recirculated to help flush the bowl.  Watching brown water stream into the bowl has a yuk factor all of its own.   Macerator heads tend to use a lot of flush water as well, which fills up the holding tank faster.  

In my experience, these heads are far from plug-free.  I think they are actually worse than the manually pumped heads once they plug.  When the exit passage plugs, the bowl fills rapidly and vastly complicates the situation.  As the flusher, unfamiliar with these things, you tend to keep the motor running in hopes that it will all go away.  And sometimes it does.  Lots of water in the bowl creates maximum suction around the fecal material and finally it gets sucked into the macerator  All too often, however, you stand petrified as the bowl fills a little more each time you push the flush button for a few seconds.

As the boat skipper, you might have a clue that a problem is developing if you hear the macerator running more and in shorter bursts than is normal.  Mostly you don't tend to find out about the problem until the bowl is sloshing over the rim with every roll of the boat.   It's pretty awful.  You don rubber gloves, scoop the excess brown water into any available containers and try to clear the passage to the macerator (which is around a 90 degree corner) with a bent spoon handle or whatever.  Then you flush everything you scooped out, clean up and disinfect the floor, your bent spoon and all the containers.  It takes a strong stomach.  After that adventure, which is impossible to keep discreet on a small boat, you can bet everyone is going to hold it until the voyage is over.  Who wants to chance putting the skipper through that again?  

One small note if you just can't abide the smell: Breathing masks with activated carbon made for working with paint and solvents will also filter out this irritant.  A second helpful note: even if you never get seasick, if you are the one likely to have to deal with a head issue, it's a good idea to take a seasickness remedy just in case.  Not getting seasick topside and not getting seasick down below up to your elbows in shit are vastly different.  

The Only Good Holding Tank is a Big Enough Holding Tank.   June 17, 2007

Its been a while since I wrote anything and a lot has been accomplished.  Lets start with one of the current projects: the holding tank and the head.  Our Islander 28 came with a rubber holding bladder, which was pretty fragrantly obnoxious after 30 years.  In addition, the vent line was plugged, so when the bladder filled up, waste would begin to leak back into the head.  Better than the bladder bursting, I guess.  The Wilcox-Crittendon bladder probably held five gallons, certainly not more than 10.  I think "big enough" holdingtankwise, is more on the order of a gallon per foot of boat, minimum.  I won't claim to follow all the rules, but I do think discharging sewage into a marina is particularly gross.  I also think a lot more people do it than will admit to it.  If marinas really cared about the problem they would all regularly put dye tablets in boater's heads, as they do in Avalon harbor.  

Anyway, with careful attention and using minimal flush water, Julie and I could go several days on the boat between pump-out runs to the open ocean.  A pump-out run is also an excuse to go sailing, so that isn't all bad.  But a boat that's a little smelly is an excuse for the wife to want to stay home, so fixes were in order.   In mid-April I carefully measured the space available.  The 18 gallon fresh water tank is aft under the starboard settee and the bladder and macerator were forward.  I calculated the largest Ronco standard tank that would fit, did drawings and everything.  At the end of May I took delivery of a B-170 28 gallon rotary-molded polyethylene tank.  The tank is roughly a right triangle in cross section to fit the curve of the hull and it narrows down a little at the forward end as the hull curves in toward the pointy end of the boat.  The tank turned out to be just a teeny bit too big at the forward outside corner.  Oops.  

Well, the tank is polyethylene, right.  So I got out a heat gun and figured I'd soften up the corner of the tank until I could collapse it enough to fit, which meant reducing the height of the tank by about an inch over a six inch square area which was originally about two to three inches high.  Having done it, this is not a project I would recommend to anyone.  The poly is thick, does not conduct heat very well and transitions from solid to liquid over a very narrow temperature range.  You want the tank soft enough to deform but not hot enough melt.  Because the material is about 3/8 inch thick, it melts on the outside (or inside) where you apply the heat long before it gets soft enough all the way through.  You can see what is going on because the material turns transparent when it melts and is translucent while its solid.  As soon as it gets hot enough all the way through gravity wants to take over.  And it's not like it cools down right away when you take the heat away.  As carefully and slowly as I worked, I still melted a hole in the tank.  Fortunately, I was working on a corner and could reposition the tank and flow the molten material back into the hole, using pieces of wood to push and/or support the plastic. 

I tested for leaks by pressurizing the tank to some fraction of a PSI for several hours.  The flat walls want to bulge out under very little pressure so this is a delicate business.  Thankfully, the pressure test was successful.  No leaks.  Installed, the tank looks like it was poured in place, which it was, sort of.  There isn't a quarter inch to spare anywhere.  It's not at first apparent that the tank in the photo fully fills the width under the settee because the bottom of the picture is a piece of plywood attached to the edge of the settee by a piano hinge.  Normally this lays on top of the (missing) plywood covering the tank and is flipped out and has hinged legs to transform the settee into a double berth on the Islander 28.

