Working on a boat
If you are planning on buying a yacht, you must know that all yachts require service, lots of it. I find that you never, ever get caught up. Working on a
boat is almost a full time job. And as a good friend of mine once said, if you wait until everything is done, you will never leave the dock.
So you must understand that things break and usually at the most inappropriate times so working on a boat takes its toll. So unless you have a fat wallet you must know that you will be getting your hands dirty quite often.
But this post is about a real-world event that happened to me the first week in July of this year. This post is simply to illustrate how things happen and how most boat projects turn out. There has NEVER been a 30 minute boat project. Most boat projects turn out to be rather complicated I find.
Day 1
It was just after dinner and Mary was washing dishes when the water stopped running from the galley sink faucet. Shurflo fresh water pumps have a life expectancy of about two years so I figured it was time. So I got out my tools and proceeded to replace the pump. We keep two on hand as backups. The new pump was installed…nothing…still no water; the pump would not start! So I removed the new pump and installed the second new pump…..nothing…working on a boat can be frustrating.
Day 2
The next morning Mary and I packed up the original pump and the new inoperative backup pump and headed to West Marine; only a 25 minute drive. So we got there and I explained to the Manager what had happened. He found it odd that two new pumps could be inoperative; I told him I did too. But he agreed to furnish me a new pump from a different manufacturer. We always buy the extended warranty on these pumps so we never have to buy a new pump. But he stopped and suggested we try something. He got a 12v battery and he tested each pump and both worked. Now I thought how can that be? So we began our drive back home.
Day 3
The next day I began working on the pump again trying to figure out what was going on. I disconnected the supply line to the water system and tried the pump again; it worked this time. Hallelujah! So I reconnected everything and began thinking maybe it wasn’t the pump itself that was the problem. Working on a boat takes a lot of energy. So I thought, let’s open a faucet on another sink to see what happens. I opened the faucet in the guest stateroom and we had water, the pump was working. Mnnnnnn….we have a problem with the galley faucet I think.
Day 4
So on this day I began to disassemble the galley faucet from the sink. I removed the faucet from the sink and literally had to disassemble the faucet itself. When I took it apart I found a huge calcium deposit that was blocking the flow of water. The blockage would not allow the pressure switch on the pump to activate so the pump would not run. So I cleaned everything up, reassembled everything and the pump worked.
Day 6
Now skip two days to day 6. Over the past few days I noticed that there was a lot of air in the system so I figured to give it a day or two to clear if out. But after two days something still did not seem right. The pump ran but there was a lot of air still in the system. So I got back down in the bilge with my tools and began to troubleshoot. There was no leakage so what could it be?
I tightened both the incoming and outgoing connections and lo and behold, I fixed it. The incoming water line fitting was just loose enough to allow the pump to pull in some air.
So after 6 days I finally corrected the problem. So working on a boat can be frustrating but this project is about normal. You must not give up and stay the course.
