Category Archives: Product Reviews

My Little Sea Pony

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The morning dawned bright, with the promise of heat. At the marina, it stretched out before me, a blank slate begging for a plan, so as to not slip away without being defined by some sort of satisfaction of a job well done. The time had come to wash the teak and apply a few coats of Semco finish. Mike had gone on a few errands, I had a book loaded on my phone to listen to. I was ready to begin.

Really low tide. Blue skies. Warm. It doesn’t get better than this in August. Aside from the smell.

As I got out the teak wash and a bucket, Mike appeared, back surprisingly early from his errands. He looked, I don’t know, like he had something on his mind, maybe. There was definitely a ‘look’; an urgency he radiated. But I was not sure how to read that.

“I need to tell you something.”

These are the words that tumbled out of his mouth, apparently without his thinking about it. Let me just go on record here: if you are married to someone who is waiting patiently (like yourself)  for the next round of cruising, crossing her fingers that nothing in life will prevent that from happening, if you have adult children, or aging parents, or either of you has had to address health issues, or basically, let’s get real, if you are in any kind of relationship at all… do not begin a conversation with the words, “I need to tell you something.” That generally precedes a telling of some kind of thing that means: “Life as you have come to enjoy it, is about to change, and not necessarily for the better. That peaceful, calm existence you have had for maybe two days is about to end early. The day you have been dreading and didn’t even know it has arrived.”  ‘I need to tell you something’ is right up there with ‘We need to talk’ in terms of popular conversation starters.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach and I cried, “What?? What happened? What’s going on?”

You may think I over reacted. and perhaps so, but there is precedent to that, as any parent knows. My mind immediately goes to something happening to one of our kids. If it’s not them then it’s one of the moms, a bad report from some doctor, or maybe someone has vandalized our car, our house… all of it crashes around jockeying for position in my head. I’ve lived long enough for any or all of those things to be true. Anyhow, now Mike is irritated that I have taken his warning incorrectly, but my stomach remains unmoved, on the ground, waiting.

Then he lays it on me:

“I’ve decided I have to give you a birthday present a day early. I don’t want to leave it in the car, and I don’t want to store it in the basement at the house. So I’m just giving it to you today….and then you can decide what you want to do with the rest of your day”.

I did not throttle him.

This? This is what “I’ve got to tell you something…” means? This is what was causing ‘the look’? Dear sweet Lord in his small fleece diaper. I am giddy with relief. I shift gears as I pick my  shaken stomach off of the bench seat and replace it in my body, the cascade of stress hormones making my hands only a little bit shaky. The ground is suddenly solidly there under my feet again. I can definitely get on board with early presents! Whew.

‘OOOH, a present? A day early? Is it a PONY?’

I have always thought getting a pony for my birthday would be right up there with scuba diving with manta rays. Plus we have a running family joke about getting ponies for special occasions. I’m not exactly sure what I would do with a real pony, but my daughter in law would probably take that off my hands.

That time Claire came home from Europe (or some other exotic local) and we surprised her with a backyard pony.

“I’ll give you hint’, he says, eyes all a-twinkle.  “It’s about 10 ponies.”

“An engine! You got the engine! and it’s here and now we can get out on the water in the new dinghy! Is it in the car? Can we get it and go out today?”  All thoughts and plans of refinishing teak vanish with not even a whimper. I was practically jumping up and down.

It was, indeed, the engine, which is a Yamaha 9.9 HP 2 stroke he bought at the engine sales and repair place near the marina. We wanted a 2 stroke because of their simplicity.

And this is paired with our new dinghy! We bought a True Kit Inflatable Catamaran dinghy from New Zealand. And we couldn’t be more pleased with it!

New dinghy and engine, in the back of our old Mexico van.

