Kinship has been moved from the shop back to the marina.  Having spent about 6 weeks taking the boat apart, now we start the process of putting her back together. First up is reinstalling the holding tank and getting the floor back down.  Peggie Hall – The Headmistress strongly recommends putting holding tank vents on both sides of the boat to allow cross flow though the tank.  Our tank has dual vents but we had not installed the starboard vent.  Over the summer we noticed a bit of a wiff if you happened to be sitting in the cockpit when someone flushes, so we decided to install the second vent with the expectation this will solve this problem.  After a lot of struggling we got the hose in place and now we just to drill for the vent and connect everything up.

Boat work is often two steps forward and one back.  The backwards step this time is a leaky starboard water tank.  It has dumped its contents into the bilge since the boat was moved and it needs to be replaced or repaired. Of course this means that we can’t connect the extra vent for the holding tank.  The tank is not really the right shape for the space, so I am looking at modified design with a better pick up location and perhaps a little more capacity.  Material choice is up in the air, my first sense is to use welded plastic, but the Saga hive mind is favouring stainless or aluminium, I need to do more research.

We are making some progress, we got the wheel repainted, covered and a new turkshead tied and it is ready to go back on the boat.  We installed the new audio system, a Fusion MS-RA205 with a Bluetooth module and it works great.  I am the sort of person that thinks the first thing you do when you move into a new place is get the tunes working.  Listening to music or podcasts  while I work just improves my mood.

Progress is slow, the weather has not been great so far, today is -8C and we are at home updating the blog rather than working on the boat.  I am trying to accept that we will not be ready in early May.  We are going to be on the boat for a year, if we are ready in May or late June does not really matter.