So I was having a perfectly fine day…. I had written in an email to Katy that I was finally not feeling like I was playing catch-up (yeah… obviously the 1st mistake). I send that email on the Iridium and download messages; another sign of a good day I had 6 messages to download (that does count in the weather file, and a message sent twice ,but still..). One of the messages…. Oops be right back… high wind alarm just went off, got to go cancel it… I’m back… was from dear Nathaniel who, among many nice things, told me “… and paps if you get bored just lift up the floor boards and clean the bilge”.. smart ass; although I wasn’t bored, it was a good day and admiring a clean bilge on a good day isn’t a bad idea… damn alarm again, maybe I’ll set it at 30kts instead of 28. Done. The computer weather files have been calling for 21kts of breeze but we’ve been getting the upper 20’s for a good 12hrs. The waves are getting big but not dangerous at all. It’s easy sailing because we’re going downwind…..OK back to the story: So I lift up a floor board which was altogether a pretty dumb idea if you subscribe to the ostrich’s approach to problems. So of course the bilge was not clean. But there were good reasons for that: following a stupid mistake when we put the boat in the water one of the diesel tanks overflowed and of course I cleaned it back then (Raiatea used to be a tropical paradise before I was done cleaning that up) but with the waves we’ve been having, the rest of it found it’s way to the bottom. So that could be expected. There was also water of the saline persuasion. Not much, maybe a gallon and a half, but enough to piss me off – more on that later. But there was also a red liquid, about a gallon’s worth as well; red liquid? Oh no, could it be the source of so much hatred on my part, Dextron III hydraulic fluid? And sure enough when I checked the spare containers of hydraulic fluid, one had essentially lost its cap… and its contents, in every nooks and crannies of the bilge. It doesn’t sound like much of a problem but it is the context that matters. Although it was not a safety issue, cleaning up the mess was awful: hydraulic fluid is very slippery (it’s like oil) and it’s awful to handle (the latex gloves might keep surgeons from getting AIDS but certainly found their match with Dextron III: they lasted about 5’ on my hands before disintegrating). And the mixture of hydraulic fluid, diesel and sea water had gotten everywhere with the motion of the boat. Now, floor boards on a boat have one purpose: making the floor flat; you remove them and you have stuff everywhere: hoses, structural aluminum frames and stringers, lots of structural frames and stingers, electrical cables…etc…. So with the floorboards out what I had was a slippery obstacle course of about 30sqft with the biological warfare mixture everywhere. So I start with my sponge and my trusty little basin, trying to sponge out the mess. Of course since the floors are out, there isn’t a flat place to rest my little basin. But also as I have mentioned above we’ve been having some pretty rough weather; the sailing is grand but you do have to hold yourself, and poor little basin took flight a few times emptying itself in the process and spreading the mess. OK fine so I empty little basin more often. By now, I have the fucking mixture of hydraulic fluid diesel and sea water all over me and thus going outside to throw the stuff over board (yeah by then my environmentalist sensibilities are far gone!) is quite an undertaking and I tread the stuff everywhere: everything is slippery as hell ,nothing is flat, and the boat jerks around, and the place to hold on to are slippery as well. So more fluid gets spilled on the way out as well, so more clean up and a sainthood for the inventor of paper towels. The whole thing took several hours.
As for the source of water….. it’s a continual fight between me and a leak in the chain locker. In rough seas water gets in the chain locker forward (which is fine) but then finds its way aft to the main section of the boat. The first time I noticed it, it was on our 1st Atlantic crossing with Evan and Nathaniel, and the leak was pretty drastic: we probably had 20 gallons of seawater in the bilge. So every time I haul out the boat I empty the chain locker look for a possible pathway for the water and weld it shut. Now I’ve done this 3 times and the leak is greatly diminished but still there. And this last time, in Raiatea, I really thought I had nailed it. I had discovered a circuitous way that water, endowed with a malicious soul, could conceivably go aft by first going forward…. Don’t ask! But no sir, it did do it, there is still a trickling. The only way now is through portals in the 7.5th dimension using topological non-trivial interdimensional tunneling…… and I just don’t have the right tools to deal with this onboard.