Shut up, Wrong-Splice Girl

Spring has finally returned to Seattle, and we spent today on the boat, prepping for the trip. We are now down to about 6 weeks until departure, and only 3 weeks until the boat will move to Port Townsend for a haul-out and bottom painting. I learned a few days ago that I'll be doing the trip in two stints. I got a contract for another teaching gig two weeks after we leave. So I'll be returning to Seattle from Vancouver Island, Canada, via bus or ferry or float plane or jet or train for 9 days, then catching back up with Scott again after the job is done. So I was a little bummed yesterday on account of that. But it is hard to turn down a job that could easily equal a full quarter of my meager annual salary.

My main task in trip prep has been to install a sewage holding tank. That's the kind of job you get stuck with when you aren't the list maker (thanks, Scott). But I generally like plumbing. You can't electrocute yourself. If you aren't adding any holes to the hull, you don't really increase the possibility of sinking the boat. And there are not really any expensive components to break. So, aside from dealing with feces, it isn't a bad or risky job to have.

Granted, I've been working on this dumb tank for over 2 months now. First, it is tricky to figure out what size tank will fit in the odd shaped space I have to put it. I finally decided that I could fit a 9-gallon tank if I made a new shelf for it to set on inside the head cabinet space. We lose a drawer in the process, but 9 gallons of extra sewage space outweighed a cubic foot of drawer space. Then I needed to figure out how to tie the tank in with the existing head (toilet, for you land-lubbers). I went with the simplest set-up I could. I added a Guzzler 500h pump to manually pump sewage from the head to the tank. Then I plugged the new tank into the existing pump-out line with new 1 ½" hose. But since the new tank gets shoehorned into the space beside the head sink, it needed to all be installed in the right order, as it cannot easily come in and out of the space. The inflexible sewage hoses all run through a bulkhead into the starboard cockpit lazerette to keep the head area neat and clean and so the hoses don't have to make any sharp corners.

I thought, since I redid the fresh water hoses when I first moved on the boat, that I knew the various hoses of the entire vessel. It really isn't all that complicated. There are only three kinds of hose, and they all look quite different from one another. The fresh water hose is the smallest and is smooth. The bilge hoses (there is one for the shower bilge and one for the main bilge) are a bit bigger and are corrugated. And the sewage hose is smooth and quite large in diameter. Oh, and there is an existing head-vent hose, which is identical to the bilge hoses.

So, to get this tank in place, I first tied the new vent into the existing vent (I thought), then added the tank intake hose so I could measure its length from the new pump to the tank, then cut that hose to the correct length and used the remainder to fit into the existing pump-out tee from the bottom of the new tank. I did that all a few weeks ago. At the time, I thought all I had left to do was add the shelf to stabilize the tank in its new home and attach the hoses, which were pretty much all in place. (All the wrestling I did to just get the hoses in the right spot left me with no energy to fight the barbed fittings on the same day, so I left it for the next work day.)

I saw an interesting news article a while ago that showed an MRI brain scan of a sleeping person. It showed how the brain was reworking the same problems the person faced when they were awake. "Sleeping on it," the scientists said, was an effective way to solve problems because our brains were still working, even when we are asleep. Apparently, our brains work out problems while we are asleep that we don't even know we have yet.

About 2 weeks ago, one Sunday morning, I woke up at about 6:30 am for no good reason whatsoever. And I started thinking about the holding tank on the boat. Suddenly it dawns on me… I wake Scott up. "The main bilge hose is the most forward hose, isn't it? Then the shower bilge hose is next, and the toilet vent hose is aft of the bulkhead." His sleepy reply didn't offer a definitive answer. But my inkling was that I didn't tie the holding tank vent hose into the existing head vent. I tied it into the existing shower bilge hose. The next time we would happen to turn on the shower bilge, it would empty into the new holding tank…

At first glance today, my screw up was obvious. But now, since the holding tank is all set in place with the hoses threaded through the bulkhead, it cannot easily come in and out anymore. Now, what was a perfectly good bilge hose will require a splice, and I will need to replace the vent hose with a new, longer hose to reach to the head vent further aft, and I will need to do the whole thing in an inaccessible space.

I had worked that dang holding tank setup in my head a dozen times. I drew diagrams. I measured and re-measured. I still did it wrong. Certainly it could have been worse. Scott and I easily could have missed the screw up for weeks and not noticed that the tank was filling extra fast. By then we would have been far from a supply store for new hose and splicing fittings.

Now I need to drill another hole through the bulkhead to get to the head vent, which is on the other side of the bulkhead from the tank (and the reason I tied into the wrong one). But we don't have the right drill bit for that sized hose, so the stupid project still isn't complete. I put the holding tank project aside and went to work on a new grab rail that we will place on the overhead just inside the companionway. Meanwhile, Scott tried another approach to removing a broken bolt from the new latch he added to the anchor locker. As he shared with me that another "titanium" bit had broken when he tried drilling the bolt out I added apathetically, "Golly, I can't say how to solve that ordeal, then."

"Shut up, Wrong-Splice Girl," was his response. Not much I could say there. So I silently, indignantly, went back to my grab rail. As I filed away in the teak to shape it to the ceiling angles, I remembered the day my dad worked with my on the boat 3 years ago. He was helping me straighten out the mess of wiring and instructed me to remove a wire that was no longer attached to anything on the other end from a tube of heat-shrink. I carefully cut the heat shrink off and removed the useless wire. When I told him I had removed the wire, I realized at the same time that I had unnecessarily cut away a protective wrapping for the remaining wire. At the same time, we broke into laughter at my ridiculous mistake. Today, I thought, if here were here, we'd have had another laugh at my expense.