Now we're cooking with- no, wait
Wait, we were always cooking with gas. Of course, it used to mean going outside, clambering down the side of the boat in all weathers (and at some funky/terrifying angles at low tide) and rummaging around in a dark cabinet. Not so much any more.
That baby right there is a gas alarm and remote trigger that lets us turn the gas on and off from the comfort of our own galley. Hidden behind is it metres upon metres of cable for power, sensors and a solenoid in the gas line, which we could never have hooked up if Dad hadn’t dedicated a couple of days to come out and help. And when I say help I mean “take charge and make it work while I held a torch.”
It may seem like a tiny thing but it makes a huge difference to our quality of life, especially in the winter. Eggs for breakfast on cold mornings!
And I must give a shout out to the guys at Technisol who made the alarm. I emailed about a lost instruction sheet and they had a PDF in my inbox less than 20 minutes later. Top service!
And kitten makes five
So once again we find ourselves with lots to update…
First of all, the numbers on board Goode Ship Hendrik have increased somewhat – myself and James have been joined by our lovely Captain’s Cabin renter, Geoff, and my mother, Sandy (though the latter is only staying for the summer). All in all, the transition has been very smooth, and the only teething problems we anticipate are figuring out exactly how long the water tanks will last between fillings when there are four daily showers instead of two.
And speaking of showers, the shower off the saloon is finally done. Finally. We thought we started this 9 months ago, but I just checked now, and oh dear, it was actually 13 months ago. Eek. In that time, it’s been built, tiled, dismantled, and rebuilt and retiled at least three times, with lots of drips (both in front of and behind the wall) and DIY denial in between. But it’s done now, and honestly, a shower has never felt quite so good.
Another development is that we had neighbour Lorna round to create and weld on some steps to make it easier for us and mom to get up to water the garden (which is now on the Saloon roof). With a bit of angle iron she found lying around the engine room, the new steps were up in a morning. She even rounded off the sharp corners!
Now we just need to get someone to mix up some magnolia Hammerite for us and they’ll be perfect! I do have a paint chip with me today for matching, but we’ll see how long that takes.
Keeping to the exterior, less good news is that an extraordinarily violent wake at the weekend cause one of our bow springs to bend a railing. This had been in place for well over two years now with no problems, and the handrail is several inches in diameter, so you can imagine the force it took to bend this.
I was utterly speechless when I discovered it, and it’s going to take some more welding to get it back into shape now. It just goes to show that when one project is completed, another presents itself…
In progress...
A warm and sunny long weekend gave us lots of opportunities to get work done around the boat!
Saturday involved lots more angle grinding on the deck (and the realisation that we could get twice as much done with a second angle grinder), a trip to the wood merchants to collect the beautiful oak and mahogany-a-like tongue and groove for the back wall of our captain’s cabin bedroom, the purchase of a second angle grinder at B&Q, and finally a bunch of patch painting on the deck and our first coat of grippy paint onto the gunnel where we regularly step aboard.
Then Sunday and Monday we attacked the shower off the saloon. Nikolaj had to rip off a portion of the wall when he was connecting the new hot water supply, and rebuilding it wasn’t very high on our priority list while we had the captain’s cabin shower to get clean in. But not being able to shower at low tide (due to the angle of the outflow from that shower being ever-so-slightly uphill when we’re settled) is getting very tedious when it coincides with that time between waking up and leaving for work, so we’re pushing ahead to make this other shower watertight…
We ran out of primer to finish that up and start tiling, but hopefully that will be done awfully soon. We very luckily discovered a spare pack of tiles in the hold, so at least it’ll match, but beyond that we’re not too fussed how it looks as this will all get ripped out in 5-10 years’ time when we rip out all the tiny toilet cubicles and make one big über bathroom for ourselves…
There should be more progress reports soon, since both of us are taking the day off tomorrow to grind down more spots on the deck while the weather’s so nice. We have to take advantage of the nice weather while we have it!
All hands on deck
Finally, a nice warm, sunny Saturday! We checked the forecast and got up early to start attacking the deck before quiet hours came into force at 1pm on Saturdays (no noise allowed at all on Sundays!).
Our initial treatment of the deck involves three steps:
- Using an angle grinder to take any rust spots back to the bare metal
- Using a wire brush attachment on a drill to exfoliate off any loose paint chips, and
- Painting over the bare metal spots with red oxide to prevent rust until the big paint job
I’m happy to say that, since he was a guest, Alex took the most fun angle grinding job, I got the wire brushing, and James was left to sweep away the considerable green dust and paint after us.
It was all going well until we smelt electrons… and realised we’d completely killed the angle grinder! So the boys went off to Machine Mart to buy a new one for next time, and I used the last hour of “noisy hours” to sand down the window frames on the Captain’s Cabin and stain/varnish them back into some semblance of health.
But neither the day nor the sunshine was over by the time they got back, so James went about dismantling the copper pipes from the old LPG installation (Calor Force are very happy to work on boats, fyi! They even have guys trained up on BSS regulations, which floored me…) in order to sell them for scrap. Our last lot of copper pipes from the old hot water system earned us a cool £50 so we hold onto every scrap now. You can also see James’s red oxide deck patching in the foreground, so the areas that were just wire brushed aren’t nearly as obvious.
