I Need to Vent

Our time here in Beaufort, SC is coming to an end.

And it’s time, therefore, to run down the list of things we need to do to get ready to move the boat back to the north to the town of Cambridge, MD that we call “home port.”

The priority items on the list are those that will enable us to anchor out and avoid marinas wherever we can. At this time of year, we will be competing with hundreds of other boaters for space on the water and at the docks; and the relatively modest out-of-season fees we paid these fine establishments on our maiden voyage down here will no longer be so modest on our way back.

Ready, set. . .

So let’s see. Ah, two items in particular stand out.

One: finish the installation of a composting head so we don’t have to pump out the holding tank twice a week.

Out with the old.

Two: get our outboard motor fueled, oiled and running so we can give Honey the Golden Retriever a dinghy ride to a land-based potty break twice a day.

Yep. Everything about living on a boat, it seems, comes down in the end to managing biological waste.

The composting head is a project I got built and installed last week after more than a month here in Beaufort procrastinating on decisions regarding design and materials. (I’ve never been a quality maker of decisions.) So, while I’m on a roll, why not just finish that up by getting the head vented and supplied?

In with the new.

. . . stop.

Half an hour into reviewing my options, I remember why not. I can’t figure out how to vent this thing in a clean and elegant manner.

This was a question I knew I would have to address when I first started the project, the question I chose to ignore two weeks ago in order to release myself from “analysis paralysis” and start building the head cabinet, the question whose answer I thought would reveal itself in time after I had spent two weeks kicking it around in the back of my mind.

The question is this: How do I run a hose to act as an exhaust duct from the back of the head cabinet to a Solar-Powered Vent Fan (Yet To Be Acquired) that must be installed somewhere in the cabin top?

And now that this question’s time has arrived, I remember why I had put it off in the first place: There’s no concealed route by which to run the duct through the hidden parts of the boat; there’s no exposed route through the head compartment that won’t look permanently painful and clunky; and, once the run is done, there’s no obvious way to connect the duct to the Solar-Powered Vent Fan (Yet To Be Acquired).

But wait, there’s more

Then there’s the question of where the Solar-Powered Vent Fan (Yet To Be Acquired) should itself be located. That it must go somewhere through the cabin top is without question, since any other location dramatically increases the chance of water intrusion.

This would, in turn, require cutting a new hole through the cabin top. In this operation, I can expect to encounter the one-inch-thick sandwich of fiberglass and balsa wood that composes the cabin top’s exterior shell, and an interior ceiling comprising a half-inch-thick soft foam insulation (interrupted here and there by mounting battens) under a finish surface of precious vintage naugahyde.

Oh, goody, more new skills to pick up.

An easy way out?

On the other hand, Pam and I had considered avoiding that new hole in our boat by incorporating the Solar-Powered Vent Fan (Y.T.B.A.) into the head compartment’s dorade vent.

Our boat has two dorade vents, assemblies which are designed to introduce fresh air through a cabin top into the interior of a boat while discouraging the entry of water from seas or storms, and which are supposed to be completely closable when the seas or storms become too much for them to handle. I say “supposed to” because one of the vents is stuck closed, admitting no air, and the other is stuck open, blocking no excess water.

The one in the head compartment, the one I would have to modify to vent our composting head, is, of course, the one currently in the stuck-closed position.

Trouble on the inside.

So before I can figure out how to incorporate the S.P.V.F. (Y.T.B.A), I would have to figure out how to fix the concealed working portions of this vent, which means getting to them, which means removing the dorade’s top-mounted wood box, which means removing ten wood plugs covering up ten screws that hold it on to concealed battens that attach it to the cabin top, which means removing the metal-rail pulpit assembly whose legs are blocking the approach of a drill to two of those ten plugs, which means removing the through-bolts securing the pulpit to the cabin top, which means removing the naugahyde ceiling liner and foam insulation layer covering up the bolt ends, which means getting the ceiling liner’s zipper unstuck.

Trouble on the outside.

Yeaaahhhh, that’s not going to happen.

That first option, cutting a new hole through the cabin top, would be, by contrast, “considerably better,” in the sense, at least, of “considerably more direct.”

But I don’t know a thing about cutting through fiberglass-and-balsa sandwiches. And I don’t feel up to taking a crash course on the subject.

And, when it comes right down to it, either option would merely represent the opening round of a carpentry project that could keep us here another fourteen days. A project I am loathe even to start until we’ve acquired the — you know.

And we told the dockmaster we would be leaving in five.

No time like tomorrow

So I guess there’s only one thing left for now. I’ll kick the can (euphemism intended) down the road again, probably until we land in Cambridge a month or so for now. And we’ll see what living with an unvented composting head will be like. And by “be like,” I mean “smell like.”

And that there is some quality decision making.

But I do wonder what Pam will think of the decision.