If you have been a reader, you know that on our first cruise we sported a Portland Pudgy named Penguin.  It served us really well for a number of years and we found it to be almost the perfect dinghy for tooling around the Pacific Northwest. However, our needs changed as we traveled further afield. We found that it was too slow and plodding in the sometimes rough conditions of the Sea of Cortez and Pacific Mexico. It took too long to get places, like back to our boat in an emergency. It was also really dangerous landing that dinghy in any kind of surf. To be sure, I don’t enjoy surf landings in any way, but being sideways in a hard, plastic dinghy with a wave crashing over me, hanging on for dear life  is an experience I do not want to repeat. Not to mention how heavy the Pudgy is if it gets pooped; a story for another day.

Farewell to Penguin, our sweet Pudgy. We actually do miss this little boat. She was perfect for the Pacific Northwest and she found a home with a family with kids who will use her to explore locally. I hope they are having a great time.

Carrying the Pudgy was also a bit of a problem. Near to shore, we carried it on davits, but on our ocean crossings it had to live on the foredeck. It got in the way and also the boat motion would be such that we had to keep a close eye on it to be sure it wasn’t moving around. One of the reasons we bought the Pudgy was its rating as a lifeboat, but just the idea that we would be able to deploy it from the bow of our boat in probably heaving seas makes me want to laugh; a bit hysterically, to be sure.

A fond memory of an ocean crossing. Probably trying to capture a sea bird. Note dinghy on deck.

It just was not optimal and I kept wishing we had bought this neat inflatable we had seen at a boat show long ago. That one fit in a bag when it was deflated, and you could stow it below deck. That one factor began to be deal breaker on finding a new dinghy as we began to research, looking for something that filled us with dinghy lust.  We just wanted that foredeck on Galapagos to be free and clear, and we wanted to be able to get places fast. We also needed something to carry snorkeling, and maybe even scuba, equipment. The Portland Pudgy got mega crowded on long day trips.

Enter the True Kit and its ALMOST twin, the Takacat.  Lightweight, stable, packable, they have an interesting bow design that would allow easy snorkeling or diving from the boat. After months of perseveration, we decided that we would buy one of these two models of boats. But which one? They looked almost the same.

The Takacat is available from suppliers here in the states, so that makes it a little easier to source. Luckily, there was a dealer at the boat show in Seattle this year and we were able to size one up in person. While we liked the general design features, we did not pull the trigger to buy one. Why? Somehow it just didn’t feel beefy enough for the conditions we were going to be in. It was PVC, which I didn’t think would be a deal breaker,  but there was something about the models we saw that just left us not feeling sure about them and part of that was the feel of the PVC. Also I was not crazy about the rope handles on the inside of the pontoons. They did not feel like they would offer enough purchase for me and I could see the rope hurting my hands. And the rub rail was not as solid as I felt like it should be. In addition we were not impressed with the design of the transom, which seemed like a weak spot. In fact the dealer was talking about how they were going to be changing that design.

We walked away feeling a little, well, deflated, if you’ll pardon the expression. It was just a gut feeling thing. And we have learned to listen to that. If we were just going to be in inland waters, the Takacat would have been just fine.  But we decided to pursue the True Kit and I emailed them to ask how their model differed from the Takacat.

Basically the difference is in the fabric, the beefier transom, a more pronounced upward curve to the open bow, and some details like the number of firm handholds (rather than rope handholds), the addition of an aluminum seat, and the heat welded seams on the True Kit. Overall, the general feel of the True Kit, even on line, looked sturdier to us, like it would stand up to harder use. The fabric, while not the usual traditional Hypalon, is a large step above regular PVC.

The fabric is called Valmex. While less well known in the US, it has been used more extensively in other parts of the world. Here is some information about this fabric to get you started if you are interested. It  is produced in Germany by Mehler Technologies and can be heat welded rather than glued. On Hypalon inflatables, it’s generally the glue that gives out before the fabric, as we discovered with the old Avon inflatable we were given by other cruisers in La Cruz.

We ordered our True Kit and it was quickly delivered from New Zealand, with only a brief stop at customs so they could ask for a small fee to import the boat. The fee was less than 100$.

Out of the box, it’s really easy to set this boat up. You tube has a number of videos of the True Kit folks setting up the boat, taking it in rough seas, showing it off, etc. Yep, they do know how to make a sale.

