Fine weather means working weekend

This was our first weekend with King Malu on the water and since the weather was fine we started on our 'in the water' list of jobs to do.

On Saturday Mark hand sanded the deck areas that need painting. That was a task and a half.

Tim and I started working on the marine toilets. We have Blakes-Lavac Zenith toilets. The one attached to he main cabin has been used extensively and the one attached to the for'ard cabin hardly used at all... at least for about 15 yeasr or so. So we decided to tackle the well used one on the basis that it was more likely to work.

Having changed the seals, we tried it and... nothing happened. So we primed the toilet with sea water and tried again. The Henderson pump emptied the water but none was drawn in to the toilet.

So we removed the inlet from the sea cock and tested that (1) water came out of the sea cock and (2) air could be blown up pipe into the toilet to confirm that water could flow. Put it back together, which is task because the pipe is old and brittle and needs heating with boiling water to be able to put it on the sea cock.

Still nothing happened.

OK, let's try something more drastic. We remove the pipe from the sea cock again and try an old water pump to confirm water really is coming through to the toilet and that there are no leaks in the pipe which might make the vacuum insufficient.

When we connect the pipe horrid brown water comes through so we assume that maybe there was a partial blockage on the pipe, reassemble the whole thing, using boiling water to soften the pipe... again.

Still nothing happened.

Next Tim checks the Henderson pump. Meanwhile I return to fixing the new light in the sail locker. That was relatively simple and worked well. Tim found a few problems with the pump, none the least was that it hadn't been cleaned from the toilet waste for some long time and so was caked, so to speak, in solid matter. He left it in sea water overnight to try and clean it up.

Overnight I downloaded the Blakes-Lavac manual which said that the vacuum should be sufficient to make it impossible to open the toilet for about 30 seconds. The vacuum was nothing like that so no wonder it was not drawing the water through.

While Mark and I washed the deck carefully ready for painting, Tim returned to the delicacies of toilet pumps! The were multiple problems with the pump, the o-ring on the trap was leaking as were the screws. Having found parts from an old pump Tim reassembled a working (almost) pump and the toilet worked (and the pump leaked!)

The wind came up and I painted about two thirds of the deck. I had hoped to get two coats on, but there was no chance of that! The Awlgrip epoxy undercoat is horrid paint to work with but excellent paint as a paint. Worth the pain, but definitely not easy. It's weird paint, like painting with extremely thin school white glue that suddenly becomes extremely thick and gooey white glue as soon as it is painted on the surface. So, it drips everywhere and is difficult to paint evenly!

Final job was to clean off more of the oil from the engine. The engine is cleaning up nicely. Tomorrow I hope to use Kurust on parts of it prior to Hammerite painting it.

Bending over for so long was really backbreaking and when I got home that evening Sue said I was not standing up straight for a few hours.