Good Old Boat Issue 142: Jan/Feb 2022

Simple Solutions

AMatter of Scale A dreamy cruise is interrupted when the head calls it quits. BY BERT VERMEER

A number of years first of two Islander Bahama 30s we’ve owned, from the Vancouver area of British Columbia north to Desolation Sound. The passage was as we’d hoped—sunny days with enough wind to fill the sails—and once there, we enjoyed peaceful overnight anchorages. Life aboard was wonderful except for one, nagging issue: With the dawning of each new day, the manual marine toilet got harder and harder to pump. I had replaced the original toilet, hoses, and holding tank when ago, my family and I sailed Dreamer , the

waters at the time, Dreamer ’s toilet had the ability to pump directly overboard or into a holding tank. Perhaps, I thought, the problem was at the Y- valve. The good news was that the toilet still worked, albeit reluctantly, and the sailing itself was idyllic. Then early one sunny morning, the pump handle simply refused to go down, even when I applied consid- erable pressure to it. As a bucket wasn’t high on the options list for my wife and daughter, I decided to head for the nearest point of civi- lization. There was no point in taking the toilet apart, I thought, without having

access to parts. We tied to the public dock at the little village of Lund, British Columbia, which is an interesting place to visit, but more importantly had a marine supply store nearby. The girls went ashore to avoid the language they knew would be coming. The temperature outside was well into the 80s, without a whisper of a breeze. The first thing I did was try both Y-valve positions to see if the pressure at the toilet pump handle changed. It did not. This meant that the blockage had to be somewhere in the hose between the toilet and the Y-valve. I assumed that

the hose was under pressure, as well, which did not bode well. (Aboard a friend’s boat in which a small vent hose had somehow gotten plugged, the holding tank system became so pressurized that a 1 ½-inch hose under the V-berth ruptured in the wee hours of the night! The story was side-splittingly funny when told over drinks, but I’m sure it wasn’t at the time.) There was nothing for me to do, however, but loosen the hose at the toilet and hope for the best. I didn’t get sprayed, but it was not a pleasant job, espe- cially in the heat. The standard 1½-inch sanitation discharge

we purchased Dreamer a few years before. I thought the toilet pump O rings were probably getting a little stiff, so I poured a bit of vegetable oil into the head and pumped it through, hoping it would lubricate them. No dice. As was typical of boats in British Columbia Scale buildup in marine toilet hoses is one of the nastiest and most intractable problems in boats that use saltwater in their head systems. 32

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