head rebuild and anchor rode marking

Christy's favorite thing in the world ever is definitely not writing blog entries. She's had one in the works for a couple weeks now but just never found the gusto to finish it. Now that none of the vowels work on our laptop keyboard, the chance of that writing seeing the light of day is pretty small.

So I'm going to take a quick minute out of my busy work schedule and update y'all on what we've been up to on Hello World. We have two heads on board, both of which are usually in some state of disrepair. The forward head is clogged - we don't talk about it. Then the aft head stopped pumping seawater at some point. Christy took a keen interest in getting at least one of our toilets to work already dammit so she read up on the inner workings of a marine head. She made a run to Fisheries to purchase a head rebuild kit. Then back to the boat and dove right in. She tore the head apart, replaced all the gaskets inside, greased it up, re-assembled it and now ... it works! How many women in this world will willingly take apart a marine toilet, rebuild and reassemble it? A select awesome few, that's how many.


Christy re-assembling the toilet on our galley counter. Think twice before accepting a home-cooked meal on our boat.






Turns out, the problem was the gasket was getting deformed and allowed air to draw into the pump preventing seawater from getting pulled in instead.


Happily reassembled!

Meanwhile, while Christy's doing the dirty work, I took advantage of the weather to organize our chain locker. After anchoring last, our chain was covered in whatever schmook we anchored in. I pulled the anchor off and all the rode out of the locker and flaked it on the dock in 25' lengths. I hosed down the rode and inside of the chain locker. The previous owner used colored zip ties to mark lengths on the anchor chain. I never could figure out his system of marking the chain so I re-did it like so:

Red ziptie = 25'
Purple ziptie = 100'

For example, at 75' of anchor rode, we have red red red. At 150' of anchor rode, we have purple red red. Some advice that I received while working on it that I'll pass on to you:

• Leave the tails on the zip ties. If you cut the tails off, the zip ties become really sharp which will transform your rode into razor wire and your hands into hamburger. The windlass won't chew them up as quickly as you'd think. The PO left all the tails on and they were still there.


• Put the ties on separate links. If you have a sequence like purple red red red all on the same link, it can be hard to make out the pattern when the chain is flying by you. Especially at night. It's much easier if you put each zip tie on it's own link.


• We have 200' of 5/16"HT chain and 200' of 3/4" 3-strand nylon line. I started the markers over at zero once the nylon line started. Mostly because I didn't have enough zipties to do 375'. But also because I'm capable of adding 200' to whatever the markers on the nylon read.


• When marking the 3-strand line, I unlaid it and wrapped the ziptie around a single strand to keep the ziptie from migrating up or down the rode.

Tht's ll fr nw, mr ltr!