Electric is Now Fixed So How About a New Disaster!

After an uneventful flight I arrived at the Knotty Cat and was very pleased to find that our electrical issues had been resolved. A wire inside our brand new inverter had come loose (and it took three hours for the electrician to rip it apart and put it back together). I'm sorry to say that I'm not a very gracious winner because I immediately said, "I told you so!" I just knew it had to be the inverter, but I'm glad to report that it's humming along very nicely now.

A disemboweled Knotty Cat nav station.















Our girl loves some attention.












This is just a small part of what I arrived to. But it's my fault because I told Hans not to put anything away.
I know where everything goes and I don't want to spend the next two weeks finding my canned goods in a drawer, the towels in a locker, and the toilet paper in the pantry.






I arrived Monday night, put everything away, and on Tuesday we were up and ready to go. We dropped the dinghy in the water, rolled up the solar panels, Hans was getting ready to bring in the electric cord and start untying spring lines etc... when I got the brilliant idea to sweep the salon carpet. So I opened up the port side closet (located on the far side of the berth) where the sweeper is stored, and screamed at the sight of three feet of water happily sloshing around in the locker.
I felt just like Chicken Little who screamed, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" because I ran up the steps and out to the cockpit like a crazy women screaming "The boat's full of water! The boat's full of water!"
Hans very calmly climbed over the berth and said, "Where the hell is this coming from?"



The back of the locker has yet another door to a small storage space and it too was full of water.



















Looking down in the locker.That's 3 feet of water down there.













After thinking we'd need to go buy a pump, Handy Hans decided to try syphoning it out first.

Some day I'll get the concept of holding both ends of a full hose level (I'm sure the berth and cabin carpet will dry out).
















The bilge happily sucked up the dirty locker water and sent it on its way!













Once we determined that the water was fresh and not brackish (thank God!) we had to figure out which of our many hoses this water was coming from. Each of our water tanks is under our berths. And of course this was the port berth where I'd loaded all of our provisions, including cases of pepsi and gingerale, boxes of canned food, our luggage (we're flying home) and anything I just wanted out of the way.
In order to get the water tank all of this stuff (including the mattress) had to be hauled up to the salon.



When I had to go over the the starboard berth and check out the plumbing in its locker, I had to crawl on my stomach to get past the mattress. For once I'm glad to only be five feet tall.

We finally figured out the leak was not from the water tanks but was coming from this hose.

What is it?

It's a locker on the front of the boat and that is its drain. Why someone felt the need to pass a drain through an inside locker is beyond us.

Here is the nice new hose after Hans got it installed.

And here it is where it drains to the outside. The top hose is a drain from the sun pad area. It looked pretty nasty so we replaced it too.

It took about an hour to get the lower hose off its fitting. Its placed in such a way that we couldn't get leverage and cutting it was difficult because its wire enforced.

In addition to that, the hoses snaked through two inner wall openings and there was barely room to yank them out and force the new ones through!

I can't imagine what we would have done if I hadn't gone to get that sweeper! And since I rarely use that locker I'm not sure how long it would have been before we discovered our indoor swimming pool.

We checked the starboard berth and were surprised to find its hoses are relatively new. You have to wonder why they didn't replace the port ones at the same time!

We lost the entire day and my ice maker got a good workout!

Today we are on our way! We're taking 20 knots on the nose and the rain has let up. I'm hoping we don't run into the thunderstorms that are predicted but tomorrows forecast is calling for west winds and we hope that holds!