Today marks one month of traveling for Christy and I but this day does not turn into much of one to celebrate.

Starts out fine. I’m up early as usual, make a coffee and check emails. About 7 am the coffee starts to work its magic and I go to the aft head for relief so as not to disturb the still sleeping Christy. This is one of those deposits that makes you feel 10 pounds lighter because it is about 10 pounds (once again, sorry for the imagery). Go to flush. Doesn’t go down and the macerator sounds like it is full of pennies.

Not good.

After a couple tries the macerator won’t even turn on via the button.

Very not good.

I’m going to have to dissemble the thing. Only problem is the toilet bowl is full of you-know-what. Put on my work shorts. Have to bail it by hand into a bucket via an old paper coffee cup, then soak up the remainder with a soon-to-be-discarded dishwashing sponge. Not a fun job and I know there is still lots of, um, fluids in the pipes that is going to come out when I take them apart. Fluids and solids it turns out. Wotta mess. Crap all over the bathroom floor, luckily these heads can be just hosed down which I do several times over the process.

Takes me a while to get the screws off the pump housing and to take the pump apart. Have to cut the electrical wires behind the wall to get at it. It is full of hair and gunk and I don’t know what. Take it all apart, somehow managing not to gag. Clean it up nicely, put 12V to it via my handy dandy battery setup and it spins freely. OK, that’s that done. I put it together, rewiring again, it works beautifully. Just clean up now and get back on with our day.

Not so fast Sparky.

While cleaning up, the shower sump pump keeps running, stopping, running, stopping but not actually pumping anything out. I actually switch it off as I’m finishing the toilet cuz it starts running continuously. Now I turn my attention to it as I need it to be able to hose down the bathroom and pump out the junk.

Pump is going, water not leaving. Sigh. I suppose whatever was blocking the toilet is now blocking the sump pump. I know there is a joint in the hose that leads from the shower basin to the pump – when we first got the boat this had an air leak and so the pump system never worked until I discovered and fixed it. Now I reckon this may be where the trouble is. Luckily it is somewhat accessible. I pull it apart and it has a bunch of hair and stuff in it (the word stuff there suits all kinds of material). As I try to clean it, the piece of metal joining the two plastic pipe lengths pretty much collapses in my hands. Can’t put these two hoses together again. That’s OK, I have a spare hose and always wanted to replace this anyway.

Got nothing else to do today. Not!

To replace this hose I have to dismantle the shower basin completely, attach the new hose to the old one to feed it through the tiny space under the bathroom floor, then reassemble everything. Keep in mind the whole shower basin is still awash in, uh, effluent. Christy pulls while I feed. With hardly any blood shed, I get the new hose in place. Turn the pump on. The pump cycles but water is not leaving the basin. Either the pump itself is blocked or the outflow pipe is blocked.

I connect another spare hose to the out side of the pump and put the other end in the toilet. It pumps water out of the shower sump into the toilet no problem. Outflow pipe is blocked. I try a few things but soon give up, will have to tackle that another day, we have a few chores that can no longer wait and it is already about 2 pm.

I clean myself up and we take our sorry dinghy, with the bumper hanging off again after a bad day at the PAYS dock on the long dinghy ride over to the Customs dock. Christy sits in the front of the boat so she can hold on to the bumper while we drive slowly. We’ve not gone far before we’re both drenched because the boat can’t plane like this and the waves just crash in on both of us.

We make it to the big dock at Customs (it’s a freighter dock with a little appendage for smaller boats like dinghys). Find our way into Customs, there’s 5 people in front of me so takes a while. Finally done, we go to pay the EC$15 fee for using the dinghy dock. We thought that was robbery until they tell us it’s actually EC$30!! No charge for Customs, EC$30 to use the dock. Next time we will take the bus for EC$2.

Slow ride back to the main Portsmouth dock where I will go to Immigration next. Not quite so wet, but still wet. There’s a bit of a mixup at Immigration but they eventually get it sorted out and we are cleared for takeoff on Thursday. Even got our passports stamped.

Now on to the other job we had planned for today – regluing the bumper for the umpteenth time. We gather our materials and head on over to the beach by PAYS. Get set up and I pull out the 3M 4000 glue – turns out this particular tube is 75% solidified and not much good. It will have to do though, we can’t go get another right now. It does do most of the bumper, back at Milu we’ll get another tube out and try to finish it off.

The best thing that happens today happens next. I use gas to clean off all the 3M 4000 from me and my knife. Throwing out the mess of gloves and glue, I see there is a market for the Salty Dawg crowd. Christy and I go to check it out, though it is mostly trinkets. One of the vendors is having a popsicle. She tells me where she got it and we go get one each from a little mini mart we never noticed before.

Neither of us can remember the last time we had a popsicle but these are oh so good.

Dinghy slowly back to Milu, add some more glue, then string her up for the night so hopefully the glue will dry.

Been a tough day. We were hoping to have a fairly chill day, just go to Customs and fix the dinghy but the plumbing issues changed that.