There were about four inches to spare on the forward end of the compartment for plumbing connections.  Just enough.  The head is on the other side of the bulkhead and the lines run along the hull and are almost all concealed by the existing cabinetry.  As is my normal practice, there is no Y valve.  The head discharges into the top of the tank. The bottom of the tank goes to a tee which branches to the deck pump out port and to the macerator.  This works because the deck port is normally capped so the macerator can pull a vacuum to empty the tank and the macerator seals well enough that the tank can be suctioned out through the deck fitting as well.

Because the ports are all on the end of the tank, it is not possible to either fully fill or fully empty the tank.  I placed the vent line (3/4" white hose in the photo above) so that it is uncovered at equal starboard or port angles of heel.  I installed an external capacitance level sensor but am not very happy with it.  Apparently because the foil strips are almost touching a painted bulkhead as well, the capacitance does not drop enough with an empty tank to register "empty" on the scale.  I put this down to poor design on the part of the device maker.  As an old instrumentation hand, I know that every instrument should have both a zero and a span adjustment.  These folks only provide a span adjustment and assume the zero will take care of itself, which clearly it does not.

Here, ten or so inches down the page, is where the story gets interesting, or at least beyond cramming 28 gallons of tank into an 18 gallon space.  Because La Mouette is my little experimental boat, I get to try offbeat solutions to problems.  Three problems: How to empty a tank where the outlet starts sucking air two or three inches before the tank is empty? - and - How to figure out how full the tank is?  A corollary problem involves the water tank level.  The water tank is also poly, but its encased in wood on all sides and just too much of a pain to apply capacitance strips which don't work that well anyway.  Finally, how to stop sanitation related odors?

Flushing the Holding Tank.  June 17, 2007

Emptying a toilet bowl, you do not just pump the waste out.  You flush it with some "clean" water too.  Seawater in my case.  Seawater has a bad reputation for causing smelly heads.  The usual explanation is that the little critters in the water die in the stagnant plumbing between trips to the boat and stink up the place.  I have known boats where this was a problem, it's very much a hydrogen sulfide sort of odor, but it isn't a problem on my boat.  Maybe I use the boat often enough, but you would think a week or two would be lethal enough to any free-floating creature.  I think the answer is more complicated, but still remains an unsolved non-problem for me.

Why not flush the holding tank too?  I can tell you from experience that some holding tanks acquire a thick layer of sediment and a generous coating of noxious gray slime on the walls.  This is what gums up float sensors for determining tank level.  My guess is that the thick gray slime on the tank walls is an anerobic bacterial mat that grows in the tank because the tank is never really flushed out.  By pumping seawater into the holding tank at the same time it is pumped out, albeit at a lower rate, perhaps things would stay a little cleaner.  I have noticed that the contents of a holding tank, while they may have been both solid and liquid to start with, rapidly become a pretty uniform brown liquid.  The only solids are indigestible things like seeds and the coats of corn kernels, along with the occasional wisp of  tissue fiber.  

I can tell you this because I Installed a six-inch section of 1-1/2 inch acrylic pipe in the feed line to my macerator.  I have done this on several boats mostly because it makes it very easy to see when pumping hits diminishing returns.  It also allows you to see what the sewage looks like.  That may not appeal to you.  I think it's interesting because I'm trying to figure out how to improve the general art of sanitation on a boat.

So in addition to a macerator to empty the tank, I have installed a "vane puppy" to pump seawater back into the other side of the tank.  Its a little early to report results as I have yet to run power to the seawater pump, but the idea is to pump out until the tank is nearly empty and then run the flush water too until the effluent clears up.

I have not been a fan of macerators.  I think diaphragm pumps are more trouble-free, either motorized or not.  But a macerator is what I had and there was no room for a diaphragm pump anyway.  The usual failure mode of macerators is usually a leak in the shaft seal dripping liquid into the motor.  The solution is to never mount the macerator with the motor end down.  Another problem is running them dry.  As long as I can see what is going into the pump, I can avoid running it dry.  A final problem is not running them for a long enough time that the impeller either seizes or takes a permanent set so it will no longer pull prime.  Like lots of other boat related things, the pump needs to run periodically to stay healthy.  Like the raw water pump on your engine, the impeller needs to be changed out every year or two.  No maintenance, works poorly, no mystery.

Catalina and (whew) back.  1 December 2006

Julie and I set off for Avalon on Saturday. We arrived just after dark. There wasn't much wind and we motored the last two-thirds there.

On the way to our mooring, I ran over a line in the water. It wrapped in the propeller and stopped us dead. OK, I've become a little night-blind.  Hired a diver who freed us and told me I broke a blade off the propeller. Maybe he could get a prop by helicopter on Monday. Sounded very expensive and at the mercy of strangers far from home.

