Friday 14 November 2014: The joy of repairs and maintenance
******************** BE WARNED: MORE TECHO STUFF**********************

The list of repairs and maintenance contained about thirty job, ranging from half an hour 'cleaning the bilges' to a couple of days 'repairing and maintaining the toilets, replacing through-hulls and large seacocks'. My plane leaves on the 24th of November from Dalaman for three days of R&R in Istanbul.

The first task we (Erdal and I) completed on Tuesday was sanding the underwater part of the hull. As we will use the same antifouling (AF) as last year, we do not have to completely strip off all of the AF, just so that it is a smooth surface again. You need to use a wet sanding method, that pretty much excludes electric sanders unless you can afford a very expensive machine or air-driven equipment requiring a compressor.
Erdal has a secret weapon that made life much easier: a sanding pad on a stick (bottom-left photo). Having sanded AF by hand before with a hand-held sanding pad, I appreciate this approach as it gives you some distance from the fine AF powder in water, a combination that turns you into a Smurf in no time (some drains into your sleeves). It also makes it much easier to reach areas above your head without having to stand on wobbly ladders. Finishing sanding the hull with two took most of Tuesday.
In the process we found a couple of areas around the bow thruster after-sales polyester inset that needed to be cut out and refilled. As it turns out, it is a lengthy process with many coats of gel-shield, each having to dry for hours. It is still in progress, 5 days after the start.

Part of the underwater hull needs to be patched up with AF primer to make sure the new paint sticks well to the hull and the keel needed a lick of metal primer too. We're waiting for the thruster area to be finished before we can progress with the AF primer and painting.

Another big job is to simplify the black-water tank connections in one of the toilets and replace some of the big seacocks (valves) that allows the poop to leave the ship (or be collected in the black-water tanks). It is an over-complicated design involving a Y-valve and we decide to get rid of it. Cutting out the old stuff (it is too tight to unscrew) is not that easy and in the end replacing the valves takes almost a day and we replace the stainless steel valves with plastic ones.
The toilet pumping mechanisms need to be completely cleaned and parts need to be replaced (top-middle). A not-so-nice job which involves rubber gloves and bubbling and smoking green fluids to clean some of the parts. Better not think of what the light-brown stuff is on the inside of the pumping mechanism or why they don't make those gloves a bit thicker. Ahhh, the joys of boat ownership!