Right out of the box. Inflate the pontoons a bit, drop in the floor, inflate the floor, then finish inflating the pontoons. Fast and easy.

Et voila! So far, it’s a very dry ride, as the bow lifts a bit even when not on a plane. Water runs out the back at the transom, keeping the inside of the boat dry. Considering we were always wet in both the Pudgy and the old Avon, we’ll take our chances with this.

So on a day that I was supposed to be cleaning teak, I found myself zipping around the bay in our new dinghy flying fast and free, and discovering that neither of us yet have the skills to get a boat up on a plane and feel safe. This boat planes beautifully, but wow. We are sailors. We aren’t used to going that fast!

Woo hoooo! And that’s why we like beefier handholds. This is exactly the position I was imagining when looking at the Takacat and I would not have been happy with the rope hold they provide. This is where experience the second go around really makes a difference in decision making.

I got to go first as the driver because it was my birthday. The engine started right up and soon we were off, skimming across the bay. As Mike took his turn at the engine, I lounged in the front end of the boat. Another benefit I will enjoy. I just layed right down and stared up at the water. There was plenty of room. “Sea Pony”. I said. Its name is “Sea Pony”.

I’ll be painting another octopus on the new engine cowling, just like we had for the smaller engine we used for several years. But I’ll be sure there is a place for a turquoise sea pony with flowing pink hair.

Digging these fancy ponies! Our bathtub was home to many over the years.

 

 

We’re in Hot Water!

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When we first took over Galapagos, Melissa and I felt as if we had just bought the Queen Mary. Stepping up from our sweet Cal 34, Moonrise to big ‘ol Galapagos was intimidating and exciting all at once. To paraphrase Bernadette Peters in The Jerk, It isn’t just about the waterline, its all the stuff.

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Of all the stuff that came with Galapagos, nothing could seem as luxurious as a hot water heater. Hot water from the tap? Just like home? What a time to be alive!

It wasn’t hard to slide into such decadence and when I began to re-plumb the whole boat with PEX tubing and new faucets, I knew that I wanted to update the old water heater and get it out of the engine room. So in January of 2017 after much perseverating, measuring and no doubt boring Melissa to tears with technical minutia, I bought an IsoTemp SPA 15 Marine water heater.

For the uninitiated, marine water heaters have an electric heating element, just like the units you have at home. But they also have a small heat exchanger that connects to the cooling system on the boat’s engine. That means you can have hot water just by running the engine for half an hour. The SPA 15 is tiny, only 4 gallons, but that is more than enough for Melissa and I to enjoy showers, wash dishes, and do all the usual domestic chores that can make living aboard a sailboat seem almost normal.

The main reason I chose this particular water heater was that it could fit, just, beneath the sole of the aft cabin. Getting the water heater off a shelf in the engine room not only freed up space for storage there, it placed a fairly heavy container down low, where heavy things should be on a boat.  This allowed me to secure it in place; confident that it would stay there in the event of rough weather or, heaven forfend, a rollover. It also simplifies the design and use of the the engine’s cooling system with the heat exchanger since no external header tank for coolant is required.

 

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This area beneath the aft cabin sole made sense as the center of our water system. There was room to locate the water heater, water pump and a simple manifold for the hot and cold water. The PEX tubing and fittings have proven to be quite reliable and really easy to use and modify.

For almost two years we have enjoyed what would have been an unheard of luxury when we first started sailing. In fact we may have grown a little complacent about having hot water and I suspect that Galapagos, like most boats, can sense when her owners are taking her, and her stuff, for granted.

In hindsight I shouldn’t have been too surprised when one night, lying in my bunk, I heard the water pump come on for half a second. Three minutes later, the pump bumped on again. Checking the faucets on the boat yielded nothing. Finally, pulling up the sole in our aft cabin, I could see a small trickle of water. Just an innocent little trickle. It could be anything. A loose PEX fitting, probably. In two years of cruising with lots of bumpy weather, things are bound to jar loose. I would have this fixed in no time I thought.

