Feeling more like a sailor

Seeing as I’m not really a pilot anymore, and soon will be a full time, live-aboard a sailboat vagabond, feeling more like a sailor seems a good goal. Though today all I was trying to do was put water on the boat.


There is hope to never have to do this again, but for last winter we used a little “pink stuff” to keep the water lines from freezing. Getting the “pink stuff” out of the lines so the water doesn’t stink and taste bad is, well, challenging. Filling the tanks, running them dry, and filling them again, usually does the trick; but not this season. Water out of the tap was still foamy and stinky, particularly out of our 79 gallon tank. I prefer using the shower on the boat rather than the public bath house stalls, but not if I end up getting slimed. So all I wanted to do was put some clean water on the boat.

Drained the tanks, filled the 79 gallon tank, filled the 40, and last, filled the 20. Something came up while the hose was in the 20 gallon tank filler. I went below to fiddle with whatever it was and, a few minutes later, found myself walking in the water pouring out from under the wet locker. Yikes! (It really wasn’t that much water, but I still get a little freaked when water is running in the boat where water shouldn’t be running in the boat.) Disassembly initiated to get behind the wet locker. It appeared that the fill hose was leaking at the top so more disassembly was initiated. I couldn’t really see anything wrong but I trimmed the top of the hose back and double clamped it with two new worm clamps anyway.

Result? Just what I should have expected by now; water still pouring into the boat. There is a tangle of wiring back there (apparently boat builders and / or hack mechanics never heard of zip-ties).  Burried in the jungle I spotted some kind of vent loop / siphon break. Hmm, vent loop? Even more “Hmmm”; vent loop screwed to a wooden block but the wooden block no longer fixed to the hull. With vent loop in the spot light (literally, it is dark back there) and wiring shoved out of the way, filling the line resulted in water squirting out of the vent loop with, shall we say, enthusiasm. There is no fancy check valve in this vent loop, just a good sized hole drilled in a bent bit of copper tube.

So I learned something new about Kintala today. After rerouting and zip tying the lines, putting new clamps on the fill line, repositioning the vent line and remounting it to the boat, there is still this …

If one doesn’t want water pouring into the boat when one fills the 20 gallon tank, one shouldn’t overfill it.

I’m feeling more like a sailor already.