Morty had a good day! He got to play with Ginger all day while we worked on the tiny house.
Ginger loves her tennis balls, and the happiest day of her life is when she learned how to carry two tennis balls in her mouth. Morty likes to steal her tennis balls and run around her. While she is considerably faster than he is, he always escapes by running under her!
The two of them will play, then relax, then play some more.
Now it is time for sleep, and he is ready for bed with a smile on his face!
I originally built Tooth to fit upside-down on the deck of Wisdom, but I eye-balled the space available instead of measuring. Don't do this! I spent months building Tooth, only to find out that it is too long to fit on the deck. Tooth is a great row boat, but is forced to live in the water.
When it rains, Tooth fills up with water and slowly sinks down as the water inside rises. After each rain, I would pump out Tooth with a hand pump. When we are on a trip, I would try to position Tooth next to Wisdom and hang over the side to pump the water out of Tooth. It takes me around 20 to 30 min to pump all the water out of Tooth after a good rain. When we were in choppy conditions, it would take me almost an hour and the whole experience was miserable!
These past 2 weeks have been constant rain and I finally got tired of running my hand pump. I went to West Marine to get a lever action manual bilge pump to mount on a board with some long hoses that I could drop into Tooth and take the water right out! While I was there, the store manager talked to me about a battery powered electronic bilge pump.
As you may have noticed, I have my biases:
I just feel that they they are waiting for the perfect time to fail you when you need them most! For these reasons, I prefer the manual approach to everything. You can spot a problem that is developing and fix it before it actually becomes a problem.
When he told me it was electric, my first concern was having enough battery power to run this pump and running the wires to power the pump. Then he told me it is self contained battery powered! Once again, my thought was trying to keep the re-chargable batteries would be a nightmare on the boat.
Then he told me that they run on 3 D batteries! I carry batteries in Tupperware for flashlights and other electronic devices, so powering a the pump with disposable batteries when it's needed is right up my alley!
The pump is simply lowered into Tooth and it pumps all the water overboard! I can easily do this from the side of Wisdom via a lanyard and retrieve the pump once the boat is dry. I tried it out at the pier, and it worked wonderfully. It took around the same amount of time as my old hand pump but it also took no effort! When Tooth was dry, I was not tired with a sore shoulder.
While I don't typically rave over electronics, this pump is awesome. Best of all, if it does fail, West Marine has a wonderful warranty policy through their Plus Plan. The pump is not "installed" in the boat, so I can easily take it in and pick up a replacement! If it does fail, I still carry a manual hand pump to pump out Tooth.
Two white ducks arrived in the marina a few days ago! These ducks are very friendly, coming up to people (expecting food to be tossed at them).
The usual duck population consists of mallard ducks which are weary of people. They usually swim around the boats and keep to themselves, but these new ducks will swim right up to the side of the pier!
I personally don't interact with the ducks in the marina since I don't want any viruses or diseases to be transmitted to my parrot Sammy, but it is nice to see some new faces swimming around the marina!
While I do feel that these two ducks may have been pets that flew away and found themselves here, it is still nice to see a bit more biodiversity in the marina fauna.
As mentioned before, everything you have while living aboard will eventually fall into the water. Many friends that come to visit us have dropped their phones, car keys, and wallets into the harbor; lost forever.
Luckily (knock on wood) I have never dropped anything important into the water by following a few simple rules.
1. Never pull anything out of your pocket while on the pier.
2. If you plan on pulling something out if your pocket while on the pier or deck of the boat, put it in a pocket by itself.
3. Never pull anything out of your pocket when you are drunk. (Batman Dave dropped his cell phone, wallet, boat keys, and car keys into the harbor on Halloween while dressed as batman)
4. If you have zippers on you pockets, keep them zipped shut.
Most items are lost when you pull something out of your pocket and it slips from your hand or pushes something else out with it. For example: you take your phone out of your pocket and your keys are hooked on the corner. When the phone comes out, the keys fall. You reach for your falling keys and open your hands to catch them before they fall into the water, but you just let go of your phone! You watch as both your phone and keys fall into the water and sink to the bottom.
If you must pull something from your pocket, do it over land or inside your cockpit/cabin. It only takes a few moments to do this and it will save you a lot of frustration. If you are expecting a call, or your phone in a pocket alone. If you are not expecting a call, let it ring and call them once it is safe to retrieve your phone from your pocket.
Lastly, it would behoove you to get insurance on your cell phone. I have my phone through Verizon and the sales representative told me: If your phone falls into the harbor, simply report it as "the harbor stole my phone" and the insurance will cover its replacement.
Try to avoid the frustrating moment when you drop something in the water, it only takes a few simple steps to keep it from happening but it takes a long time to replace whatever falls.
We came home from dinner one day and Maddie told me: "It's time to clean the bilge".
We don't have any issues with bay water leaking into the bilge, but we do have issues with rain water! It gets in through different places and works its way into the bilge where it begins to "grow". What starts off as innocent rain water mixes with Morty's fur and general dust that accumulates in the bilge. After a few months or so, it begins to develop an odor which Maddie's sensitive nose can detect. When the Admiral gives the order, I do as commanded!
Cleaning the bilge isn't as difficult as it may seem. Yes it's deep and I can hardly reach the bottom of it; but since I keep it pretty clean, it's never that daunting of a task.
A variety of bilge cleaners exist, some use caustic and harsh chemicals, others hardly do anything at all. I strongly caution you away from using the harsh and caustic chemicals, because these cleaners will be dumped into the water shortly. I use Simple Greene because it works really well and is biodegradable.
If your bilge has never been cleaned, you will have to get in there and scrub the crud off the walls and floor of the bilge. If you have a deep bilge (common in full keep boats), you will need a scraper mounted on a long stick. My bilge is around 4 feet deep and is a nightmare to reach the bottom (hence my knowledge of the scraper stick).
If your bilge is very dirty, I highly recommend cleaning it. This is not because of smells, or aesthetics, or bragging rights, but because of safety. If you have a lot of crud and gunk in your bilge and you spring a leak, all of that stuff can clog the strum box and stop your bilge pump from pumping. If left unchecked, your boat could sink!
After the initial cleansing of the bilge, subsequent cleanings are pretty easy to carry out. I simply pour some simple green into the bilge and drop a hose down into the bilge. I let the hose run for a while to suds the bilge up a bit and bring the water level higher than the strum box.
With the hose still running, I go outside to the bilge pump lever and begin pumping.
I pump the lever until I stop seeing suds bubbles form on the surface of the water around the boat. Simple green will have some bubbles, but they pop rather quickly and disappear. When I can't see bubbles anymore, I go inside to see how the bilge looks.
If the water in the bilge is completely clear, I pull the hose up and shut it off. Then I return to the pump lever and finish pumping out the bilge. As the strum box reaches the bilge waters surface, it will begin to gurgle. This is a good time to stop pumping as no more water can be drawn out of the bilge.
I then take a shop vac with a long hose and suck out the rest of the bilge water. While you have the shop vac in the bilge, it's a good idea to vacuum the strum box intake, incase any debris is laying on it. Now that the bilge is completely clean and dry, the smell that was just beginning has now vanished.