Meanwhile, where did I put the manual for that outboard motor?

Abandon Ship: Hijinks (and High Water) in the Holding Tank

You may have read recently that my wife and I moved out of our yet-to-become-beloved Meander five nights after moving in.

If not, you can find the full report here. The fact that a sailboat is not a house can make the job of stowing one’s earthly possessions on one quite a challenge, and I noted that several days of this tedious activity on our new boat accounted for half the reason we abandoned it.

This post is about the other half of the reason.

But first, I should let you in on yet another way in which a sailboat is not a house.

Houses, or at least most modern American ones, have permanent sanitary drain lines connecting their toilet fixtures to off-site disposal facilities of seemingly infinite capacity—usually municipal sewage treatment systems or, somewhat less endless, septic fields.

In contrast, Meander’s head is connected to a “holding tank” with a very specifically defined capacity of twelve gallons. (For anyone living in any part of the world that is not, you know, the United States, that’s about 45 liters.)

And Meander’s holding tank is located just forward of the head, where its inspection port penetrates the top of the V-berth in the bow of the boat. And this is the berth that serves as our bedroom. Lucky us.

(One way, incidentally, in which houses and sailboats are similar: The owners of both tend to disguise references to anything associated with the end products of human digestion in coy euphemism. Powder room, water closet, loo. . . head. Septic field. . . holding tank. And if you ask a plumbing engineer what it is that the holding tank holds, he’ll say, “Effluent.”)

Having established all this, I should also mention that the first thing we did on the Tuesday afternoon we moved aboard was, for obvious reasons, to get the head up and running.
________
Just a quick aside here: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that a toilet can account for up to 27% of the 400 gallons a day the Average American Family of Four puts down the drain.

Running a few calcuations to adjust these figures for a family of one (what with Pam having established between us long ago that she has never been in a restroom in her life and our golden retriever, Honey, not yet trained to balance herself on the loo) would not be extraordinarily difficult. And if you were faced with a holding tank not much bigger than the fuel tank on a compact car, it would have occurred to you, an extraordinarily intelligent reader of the type of fine blogging literature most excellently exemplified by this post, to start doing this math immediately.

Therefore, I suspect, you will ask why it didn’t occur to me, a reasonably intelligent author of the type of fine blogging literature of which this post is such an excellent exemplar, to ask the following question until Friday night.

“I wonder how long will it take us to fill the holding tank?”

That was an error.

The next error was, “I’ll figure it out in the morning.”

And as I go on to report that my third error came Saturday morning with one more trip to the facilities, you, my extraordinarily intelligent reader, can already see where all this is “headed.”

What’s that smell coming off the Chesapeake? Bay Bridge patrons want to know.

________

Water on the floor. Water in our bedding. Water in our cushions. Pick up the cushions, and more water rolls across the top of the V-berth. And  onto the floor again.

When Coleridge’s ancient mariner observed, “Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink,” I’m pretty sure he was thinking about the ocean’s high salinity rather than what we were facing.

Having cleaned out restrooms as a busboy in my youth, I am somewhat inured to such things. Distasteful to deal with, sure. But not impossible.

My wife, however, spent part of her youth studying history, and so missed developing such a strong stomach.

On the other hand, she did spend the other part working the service counter in an auto parts store, where she often had to deal with sh*t of a different kind. That’s gotta count for something.

So I wasn’t really surprised when Pam insisted that she be the one, her qualms notwithstanding, to work the forward part of the boat–something about toughening herself up, I guess. Rather, I gallantly decided to express my complete confidence in her by letting her dive in by herself.

She first removed the soaking wet bedding and stuffed it into a plastic bag. Then she passed the soaking wet cushions aft to me for removal to the open air of the cockpit. Then she mopped up the mess on the V-berth and the floor with rags and paper towels. Then she passed our recently stowed clothing aft so I could again get it into the cockpit before it began to absorb odors we did not want to wear.

And when she was done, she turned to me and said, “That’s it. We’ve had enough. Let’s get ourselves to a motel for a few days, use a real toilet, take a real shower, and rest.”

And I replied, “But sweetheart, I’m feeling fine. And isn’t a motel expensive? And shouldn’t you be using a hand sanitizer before trying to hug me?”
________
So after I ducked the soaked and stinking rag she threw at my head, we showed Meander our backs and retreated to a roadside motel about twenty miles from our marina for a few nights. On top of our ever-lengthening stowage battles, that holding tank spill was the next straw.

That’s right, the next straw. My fielding errors do not necessarily mean we’ve lost the ball game. And to misappropriate one of Tom Hanks’ great moments in A League of Their Own, “There is no last straw in cruising.”

So we’ll be back.

But I’ve got to learn to ask faster questions.

________

photo credit: Electricity on the Chesapeake via photopin (license)