James and Alex also thought ahead and bought supplies for next weekend’s project, realising that the only environment more hostile than our fenders is B&Q on a bank holiday Saturday… When Nikolaj was piping in our hot water supply, he had to remove a portion of the starboard toilet’s shower wall, so we’ve got the supplies to rebuild the wall and tile it over again.
A shower at low tide? What a luxury…
Back in action
It must be the hint of Spring in the air, because we got more accomplished this weekend than we have in the last 6 months combined.
Saturday began early with a bit of art terrorism for James and some giant fender maintenance for Melissa, and then followed a massive quarterly shop at Costco to stock up for the charity dinners. We also made a whirlwind shop through B&Q (for some mains electrical bits to enhance the captain’s cabin) and Ikea (for some baskets for the captain’s cabin bedroom’s new shelf and a stepstool). We were no sooner back home for an hour before we were called in to help push-start a neighbour’s car (success!) and we finished up the various household duties (recycling, rubbish, cleaning, the loads of laundry – the usual) before collapsing into bed.
Sunday began with another early start, where we collectively accomplished the following:
- tied up the errant live electrical cables in the hold so we could then pry up the rest of the floor to patch the (yet again) leaking water tank
- cleaned out the filter on our water pump (better the debris be in there than in our glasses!)
- stained and assembled our new stepladder, intended for access to the wheelhouse from the captain’s cabin entranceway
- cleaned out the captain’s cabin fridge, because it was beginning to reek
- tidied the half-height storage area under the wheelhouse, and moved the patio furniture to the calorifier cabinet instead
- assembled the boxes for the captain’s cabin bedroom and transferred our smalls inside, and removed the rolling drawers to the other side
- removed the ugly motion sensor in the captain’s cabin saloon
- attempted to create a new coax extension to place the TV aerial in the wheelhouse (unfinished)
- cooked an excellent meal and Melissa also sewed up a new shirt
We’ve really only got the galley steps as the last big task still on our list so hopefully we’ll have a pretty relaxing few weekends ahead of us!
Copper Cabana
The heat situation isn’t much better, I’m afraid, but we are making progress. Last Friday Nikolaj took the whole day to hook up the old, existing radiator (plus a tiny quarter-sized radiator the size of two sheets of paper) in the saloon to the new boiler. Flipping the switch suddenly caused boiling, black water to spurt from two pipes in the old hotel rooms! So the pipes that we thought did nothing but feed the (ripped out) sinks apparently were for a heating system that was never actually installed… So after cutting out the leaking sections of pipe and popping in new HEP20, we had the radiators on for exactly five minutes before the connection to the big radiator did a hot, black, geyser interpretation and then the radiator itself started to bubble up on the front panel (as a leak pushed pressurized water out, bubbling up the special paint. So we’re still without heat in the saloon. It looks like we’ll need to rip out ALL the pipework in the saloon and hotel rooms as well as replace the radiators. But since Nikolaj’s already done the difficult stuff, we should be able to do this on our own (famous last words).
Instead, we turned our focus on installing our new shiny Kabola diesel stove. James had to work on Saturday so it was down to me to create the new fuel line from the big tank in the engine room up to the captain’s cabin fireplace. We were going to go down through the floor and then along the ceiling of the engine room, but after drilling through the floor, it transpired that there’s a 4 inch gap between the floor of the captain’s cabin and the ceiling of the engine room. Which is too deep for a drill for me to be able to mark my place down below. So that was scrapped, instead opting to take the line from the fireplace, over the shower door and through the bulkhead behind the stairs down into the captain’s cabin, where a small hole for an (unused) coax aerial cable already existed. After 15-20 minutes with the hammer drill, a giant drill bit, and a whole ton of muscle power, the hole was big enough to take a gland with a hole for our 8mm fuel pipe inside. The gland makes the hole nice and air- and water-tight and also cushions our little pipe from any jagged steel.
I then had to wrestle the 5m of copper pipe (with a mind of its own) from the tank, up the rib, along the wall, behind the boiler flue, through a hole in a rib, then into the gland, along the wall, up above the shower door, through another hole in the wall, down the wall, around the marble fireplace edge, and into the new stove. I had to bend it all by hand (until the pipe bender arrived to do the real sharp angles), and put fasteners every few feet to keep it all tacked down. James got busy on arranging the voltage droppers for our 12v fuel pump, which we’ll hopefully get to hook up tonight.
The other part of the installation is to make a path for the flue, since the previous owners never used it after they raised the wheelhouse. We know this because they built a battery shelf and the walkways to the wheelhouse entrance directly above it. Thanks!
Earlier this week I did some very tedious measuring with numb fingers to mark the point directly above the flue so Nikolaj can enlarge it to 80mm with his plasma cutter. On Saturday I drilled a hole at this point so the plasma cutter has an edge to start from using a regular ol’ drill and a metal bit, which took way more muscle power than I was expecting. Of course it rained overnight so we now have a nice rusty hole!
