Whilst looking for a way to route the waste water pipe on our water-maker, Bruce noticed that one of our exhaust pipes had virtually collapsed in the most inaccessible part of Flirtie.

We believe the VETUS exhaust hose to be original (circ. 27 years) so we can't complain given that the recommendation is to check and consider replacement every 10 years. With this in mind we thought it prudent to replace the lot, some 12m of it, 6m per engine.

Sourcing the exhaust hose should have been straight forward until we found out that the local chandleries only stocked the local brand Osculati which had an external diameter greater than some of our existing access holes which would have presented us with a problem. Thankfully RI.M.A.N., a chandlery on the outskirts of the city saved the day! This company seems to be the only chandlery in Cagliari who are a distributor for other well known nautical brands found across Europe. Hence an order was placed with VETUS in Holland and was received in 10 days. Excellent service we think!


out with the old, in with the new

Unfortunately to replace the hose we needed access to a lot of areas at the same time - from underneath the saloon floor through to the aft cabin (underneath the floor and our bed) and an outside locker resulting in an awful lot of upheaval for a couple of days. It wasn't particularly easy because the existing exhaust hose had taken on the shape of the hull so we ended up cutting it up into smaller sections in order to remove it whilst taking care not to accidentally cut the spaghetti of wires and other pipes that lay on top and around.


just a few wires and pipes to contend with!

With the old exhaust hose out, we then enlarged (or sanded in some cases) some of the access holes in the bulkheads before feeding through the first 6m length of unwieldy exhaust that now had to be laid underneath the spaghetti of wires and other pipes already in place. Then we repeated the same exercise for the remaining 6m before finally reattaching the ends back onto their respective engine water locks (designed to prevent water backflow to the engine) and goose necks (prevents seawater from entering the engine).

As usual, being inquisitive we just had to take a closer look at the corroded part and surprisingly despite the steel being totally corroded the rubber was still intact... but for just how much longer we will never know.


corroded hose