This weekend was again time for hauling Iris out of the water and give her a fresh bottom job. In spite of having been in the water for 16 months Iris's hull was pretty clean when she was put on the dry. I guess there are two reasons for this: the superb quality of the EU 45 antifoul, and the reduced marine life in Port Ginesta since the expansion of the marina (Iris's berth is now much farther away from the harbor entrance).
So it was again time for the traditional pressure hosing, sanding and painting. This time however, I took advantage of the stay on the dry to replace the two toilet seacocks. For more info on the state of the Wauquiez thru-hulls read the next blog entry. On one of these thru-hulls one of Iris's previous owners had installed directly a bronze tee on which two valves were mounted (one for the head water intake and another one for the sink outlet. This was in my view a rather dangerous setup (3 failure-prone connections instead of one). Moreover the tee and valves were completely rusted. So I installed two new 1 1/4" bronze seacocks and solved the forking towards head and sink by means of a plastic two-way valve behind the first seacock. The second seacock is for the head discharge.