2 Jul 22

We slept in until 09:00; another glorious night’s sleep. The weather was overcast, but warm. After breakfast, John advised he needed to start his engine charge his batteries, so we decided to get going over to Bottleneck Cove. The engine was on at 10:36 and the anchor was aweigh at 10:55, but the anchor wash stopped working, so that is something that will need to be dealt with; fortunately, the anchor came up pretty clean, so I did not put my back out hauling up multiple buckets of water. We motored out of Young Bay into Sydney Inlet, where we picked up a couple of bars of cell service. I deployed the prawn trap in 68 m of water in the middle, while we collected 2 days worth of e-mails and news, then we motored on to Bottleneck Cove, which is another lovely little, totally bullet-proof anchorage, which we have all to ourselves. After a quick lunch, I decided I had better see if I could solve the problem with the wash down system; it has to be either a blockage in the system or a problem with the pump (which is only 2 years old). I started by disassembling the raw water supply system, which is T-eed off of the raw water supply to the forward toilet. Naturally, all the fittings are buried inside the cabinet under the sink in the forward head and virtually impossible to access.  There was no raw water coming into the toilet either, which made a blockage seem more likely. I first got the raw water hose off the toilet hand pump and thought maybe I could pump any blockage back out the pipes/through-hull using an air foot pump, but could not push any air through. So, I disconnected the supply hose to the pump and tried to push air back that way; again, no success. With the supply hose disconnected, I fed water into the hose with a funnel and confirmed that the pump was working fine, which meant it was definitely a blockage. Next, I finally managed to wrestle the hose end off the end of the through-hull fitting; this was an absolute bastard of a job, which was only achieved after I poured large quantities of scalding hot water on the hose to soften it up. Once this hose was off, I opened the through-hull valve and water came gushing through. Which meant a blockage in the hose? Detailed inspection of the hose system revealed that North Island Boat had installed non-return valves in both legs of the raw water line downstream of the T (i.e., one each on the leg to the pump and to the toilet); which explained why I was not able to push air back either of the lines. So, I further disassembled the system and inspected the non-return valves, both of which were completely clogged with seaweed and other muck. Once I cleared those out and reassembled the system, all of which only took about 4 hours, everything worked great. Naturally, during the disassembly of the raw water system, I managed to break the hinges on the toilet seat. So, I spent a few minutes trying to repair it, but it is cheap plastic and not repairable. Hopefully, the Admiral will be able to cope. And, then it was happy hour and dinner time. After dinner, I sort of dozed off for about an hour. When I woke up, the Admirals had gone for a long row around the cove, to check out the starfish. It was a lovely, still evening.

49-26.751’N, 126-12.905’W; Log = 3.4, Sum = 307.9 N-m; Eng. hrs. = 1.5, Sum = 2934.2