Sadly, all the easy things were ruled out and I could now see that the water was coming from under the water heater. If I wanted to learn anything more or have any hope of fixing this leak I would have to remove the tank from my super snug location under the cabin sole. I began to question the wisdom of locating the water heater there and was dreading the process of disassembling the bracing and fittings.

But bitching and moaning wasn’t going to stop the leak. And if I didn’t stop the leak we would lose precious water and,  quelle horreur!, Melissa wouldn’t be able to have a hot shower. That was a future too smelly to contemplate for long. Onto my belly I slithered and an hour or so later, I had the tank out. It got a lot easier after I had reinstalled and removed the tank a few times as I tried and failed to understand where the water was actually coming from.

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The water tank removed and in the shop. In trying to locate the leak, I had thought something obvious might reveal itself without too much effort. I filled the tank with water and looked for air bubbles. No such luck.

 

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This is the heating element and the associated controls that I removed while trying to locate the leak. The electric heater element is mounted through a plate that has a rubber gasket that acts as a seal on the tank. In conferring with the manufacturer, the gasket was mentioned as a point of failure and replacement gaskets are sold on the IsoTemp site.

After disassembling the tank’s electrics and eliminating the rubber gasket, a failure point suggested by the manufacturer, I had nothing left but the stainless steel tank itself. As you can see in the photos, the SPA tanks are encased in a hard plastic case with a foam insulation. Since I really had nothing to lose, I carefully cut the outer plastic casing and started cutting away the foam insulation so that I could see the steel tank.

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Here you can see that I am well and truly committed to finding this leak. By removing a hard plastic band from the middle of the tank, I could remove the bottom half of the cover. I then had to cut away the foam insulation that covered the steel tank. At the bottom, you can see the pin hole leak.

But even with the steel exposed and the tank full of water, I couldn’t find the leak. No, the tank had to be under pressure. Fortunately I was able to pressurize the tank without having to put it back under the sole by using some spare PEX tubing, fittings and a hose bib in the engine room. Voila! the leak finally revealed itself. I had suspected that the weld had somehow failed but as the photos show, the pinhole leak is actually a little above the weld. It is troubling that the tank failed after almost exactly two years and we are wondering if another leak will develop at some point in the future.

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Finally!

In researching how best to repair the tank, a few of options were presented. Some people have had good luck with JB Weld and if we were far away from services, we would have taken the epoxy repair approach. Melissa has never seen a problem that couldn’t be solved with epoxy and was ready to go that route.

But since we were only a short dinghy ride and walk from several welders, I thought it might be a more durable repair to just have the pinhole spot welded. Walking down the streets of La Paz, carrying my leaky, disassembled water heater, I knew that I had arrived as a cruiser. I also felt a bit like a local; no self respecting Mexican would throw away a perfectly good water heater just because it had a leak. Everything can be repaired and made useful again.

A short walk from Marina de la Paz I approached the men at Taller de Soladura el Chicote (Chicote’s Welding shop) and pointed to my little leak. One of the men took my tank and soon a few other guys were gathered round including a very old man that did not do or say much but seemed to have some position of authority in the business. Was he the elder Chicote? One of the guys did a bit of grinding, selected a welding rod and took my tank over to the welding station. The welding machine ran for all of five seconds and my pinhole leak was no more. Total cost: 150 pesos. About 7.50 USD. The shop seemed pretty busy but I think my job was so small they just took care of it while I waited. It took all of ten minutes and I was schlepping my tank back down to the dinghy.

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The guys at Taller de Soladura el Chicote look over the tank. It was a quick, easy repair for them.

Once back on the boat, I filled the tank and put it under pressure again to see that the weld was holding. Huzzah! No leak.  I reassembled the plastic case as best I could and sprayed expanding foam inside to provide a bit of insulation and to give the bracing and mounting hardware something to work against. It was a glorious site seeing the tank installed and holding water pressure. Let’s hope we get many more hot showers out of this tank.

A phrase that seems to pop up in our conversations chez Galapagos is “In for a penny, in for a pound”. There were moments in this project that made me question how much further down the rabbit hole I really wanted to go. Many of our adventures keeping our boat in good repair seem to involve a decision to push on, despite the evidence that we are in over our heads. But one of the luxuries of this lifestyle is an abundance of time. Time to read, enjoy the beauty of the world around us and time to expend ridiculous efforts where normal people would have just pulled out a credit card and bought a new water heater.

