This year’s refit was supposedly a smaller and easier refit than last year’s. That was the plan at least… got to love a plan!
The good
Foot pump serving
For most of the time we’ve had WeatherWitch, the foot pump for the salt water has been ineffective at best. We finally found the time to give them some TLC with a service.
Surprisingly (and a pleasant surprise for once), the pump was actually in pretty good condition though certainly benefitted from a good clean and new seals. I even managed to remember where all the pieces came from. Success! Or so we thought at this point…
After refitting the pump we expected enthusiastically flowing sea water on demand…yet it functioned just as poorly as before. We investigated further by removing the tap….and this did result in very enthusiastically flowing water that had been pressurised by the pump straight into my face (thanks Mike and his “can you just hold that sponge there…”). It turned out that the problem was that the tap was blocked by many mini mussels…nothing to do with the pump at all.
Now we’ve evicted the mussels, the system works great and we’re planning to fit a filter to help reduce the likelihood of surprise mussels again.
The “endless” cleaning
Having tacitly avoided cleaning the bilges we finally accepted that this couldn’t be put off any longer. This resulted in Mike getting to have various amounts of entertainment watching me try to work out which strange position lying on the floor was best to reach the bottom of our deepest bilges. All the wriggling, trying not to fall down surprise holes (“there’s normally a soleboard there!”) and effort was worth it as we now have bilges clean enough to shine (in places!) and can see the keel bolts clearly again 🙂
Sewing time
The front of our sail cover has been irritating us for a while now – it had about twice the amount of fabric as was needed in it and consequently spent most of the time trying to flog itself to pieces and being very noisy while doing so. This refit provided the chance for me to fix this before it turned into more holes than cover:
The frustrating
Mike’s main project was to build a solar arch and fit solar panels to keep WeatherWitch’s batteries topped up as she sits mid-river. We’d gone for a build your own arch design, which turned out to seriously test Mike’s patience and rather deplete our tool supply!
So far the scoring goes:
Tools broken by the steel pipe = 7
Small things escaped overboard = at least 2 allen keys and a selection of annoyingly fiddly grub screws
Completed solar assembly = 0… though we’ve nearly finished the arch now!
My main project (other than all the cleaning) was to replace the aft heads pipework and fit anti-syphon loops so that we would be able to use it at sea. This started off with fewer frustrations than Mike was having with the solar arch, with the old pipework coming out with minimal smell and the new fitting on without too much of a fight.
The frustrations started once we’d fitted everything back together including the new anti-syphon loop on the inlet hose…with the anti-syphon loop in the right position the loo won’t flush! The only way we could get water in was to drop the loop down below outside water level, which completely defeats the point. We then noticed that the electric pump on the heads is leaking badly too…so until we’ve solved both of these issues (the leak as a minimum) the aft heads is now out of action :-/ Not the result we were hoping for!
The unexpected
Ever since we bought WeatherWitch, we’ve been monitoring some staining in the varnish under one of the small hatches to try to work out whether it was getting worse (indicating a leak). This last summer we decided that there definitely was a small leak so reseating and sealing the hatch was on the do list this winter.
Once Mike removed the hatch trim we found that the damage was far worse than we’d realised (when he nearly put his finger through the wood)…oops!
Resealing the screw holes for the hatch does at least appear to have stopped the leak and water has stopped oozing out of the veneer, so now we need to work out removing and replacing the damaged wood and redoing the veneer – a new set of skills to learn!
Lesson learnt: don’t ignore the small things.
