Daily Archives: July 24, 2010

Friday, July 9

Today we began installing the new heads. We started the day by walking to the downtown area to Jackie Munro’s restaurant “Munro’s” and introducing ourselves to her.  Bob was due to arrive home from Atlanta later in the afternoon. Jackie was kind enough to loan us her car so we could go on a trek for plumbing supplies—and what a trek it turned out to be! A few pieces at Canadian Tire, some more at Home Depot, then WalMart, some more at the local marine supply store and finally at a local plumbing supply store. Wow, almost 5 hours of running around for a handful of parts.

After we were done Jackie fed us awesome (late) lunch at her restaurant.
Armed with plumbing supplies and full tummies we started our new project. Bo really did not have a lot of interest in helping me with this project. He told me that he had trouble sleeping the night before so he was up at 3:00am measuring the dimensions in the head and making a list of the supplies we would need to accomplish the task. What a great guy!

The old toilets came our pretty easily and I lined them up on the foredeck so that all passers-by in the marina could have a chuckle. We started installing new toilets and I blew out my back trying to put a water fitting inside a piece of plastic pipe. Wow, did that hurt! I was simply sitting down and trying to press the two fittings together—and pow!!!—it felt like someone had stuck a knife in my back.
By this time Bob Munro had arrived home from his trip. Bob and Jackie live in a condo right at the marina so Bob kindly went home and got some pain lineament for me. That seemed to help a bit. It was getting on to early evening & I did not want to push my back any further so we quit for the day and went out for dinner with Bob and Jackie at a local English pub. Awesome fish & chips!

Thursday, July 8

We left the marina in Scarborough early in the morning and motored east to Coburg. Unfortunately there was not enough wind to sail. The lake was like a mill pond and the heat was so intense that the lake was covered with heat haze. We could only see a couple of hundred yards forward but if you looked straight up the sky was clear and blue. We arrived in Coburg in the late afternoon, went for dinner at local restaurant and then stopped by local pub to listen to a great blues band. Tomorrow we tackle the installation of the new heads.

Wednesday, July 7

Bo and I took Emily to catch the noon train back to London then headed back to the boat. It was unbelievably hot! I cannot remember having such a long stretch of hot weather. The anchorage we were in had no wind at all so we weighed anchor and headed east to Scarborough. I contacted Mike Macdonald from The Rigging Shoppe (in Scarborough) and he offered to deliver two new heads (toilets) to Cathedral Bluffs Marina which was just a couple of kilometers away from their store. I have decided to install new heads because the current ones are the original installation from when the boat was first built. They worked OK but were complicated to flush, allowed smells to come back from the holding tanks and they used a lot of water compared to the newer models.

While we were en route to the marina the cold water feed hose blew off the hot water tank and the entire water supply drained in to the bilge. The hot water tank is inside a bench locker in the galley and with all the engine noise we did not notice the problem until Bo went to get some water and nothing came out of the tap! Fortunately there was no damage and we were able to make repairs at our destination. We arrived at the Marina just as Spain won the Fifa World Cup against Germany.