Once again, Melissa and I have proven to be abnormal.  What’s the most ridiculous repair you’ve done on your boat?

 

Let’s Review a Product with…SCIENCE!

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Stormageddon 2016 turned out to be much easier on us in Tacoma and Lakewood than predicted. Nationally, forecasters predicted our area would be hit by the storm of the century with wind gusts exceeding 70 mph. Indeed, some coastal areas were hit pretty hard. There was even a tornado down in Oregon. Whoa! That’s just weird. But here in the South Sound area, we were really surprised and pleased when we clocked our top wind speed at 38 mph, which barely makes Galapagos wake up from her slumber in the slip. Whew! What a relief!

A tree in Tacoma waits for the wind.

A tree in Tacoma waits for the wind.

So this time, the science/art that is weather forecasting just plain old got it wrong for our area. If you are interested in why, here’s a local article that explains how mother nature always has a few tricks up her sleeve. Scattered around the world, groups of professional, knowledgeable weather forecasters couldn’t believe it, as they examined the radar images and worried that people wouldn’t believe them next time a big storm was coming. Tell you what: I will believe them and I hope you will, too. I’d rather be over prepared than caught by surprise.  It just goes to show how difficult it is to predict the great mother’s wrath. It’s good to put that into perspective before one heads out to sea. Think about it. These are experts. The rest of us are not. If they get it wrong, we certainly can, too. Just saying. I think we’ll just stay on the safe side by giving possible storms a wide berth as much as possible.

Since I have faith in science, I thought I would engage in a little experiment on board Galapagos, just for fun and because I am easily amused. Recently Practical Sailor magazine had an article comparing brands of toilet paper in terms of their ‘dissolvability’ and, thus, how hard they are on a boat’s holding tank system and how likely they are to cause a pollution problem if pumped overboard. They did a test with several different brands, both regular brands and ‘marine’ brands and reported on how fast they dissolved in water. I thought it was a pretty interesting test. It got me thinking. What was all our toilet paper doing in our holding tank? Was it decomposing? Was it sitting there in a large mountain of yuck? How could I find out without getting into a disgusting project? Literally. And what difference does that make, anyhow?

Well, I’ll tell you, because if you don’t live on a boat, you’ve probably not given this much thought. The United States has laws about pumping your sewage overboard, and we follow those laws. But other countries do not have the pumpout facilities that we have here. In some places, people just pump their sewage overboard right there in the same bay you are anchored in. Kind of gross, but there it is.

Because I’ve been raised here in our country where we have things like waste water treatment and where I am educated enough to care about the environment, I’d kind of like to be able to discharge our sewage in the highest and best way possible, given the fact that I’m not going to spring for a big waste water treatment facility on our boat.  If I’m snorkeling somewhere, it’s really going to gross me out to see large clumps of human waste and toilet paper floating by. So I don’t want to submit others to that, either. Galapagos has a macerator pump that grinds everything up before discharging, but what if we could use science to make the discharge that much less ‘papery’ in the first place? And also what if we could break solids down before dumping them overboard, even at sea? That would be a win for everyone.

When I refurbish ours it will look like this.

When I refurbish ours it will look like this. I like to think of this as industrial art.

Some people solve the toilet paper problem by never putting toilet paper down their marine heads. That works pretty well in the United States, and especially in the marina where you can take your trash out regularly. But we won’t be able to take our trash out regularly when we are cruising.  Plus, we have those lovely heads that rarely get clogged. We have the Crittendon Marine Skipper II heads. Those who have them love them. We’ve literally had people tell us how envious they are of our toilets. (That’s right. That’s what happens when you live on a boat. People look at what kind of toilet you have.) With these babies, we don’t really worry about clogs too much. We don’t mind throwing our tp out with the trash here in the marina, but I’m kind of loathe to keep bags of used tp somewhere in my boat for weeks at a time. Call me a princess.

