Boats and Bears and Trains ... oh my

The crew of The Floating Bear moved back aboard a couple of days ago. Alas, that has not led to any appreciable easing of the work load. The DC electrical system is still a work in progress even though the batteries have found their way to a new home in the starboard side lazarette.  Switch panels are held in place with tape and wiring runs are still being unscrambled.  A whole heap of zip-ties are about to be sacrificed in order to bring order, but at least the lights are working.

There are solar panels to hang and wire, and the water system is not cooperating for reasons as yet to be determined. Massive leaks in the cabin windows are being addressed by actually re-bedding them. By all appearances others have made at least four attempts to stop the leaks. That is the number of different kinds of sealer found piled one on top of another. Needless to say the efforts proved fruitless and the windows leak like screen doors with the first drizzle of rain. It must be admitted that trying to remove said layers is nearly fruitless as well.  One long day of effort is required for each of the four windows.  That task has fallen mostly to Deb as I have been banished to spending my days in the lazarette, tied in a knot of wiring.  There is also a debate raging about the new holding tank install.

The fitting for sucking the nasty away is located at the top of the tank. When I asked about it needing a tube reaching near the bottom of the tank for the system to work properly I was assured by a guru of all things nautical that it would not be necessary. I admit to having doubts. Nomad was - and Kintala is - plumbed with that fitting at the bottom of the holding tank. Normal pump type sucking gets the desired results without the need of enthusiastic vacuum / weight lifting type sucking. If a suck pipe needs installed I would rather do it now than after the tank is full of smelly brown stuff. An internet search did not shed much light on the subject of holding tank sucking in sailboats, and far be it from me to question the sage wisdom of a guru of all things nautical based on my scant experienced with just two such systems.  But I still wonder if that tank needs a pipe stuck in it for a proper sucking to take place. (Advice based on the cumulative wisdom of the gurus of all things nautical who find their way to these musings will not be ignored.)

Other challenges go beyond that of just trying to repair the boat and get the systems working properly. The budget burden has escalated to the point of being crushing. Searching for income to offset the outflow is now solidly in the short term future. (Anyone who could use an pretty accomplished airplane driver in the Miami / Ft Lauderdale area should feel free to speak up. I know where one can be found.) The schedule burden has become impossible. The boat was supposed to leave yesterday for a mooring field near to where Grandson Eldest will be starting school scant days from now. I think he is going to need a note from his boat doctor.


At the moment we have no real clue as to what to do other than get up each morning and struggle on. This is family, those for whom all of us would step in front of a train, if necessary, to keep them safe and whole. What is a Bear in comparison to a train?  And, at least with a Bear, one might actually live to tell the tale.

Cross one more off

As the keeper of the maintenance list now that Tim refuses to look at it, I'm doing a pretty dismal job. After
closing out the house I really found it hard to get too interested in more honey-do stuff. But after a pretty easy morning of finishing up the fitting of the wind vane tower, we were feeling rather guilty about not doing anything so we decided to tackle the holding tank monitoring system install.

We decided on a SCAD single tank monitoring system because it has an external sensor that can go on our plastic holding tank without having to drill any holes or fit any fittings. It's a clean, simple system and we like clean and simple. Unfortunately, Tartan doesn't always agree and continually tries to make access as difficult as possible for things like wires. It took us 4 hours and a completely torn apart interior, but we got it done and we're pretty happy with it. I did hold my nose and open the access panel on the top of the tank so I could see if the Empty on the panel agreed with my eyes. This holding tank was actually a water tank at one point that someone converted to a holding tank, so the pumpout fitting is about 2" short of the bottom and there is always some sludge there. It means that for us our 24 gallon tank actually only holds about 18 gallons so we will have to watch it pretty carefully in the early days of cruising till we see how it goes. At least now we'll have a monitor instead of having to disassemble the V-berth to get  at the access panel to take a look-see.

Nothing like having your mattress on your dining table...