42 flushes

Warning: This post is full of crap.

“Ugh, disgusting! Who didn’t flush the toilet?”

It was a familiar call ringing through our house when we lived back on land. It’s wasn’t their fault though. Kids come into this world knowing how to poop, not knowing what to do with it afterward. That’s our job as parents. Teaching kids where to put their poop. Glorious.

Luckily, my kids are geniuses. It may not have been obvious at the time, but for years and years on land, they were secretly training for the future. Flush the toilet? I think not. Deep down, their intuition just knew that the often overlooked life skill of laziness would pay off in spades.

“Ugh! Who flushed the toilet?”

Living on a boat, this new version is more likely to be heard. They knew. Somehow, they knew that someday we would be rationing our flushes and they would be celebrated for actually not flushing every time. I mean, poop, yes. That goes down every time. Don’t be gross.

It’s literally spelled out in the handbook:

The capacity of the tank is 85 litres each side. The flushing is 2 litres per flush, which gives 42 flushes per side. – Leopard 46 owners manual

It turns out that 42 really is “the answer”.

I can hear you now. “c’mon, that’s not so bad. 42 per side is 84 total flushes, that’s not so bad. Why do you need to ration?”.

You’re wrong. 5 people my friend. 5 people. Oh, and we’re at anchor most of the time, so we can’t unload to start the count again (you have to go out 3 miles from shore to dump the dumper).

So, we get creative. Everybody pees in the ocean, right? Boys, your dream has come true, do your standing business off the back of boat. Don’t worry, that other boat isn’t looking. They’re probably doing the same thing.

That helped our capacity a bit, but not everybody on this boat is able to let loose off the back. Our next stab was to designate one side of the boat as the “pee side”. Yup, that’s what it has come to. We have a pee side of the boat. (don’t worry, if you come visit us, you will be treated like nautical Royalty and be bestowed with your own private bath room with zero evacuation regulation). The contents of that side continue on to the sea guilt free (all though I think it’s still technically against the rules).

We’re so smart! We figured it out!

Nope.

That’s when we learned about “joker valves”. These appropriately named little values are simply a piece of well formed rubber that are vital to the operation of a boat head (toilet). Did I also mention that they fail? Like all the time? We found out the hard way. One day, not long after we were patting ourselves on the back for figuring out how to go to the bathroom, the pee side stopped flushing down. In one tragic move, our flush quota was cut in half to a grand total of 42 flushes for all manner of business.

I put off fixing it until the crew threatened mutiny. I stared at that beast of a toilet. I really didn’t want to fix it, but that’s the captains job. Plungers are useless with marine heads, so the answer is taking the toilet apart from the bottom up. At some point, you’ll find the clog. When you do, things will start flowing again. Immediately. While it’s still taken apart. And the toilet doesn’t care that you only use the toilet for pee. It only knows that it has been unhindered to build up for 15 years.

get it? I’d show you a picture, but I didn’t have the heart to take one. Plus, at that particular moment, I wasn’t about to touch my phone.

The problem was the joker valve. It had calcium buildup from seawater, so it didn’t work right. A spare is $12. We didn’t have one. I cleaned it out as best as I could, and now we cross our fingers each time that we flush, counting the days until we can get back to the states and get a spare (or 10).

As an aside, the shackle that broke on the dinghy davit (hoist) is also a $12 part. We also didn’t have a spare for that, and it’s hanging on with a slowly rusting bolt I found. Coincidently, none of the stores here in the Bahamas seem to carry the $12 parts. They’re happy to sell you a $300 water pump for $550, but the markup on $12 must not be worth it. Add it to “the list”.

Our lives are now rules by rationing. Counting. Flushes. Gallons of water. Amp hours of electricity. Ice. All must be hoarded like my parents rationing and freezing a bag of costco cheese.

It might be amusing (to you, not me) to note that yesterday one of our 100 gallon water tanks developed a leak. In the same type of gut punch that the joker valve dealt us, the water tanks cut our capacity in half with a right hook. I spend the day with a hot iron melting the tank into submission. It might have worked, I don’t know. I haven’t checked yet. It’s 7 am and I don’t want to start my day that way.

They say that the definition of cruising is “fixing your boat in exotic locations”. With these repairs, I grasped how true this statement was. We’re still chilling out in Eleuthera. Partly because it’s amazing here, partly because some heavy winds have kept us from seeing all that we want to see. Soon we’ll head north to check out the Abacos, before then heading west to cruise the East Coast of the US for the summer/fall. For now, we’re enjoying the crystal clear waters, the new friends, the epic snorkeling, and the ever growing list of items to fix while looking at brilliant sunsets.