How to run a messenger line

These past two weeks of (planned) vacation, we've ended up doing too much (unplanned) boat project work. Ugh. But we've gathered a bunch of ideas from some experts on running messenger lines that we thought useful to pass along...here are the big three:

1) Gravity: tie something flexible and heavy to your line at the top of the run and use gravity to do the trick. A bike chain or a line of nuts seems to work pretty well in some applications.

2) Magnet: using (non-stainless) bolts or some other metal tied to your line, get yourself a decently powerful magnet and lead the line where you want it to go from the outside.

3) Vacuum: tape off all other inlets/outlets, use your shop vac to pull a string tied with Kleenex through the run (this worked particularly well on our bow pulpit).

And when you finally get to running your electrical wire, decide on a suitable knot (we use 1-2 rolling hitches) and grab that KY Jelly from the bedroom and put it in your toolbox.

New drink recipe

I'm not one to mix stuff into my beer. This whole clamato-juice-in-beer thing just doesn't do it for me. But tonight, I was convinced to try shandy (thank you Kevin and Nicole). What is shandy you ask? It's very complicated:

1/2 glass lemonade
1/2 glass cheap beer



It's delicious. Very refreshing, and as Kevin pointed out, you can drink it all day and be fine. I plan to attempt this tomorrow while working on boat projects.

graffiti

While in Hot Springs Cove in 2009, we followed the tradition of carving our boat name into the boardwalk. We spent a day working on the board to get it just right. Our friends Aaron and Nicole aboard s/v Bella Star were just in Hot Springs Cove and notified us that our board has been defaced.


Our board.



We just can't have nice things.


(Note: we have come to realize that since not everyone know's Aaron's sense of humor, not everyone realizes that this little practical joke is something Aaron relishes and has been planning for weeks. There was no permanent defacing, just temporary enough to crack us right the hell up.)

Sometimes money does buy happiness

We have a few closely held beliefs on Hello World.

Money doesn’t provide happiness. These days it seems like we’re always after the bigger and better gadget. More stuff. Bigger house. Need more money to get more stuff. Even on the boat, where we can’t fit much of anything, we find that when we’re docked, we accumulate stuff so quickly. I know deep down that it’s just stuff. Stuff and money don’t make us happy (but it’s still hard to get rid of all of those shoes). We know this. It’s what we believe.

We do all of our own work on the boat. There have been exceptions here and there, when we simply don’t have the expertise to do a particular job, but for the most part, we’ve done just about all of the work and upgrades on Hello World. We’ve done this for 2 reasons: we’re always saving for the next trip (it’s so much cheaper to do it ourselves). And it’s really important to us to know the systems on our boat; be able to fix them if (when) they start acting up – especially because we’re likely to be in the middle of nowhere and have no one to rely on.

Last week, in a flurry of boatyard activity, working real jobs, prepping for multiple weekends out of town and fighting with insurance companies, we just couldn’t take it anymore. We could have prepped and painted the bottom (in fact, we started), but the prospect seemed daunting to both of us and we were completely unmotivated. Neither of us wanted to broach the idea, but we both were thinking the same thing; wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pay someone to do this for us?

We justified it to ourselves by saying Jason would have to take off of work to do the painting. That, in the end, the money was about a wash. But the reality was, we just didn’t want to do it. Enter the professionals.

We continually discover ways in which we are not nearly as hard core
as we thought we were. But then, maybe there's a little happiness in
that, too.


(before the brilliant idea to pay someone else to do this...)

Dear Jabsco,

Thank you for manufacturing the cheapest toilets out there, but your products are supposed to dispose of crap, not be crap.

Love,
Hello World



Well, we finally dumped the ol' Jabsco in the trash. It was a long time coming. We decided while in Mexico that we will never allow Rule/Jabsco products on the boat any longer. We still have 1 residual toilet in the aft head, but it's been out of commission longer than I can remember. Therein lies the issue. They're cheap, yes, and you get what you pay for. Even after downsizing to one head so we could cannibalize parts in Mexico, our one working toilet still leaked because of cracks in the cheapo plastic, important parts breaking off, etc. We tried to convince all guests aboard Hello World that the leak was in the inlet hose (not the poo hose!) - I'm not sure anyone ever really believed us.

ANYWAY. Enough of my rant. We got a new Lavac!



Not only is it pretty, it doesn't leak. Also? It works. The mechanics are amazingly simple. The installation, as with any head, were a bit of a pain in the a**, but it's finally in and we can invite people over without embarrassment :)

A few lessons that I learned:

1. I feel like I finally got the hang of removing and installing sanitary hose (I know, this is exciting stuff). The secret?? KY Jelly on the inside of the hose and the outside of whatever you're putting it on. Then add heat (both the heat gun and the hairdryer worked well). I had tried these options separately before, but together, that's the ticket. Now we can be embarrassed about guests finding our KY Jelly, instead of our leaky head...
   
   
2. As much as I love that the hoses are hidden with our bulkhead mounted pump, it was a serious hassle to install and it will be a hassle to take apart if ever we need to take it apart. I'm still happy we went with the hidden hoses, but I had a different opinion this past weekend. I'm bi-polar like that.
   
   
3. The key that no one ever writes about? When installing a Lavac, it requires a tiny hole at the top of the inlet hose loop so the vacuum will release. The size of this hole determines the amount of water left in the bowl. That much is well documented. What they don't tell you is that if that inlet line doesn't go straight to the toilet (ours dips to the floor then back up to the toilet), that hole needs to be at the highest point just before the toilet. Normal people wouldn't run their hoses this way, but we wanted to use existing holes in the cabinetry.
   
   
4. And finally, thanks to some advice from our friends on s/v Former Pisces, we rummaged through the lockers and found some canned goods that we will never eat. Instead of testing the head with real "product", we used this stuff (which may actually be nastier). This way, if there was a leak or a problem, we're not dealing with even more poo.

Jamon de Diablo - Ham of the Devil. Maybe I was drunk when I bought that? I don't know what I was thinking...


Anyway, all things considered, it was a "relatively" easy job (maybe because I'm comparing this to the aforementioned fridge project). Only 3 trips to Fisheries, 3 trips to the hardware store and about 2 days of swearing. So far, that's about 42 times easier than the fridge project...which is nowhere close to done.


You didn't think we'd do an entire post about the head without the obligatory plumbers butt picture, did you?