On James’s epic trip to Maplin’s he also picked up two extended lengths of cabling so we can move the two right-most batteries down underneath the battery shelf to make way for the flue. Let’s hope we can do it without creating a mess of sparks this time, as there’s no 24v isolator and those puppies are now fully topped up…
Steamboat Hendrik
(Yes, we finally have hot water!)
A Hopper, Skip, and a Pump
(Or is it just in my dad’s world that “hopper” = toilet?)
One major accomplishment James failed to relate in the last update is that our new toilets are now fitted and operational! We had a wide variety of marine toilets to choose from (all with equally amusing names), but to be fair I can’t actually recall which ones we settled on. In any case, they work beautifully and we can now flush toilet paper instead of binning it (ewww!) and they actually do flush, unlike my mom’s horrible experience with the pump-type toilets on our Greek sailing holiday a few years back.
In fact, the toilet control panel we bought is complex enough even with just two buttons to surely mystify guests. We thought that the two buttons would be Big Flush/Little Flush like on European toilets, but when they arrived, we were confused to find the buttons labelled “Before Use” and “After Use”. Hitting the “Before Use” button before #2s fills the bowl so you don’t have the German shelf toilet issues, and the “After Use” button just flushes as you’d expect. Only about 10-15 seconds after flushing, it sends another blast down the pipes which gives you a hearty jolt if you happen to be slow at doing up your fly. Bwahahah!
In skip (translate: dumpster) news: we’re finished! Hurrah! The deck is clear again apart from the plumbing equipment Nikolaj’s still using to finish up the heating, plus the few bits of kit we’re planning on eBaying. So hopefully the skip itself will even be off our deck in a few days’ time…
In pump news: we’re slowly getting used to the eccentricities of our water system and becoming pitch-perfect at detecting the different noises various pumps make. The geyser problem is being averted by filling little and often (once a week or so) until we can get a robust patch, and our water pressure is good in all areas of the boat.
Our new diesel stove for the Captain’s Cabin has been ordered and should arrive in a week or two (now being an extremely popular time of year to buy heaters!). This is replacing the extremely knackered diesel stove that’s already back there, nestled in the marble and tiled fireplace, and is the same dimensions and shape as the one it’s replacing (only it works, and has eons better fuel efficiency!). We could’ve hooked up a radiator from the big system Nikolaj’s installing, but no one makes any that look nice enough to place in a fireplace, so we figured we might as well get something nice enough to keep back there even after the sprucing up. And in the case of its eventual renting, we can keep tabs on how much fuel the lodger uses as it’s on a separate system.
And finally, some photos of the “dancefloor” from our party. The only rooms remaining are the first single rooms by the saloon, and as you walk from the saloon to the front of the boat, rooms 2 and 3 on the left, preserved for the winter as James’s wardrobe and my sewing room, respectively. They, too, will go at some point, but we’ve got to take the rest of the hold down to the bare metal before that point…
(both views are looking towards the front of the boat)
It feels huge down there, which is really exciting as we walk out where the walls for our lounge, bedrooms, and en suites will be!
Haven't we been here before?
This story is becoming too familiar now. Since Nikolaj installed the balancing pipe last week we’ve been playing with the water flow, trying to find the right amount of water to hold in the tanks so that we get a decent supply but the tanks don’t crack again.
Trouble is, our tanks are something of a blunt force instrument. We only know when they’re full because the fibreglass begins to bulge upward and lifts a little copper pipe pushed through a hole in the floor. Of course they only bulge upwards when they’re full, and if you fill them when they’re level the port side tanks get a rush of water when we settle and there are a million other reasons why it’s bloody difficult to tell exactly how much water is actually in there already.
Which is how I came face-to-face with a geyser in the storage hold tonight. The force of water had cracked my original repair wide open and there was a six-inch fountain gushing into the bilge. And for once I definitely didn’t say any bad words because I was too busy running to grab the little submersible pump which is fortunately still aboard and shouting to Melissa to yank the hose out of the filler.
Funny thing is, despite the situation looking far worse than last time, we’re actually in much better shape. Because we now have a working pump we were able to open a couple of taps and relieve the pressure on the tanks far quicker than last time, where we were forced to let it trickle out for days on end. The sand beneath the tanks isn’t even waterlogged yet, although I’m hoping when we settle at low tide enough water will settle out that we can pump it clear. In the meantime we’re sat twiddling our thumbs, so I took the opportunity to hack a fortnight’s beard growth off my face. Got to love a crisis that gives you time to shave.
He must be great at Tetris
I can barely get a crab croquette into my mouth with a pair of chopsticks so I was put to shame yesterday by the guy from Tidy Thames who craned a skip onto our deck. A ton of skip hanging from a couple of chains on one moving barge being dropped onto the deck of another moving barge, what could go wrong?
Fortunately, nothing. Trouble is, compared to the amount of crap we have on deck, the skip is starting to look very small. Three or four loads too small, in fact. And we don’t have all that long to toss the remaining partition walls out before we need that space.