Getting there

Nomad gets a sleek new bottom

Sailing a boat usually involves a destination, be it a cove at the other end of a lake or a harbor in some distant country. (For little Nomad its always the former.) The path to that destination is a bit ambiguous. Zags and zigs dictated by wind shifts, waves, and other boats make "the shortest distance between two points," something that can only be measured after the fact...at least for a sailboat. It turns out getting from the hard to the wet is pretty much the same kind of thing. (Something sailors have known from time immemorial, but this is the first boat Deb and I have ever taken out of the water "for a little work.")

I was down in the starboard lazarette drilling a hole in the forward bulkhead to run some new plumbing into the head, the goal being a shower in Nomad that actually works. I had various tools spread out on top of the holding tank, which is bolted against that same bulkhead and makes a good little work table if one is in that particular hole, when I said to myself, "Why is my shoe getting wet?"

Why was my shoe getting wet? Because the holding tank was dribbling on it though a small hole in the bottom, inboard corner. Not what I was expecting. Trailing out from under my shoe was a faint water stain leading to the bilge. Deb popped the cover off the bilge to discover that The Blob's little cousin was breeding down there. Not as lethal as the original 1958 movie version, but just as disgusting. Hours later the bilge was clean and dry, something that you couldn't say about Deb. She insisted on evicting the alien living in her boat, apparently betting that I would get my share of gross when it came time to pull the failed holding tank and not wanting to miss any of the fun. I won that particular bet. The holding tank popped out of the lazarette in about 10 minutes with nary a whiff of gross.

The errant holding tank

Being on a roll I decided to drop down in the port lazarette and figure out what we needed to make the water heater work. After all, what's the use of putting in a shower if all that comes out of it is cold water? Turns out what we needed to fix the water heater was a new water heater. (It seems 26 year old aluminum tanks and various liquids don't actually play well together. Who would have guessed?) Another turn, a friend had a brandy-new, still in the plastic, 10 gallon water heater for sale at the marina. It took a bit to find 10 gallons worth of space in a place that used to hold 7, but by mid-afternoon the deed was done and Nomad now boasts (or will when the high-tech plastic holding tank arrives) some modern plumbing to go with her new interior parts.

All of this is well and good...headliner, interior panels, steps, swim ladder, new life lines, repaired and painted hatch / seahood, overhauled prop, re-bedded stanchions, shiny bow sprit, cockpit grids, bottom scraped / sanded / painted, shower installed, head faucet replaced, holding tank, water heater, rigging tweaks, chafing tape...but the destination is getting the boat back in the lake. Countless excursions to various supply shops, endless trips up and down the step ladder, bilge dives, lazarette crawls, over births, under settees, from the tip of the bow sprit around and around the hull to behind the rudder post; about the only place I haven't been yet is up the mast. (I need to go up the mast, but up the mast while up on the hard? No thank you. I'll wait until Nomad is back in the water.) Though its just a couple of hundred feet from where she sits to the water's edge, the path between the two is much, much longer.

But we're getting there...