So we don’t worry about clogs, but we do worry about solids building up in our holding tank and then sitting there forever rather than getting pumped out. Those solids are usually in the form of un-decomposed toilet paper. And that’s the long story about why this Practical Sailor article caught my eye. Unfortunately, they did not test our brand of toilet paper: Kirkland from Costco.  We have also been using Zaal Noflex Digestor in our tank and I wanted to know if that actually worked to help break down the paper. So I set up a small laboratory in the galley down at Galapagos and commenced to testing. Science!

The goal: to determine how long it would take for plain toilet paper to decompose in plain water, plain water plus Noflex Digestor, and salt water plus Noflex Disgestor. I did not test using plain salt water because I forgot. Maybe another time when I’m bored.

The set up: Three flasks, or, in this case, cups and glasses, each with one square of double ply Kirkland brand toilet paper.

From the left, salt water/digester, fresh water/digester, fresh water alone.

From the left, salt water/digestor, fresh water/digestor, fresh water alone.

Flask number 1: plain water and tp
Flask number 2: plain water, tp , and a pinch of this digestor
Flask number 3: salt water, tp, and a pinch of the digestor

Each solution with paper was given a couple of stirs with a fork. Then we waited.

Nine hours later, I checked to see how things were going. The results were already startling. The tissue in the plain water had not broken down at all. It came up on the fork in one giant piece. Imagine watching cool fish underwater when this baby, used, comes floating by. EWWWWW.

Intact piece of toilet paper.

Intact piece of toilet paper after 9 hours in plain water.

The tissue in the plain water with the pinch of digestor was beginning to break down significantly, coming up on the fork in small clumps. The tissue in the salt water/digestor mixture was a little behind but was starting to break down. We waited overnight.

Plain water with a pinch of the digester. Significantly deteriorated after 9 hours.

Plain water with a pinch of the digestor. Significantly deteriorated after 9 hours.

About 24 hours after I began the experiment, the plain water/paper was still intact, but seemed smaller, like it had less mass, even though it was not disintegrating into pieces. Still, when I swished it around, it held together. The plain water/digestor/paper mixture showed that the paper was dissolving and that there were only small pieces left floating at the bottom of the container. It was going fast. The salt water mixture was still behind, but was also decomposing the paper. It was just taking longer. (I poured each one into a colorful container to make photographing easier.)

Plain water alone.

Plain water alone after 24 hours.

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Plain water with digestor after 24 hours.

Closeup of the salt water with digestor.

Closeup of the salt water with digestor.after 24 hours.

I gave them all a stir to simulate agitation due to boat movement. Then decided that I would add another pinch of the digester to see what happened. Unfortunately, I got excited about adding the product and added it to all three containers. Oops! There went my plain water control.

Within 5 minutes the paper that was previously in the plain water and looked like it was still a solid sheet was beginning to disintegrate. This leads me to believe that it was beginning to decompose on its own and that I just had not waited long enough. Anxious to test this hypothesis, I began another batch with just plain water and 1 sheet of toilet paper. I want to see how long I would have to wait for this paper to decompose without adding any of the digester.

I’ll report back on how that part of the experiment goes, but the results of this test were already very clear. While we are at the dock, we can use a fresh water flush and add the Zaal Noflex Digestor regularly and we’re going to be fine when it comes to pumping out. The directions on the container say to add a bit every day or so, more or less, depending on whether you have buildup in your tank already. This stuff works, and we can keep buying our usual brand of toilet paper and skip the expensive marine stuff. When we are traveling we can continue to use the Zaal, and we will go to a salt water flush to save our fresh water. I’m betting the constant motion of the boat will keep things agitated enough to encourage decomposition. I’ll be putting in a good supply of Zaal Noflex Disgestor before we go.

One caveat is that we use plenty of water to flush, and we make sure to clear the pipe every time. The extra liquid is going to help the digestor get to everything in the tank, even if we have to pump out a little more often. It’s worth it. Oh, and by the way, there is no ‘head’ smell when we use this. Nada. None. That, alone, makes this product a ‘win’.

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