Repair day rather than beach day today.
I fired up the engine to charge the batteries in the early morning and had my first coffee. While drinking this I looked at the charts to choose which anchorage to visit for the weekend.
But the best laid plans of mice and men often fail. While flushing the toilet (luckily as I was putting in clean water) I heard some nasty grinding and crunching. The electric pump motor for the flush cycle stopped turning. That means I’ll have to disassemble the toilet and most likely replace some parts. I hope that the motor itself hasn’t suffered, as those cost over $200 and is most likely not available here in St. Lucia.
Repairs
I’m drinking my second coffee as I write this and realize that I’m looking for excuses to not begin this dirty task. My first step was to ensure that my backup toilet, a manual one, is ready for duty. I opened up the closed through-hulls to the head and pumped away until it primed. Then pumped until it flushed. My backup plan is complete. I know that sealing up the O-ring after disassembly is a lot of effort. I’ll use advice that I got on the internet and remove the whole toilet assembly so that I can re-assemble on its side in order to seal it after my repairs are complete.
Coffee is empty. Blog updated. No more excuses…
Just as with cooking Mise en place, I got the tools, towels, rags, buckets, gloves, bleach and disinfectant and various and sundry items together before beginning.
I didn’t get much further than the initial cleaning and preparation. What a repair day! The picture to the left shows that the toilet is mounted to the boat with 3 bolts. But I cannot see the nuts and am worried that they are not captured. And there’s no access at all to the toilet/shower pan underside so if the nuts drop, they are gone. And I have no way of getting them back on.
I have a borescope but couldn’t locate it until intensive searching located it exactly where I’d started looking. After charging up I spent an hour trying to get the Android app working. Everything worked (resetting, changing WiFi SSID and password) but there was no picture. I finally downloaded an older version of the app and that did the trick. I snaked the scope underneath the shower pan and those bolts are indeed uncaptured, so I’m not going to remove the mounting.
Lunch
I had some more guava and small bananas for lunch and, once again looking for an excuse not to work on the toilet, wanted to get some stand-up paddleboard time. But it was almost completely deflated and when I got it aboard and looked at it, I saw a 10cm long tear in the seam. Naturally this happened 15 minutes before the local chandlery and hardware stores closed for the weekend. PVC-glue is now on my shopping list for Monday. But I did get to swim around the boat a bit to cool off. Unless I come up with something quick, I’ll no longer have anything to do but fix the toilet.
Early afternoon
It is now 15:00 and I’ve been at the @#$%@#$#!@# toilet since lunch. I found a maintenance kit for the toilet so decided to replace the joker valve, but the experts at Jeanneau had placed the assembly behind the plastic. I could reach the nuts but couldn’t get to the screw heads on the inner side. What a mess, it took over an hour to get the 4 screws and nuts undone. Then, upon removal of the old joker valve, I saw that the replacement kit had a completely different size! Another hour later saw the old valve replaced and the screws tightened.
I’ve got the motor removed but needed a break from the confines of the forward head. The wind has died outside which makes it a bit hot belowdecks. In addition, the boat is rolling side-to in the waves and the numerous jet-skis zipping by isn’t helping.
It turns out that the plastic mounting has cracked and is also leaking. The repair day just gets better and better. I’ve got a spare and have used that. The O-ring wouldn’t seat, and I tried using sticky anhydrous lanolin to keep it in the groove while I mount it but that didn’t work. I then used a small amount of Loctite Red in the groove and let it cure for about 10 minutes before attempting the installation. That worked perfectly, and I got it installed first time around! I just had a celebratory ice-cold Piton and now the day doesn’t seem like a total loss.
Evening
I couldn’t be bothered to cook tonight, so I went ashore to the marina for a simple pepperoni pizza. I was finished before the Saturday night crowds arrived.