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I cleaned the head on valkyr this past sunday and fixed the shower sump pump. Head was pretty nasty and I kinda nuked it with oxy clean and then a long soak in vinegar..  after I did that it started backflowing badly. Now the bowl fills half way up within 4 minutes or so of pumping it out. I am so tempted to just order a composting head and install it and rip all the head plumbing and tank out.. close off the through hulls and be done with it. I have a friend that he and his wife and two young children live on a 40 ft ketch and that is what they use. 2 years into it and they love it.
We were on the boat the other day when all the rain was pouring down. Something was leaking like a sieve on the starboard side of the boat. Another project 🙂
The stanchions could be the problem. On a lot of other Downeaster boats this is a fairly common complaint that they let water follow the bolt through the caprail to the inside of the boat. They don’t actually bolt through the teak cap like I have seen in pictures on other DE’s. They have fiberglass sockets inboard of the caprail that they bolt into. I’m not sure if there is a bolt though the bottom yet. there is one through the side of the fiberglass socket they sit down in. However as much water as was coming into the boat the other day from rain on starboard it could certainly be an issue. I was thinking it might be the coming in around the screws holding the caprail in place. The teak plugs on 80% of them have come out and I’m thinking that rain is filling the hollows that the plugs were in and then draining down past the screws to the hull. It was just coming out through the teak strips over the starboard settee shelf and running down the hull there. I plan on pulling the cap rails off over there and taking a look. I will probably pull a couple stanchions at the same time and check them out also.
We ran out of water in the two water tanks. No big deal, we would just get the hose on the dock and fill them. It worked just fine. We filled the first tank. You could tell when it was full as it started to overflow around the deck fill (this is exactly what would happen on my last boat with a water bladder instead of a solid tank. It didn’t have over flow or vent lines). We started to fill the second tank, and kept filling it and filling it… and filling it…. hmmm for some reason it just didn’t feel right. “It’s taking a lot longer to fill than the first tank” was said a couple times. Finally… “umm lets turn the hose off and find out where the water is going to.” When it comes to finding water start at the bottom and work your way up. It loves going to the lowest place it can find! “Hey guys, the bilge has a lot of water in it.” We must have had a hundred gallons or better of water in the bilge based on how long it took the bilge pump to pump it out. About 15 minutes. The slightly scary thing for us about this was that for the last few months the automatic bilge pump was not working at all. I fixed it so that it works manually now and am waiting on the new electronic bilge switches to get here so I can re-enable the automatic bilge feature. Pictures very similar to Bob’s stories about the other boats sinking floated through my head as scary what ifs. It’s not that bad because we don’t leave the shore water connected and we were there during filling the tanks to monitor it and catch that it was taking to long to fill the tank, but it is enough to make you think twice. Until I read Bobs article I was assuming that we had a leak in the tank or a broken vent or something of that sort in the tank. After we pumped out the bilge we weren’t getting any more water like that in there so it led me to believe that it wasn’t a major leak in the tank. When I get a chance I am going to go spelunking on Valkyr in and around the water tanks and get some pictures as best I can. You can see the front of the forward tank from the forward access hatch in the v-berth. There is actually almost enough space to crawl up under there if you were a bit smaller than I am. 
Oh if I didn’t mention it I am moving all the fuel supply lines from where they are now. I really like the functionality of the existing system but there is about 20 feet of fuel line where 3 different fuel lines basically circle the entire engine. Right now the fuel line manifold and single external filter are port and slightly aft of the engine. the fuel lines start at the fuel tank and run down the port side of the engine to the filter and then to the manifold. From the manifold three fuel lines run from behind the engine and up the starboard side of the engine to the on engine fuel pump and to the the parallel electric fuel pump with a return line to the tank somewhere in there.
here are the only 4 dual products I have been able to find that are specific to the marine industry. Actually they are pretty much the only vendors I can find even in non marine applications.
Griffin GTB228DM-MA dual filter/water seperator http://www.griffinfilter.com/s…..INE+SERIES you can purchase from http://www.filtrationdepotonline.com
This was one of the lost topics when I had to change out the forum..here it is with some before and after pictures also.
We are heading to Valkyr this evening to spend the night.. We are going to try some special laminate paint on one of the laminated counter tops to see what we think of a color change from the original brown laminate to an ivory color. We were looking at replacing the laminate with a lighter laminate but this paint looks pretty good on the demo we saw at home depot and only cost $20 for enough that we should be able to do all the laminate surfaces in the boat with it. We figure that since we planned on replacing the laminate anyway that there is no downside to spending $20 dollars to test out just painting it with this new product. We will let everyon
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One of the first things I did on my old boat was replace the existing bulb fixtures with LED light fixtures. It made a huge diffence in my energy budget. I could run 6 led lights and only use the same ammount of or slightly less engergy than one of the old bulbs used. Also there was little to no heat generated by the LED’s which was nice here in South Carolina as it is pretty warm most of the year and it kept a little more heat out of the cabin. The downside of the LED fixtures I got is that they were a cool white color an though they generated a lot of light I never felt comfortable reading by them. I could but you just barely had to strain to do so.
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