We spent Saturday night on the mooring.  The next morning I decided to sail back while we still had plenty of provisions and most of our money. I figured that if the wind died and we got stuck between Catalina and home we could call for a tow.  "Home" was about 23 nautical miles away. The forecast called for 10-15 knot winds in the evening. I remembered that the island tends to block westerly winds and we would have a chance after we were out of the island's shadow.

We got a few miles out and the wind died completely. We bobbed around until late afternoon. With two hours of daylight remaining, the wind returned. 20 miles to go. The wind suddenly increased to 15 knots and the boat shot along at between 5 and 6 knots. It was a somewhat wild ride until I got the sails adjusted for the increased wind.

After dark the wind began to drop. 5 miles out, 5.5 knots. 4 miles out, 4.5 knots, three miles out, 3.5 knots. At this rate we would always be nearly an hour from home. Thankfully the wind returned just enough to keep us moving well. We crossed into the harbor around eight and managed to avoid the large freighter going out as soon as we got inside. Remember I have no engine to push the boat, at least not more than at a very slow speed.  I tacked across the harbor and got to the entrance to our marina when the wind completely died. We were able to slowly motor into our slip on a propeller with one blade.  We stayed here and partied instead. We plan to return to the house this afternoon (Tuesday). Its been fun.

You can tell how much fun it was because we have no pictures.

Well, I guess this isn't too bad.              18 September 2006

Julie and I have been living on the boat for the past week and a half, all snug in our San Pedro slip.  After a few bad days adjusting, she is getting to like it.  I don't know what you have to do to get your wives on your boats.  We had to have the inside of the house painted.  Julie has compromised pulmonary function and the dust got to her.  So we camped out on the boat which is on the upwind side of the LA harbor.  

Now there is a lot of distance between what you need for a day sail and what you need to make a woman who is fussy and can't breathe or walk well happy.  I'm on the second iteration of boarding steps, which seems to have resolved most of those issues.  Then the boat had no 120 volt power or functional battery charger.  While a couple of extension cords would have worked for most people, I have modified the area under the port salon settee to take two pair of golf cart batteries with a 1500 watt Costco inverter close by.  I put a trusty Newmar 30 amp ferroresonant charger below the alcohol stove and in back of some cabinets.  Who wants a battery charger taking up valuable lazarette room?  Anyway, we have lots of power to run a microwave and a blender.  I appreciate the difference between a new three-stage whiz-bang charger and an old ferroresonant.  For my application, my boat, I'll take the simplicity and robustness of a ferroresonant with a stainless chassis.  I'm still trying to figure out whether complex charging algorithms buy you anything but slightly faster charging.  The way I see it, any way you get the electrolyte to 1.25+ is ok.

I'm reading "Living on 12 volts" and the other Ample Power stuff and find it quite sensible even now.  I think I'm going to publish a commentary, however, to point out where the argument becomes hocus-pocus polemic, which it does often enough.

I started out fine-tuning sails and have made a timely switch in emphasis to creature comforts.  The head works well.  There's a nice solar vent fan in the head compartment and fluorescent lights popping up all over.  I used to dislike fluorescents because of the color.  I have learned to forgive them because of their efficiency.  Its a lot of light for the watt.  LEDs just aren't practical for area lighting at this point, besides the incredible expense. Also in favor of the fluorescents, a customer decided to replace all of his "old" fixtures with bright, shiny new ones.  So these old ones were essentially free.

Oh God, a boat.                    8 Aug 06

A boat?  Most of the people who fix and maintain boats aren't usually driven to get one of their own.  They get enough contact high from rubbing up against your boat, to name just one thing.  This isn't a fabulously well off trade, boat fixers, fellow yachties.  We're each just another working stiff paydaying a boat.  And besides - where are you going to get the time to work on your own boat?  Wouldn't you rather sit back and watch the wide-screen for a couple of hours in the evening?  You spent all day on boats, Dang.  You had to shower off the day's grime before your wife would let you come close.  Amazing how much crud sunscreen pulls out of the air.

Well, it was too good to pass up.  Isn't that what's bit you before, boy.  No, after a while you start to figure that not all good deals should close.  You have to look at the water rocking around the little tub that holds you and all your others.  Its going to affect everyone so WOULD YOU PLEASE BE CAREFUL? 

In my defense I am proud to admit that I got Julie's OK before I did anything.  As the odds of that were somewhere between . . . , well, not good.  To my surprise she thought it was cute.  Liked the lines and the teak interior.  She kept thinking I was really taking her to look at the whaler tied up next to it and was pleasantly surprised.  I was amazed that an Islander 28, even one built in 1975, can still impress.  Oh good.

to be continued                            HOME