36°50′28″ N 76°17′29″ W

July 23 – Tidewater Marina, Portsmouth VA

Today (Wednesday) we stayed at the marina & worked on a few maintenance issues.

First on the agenda were the heads 😝

There is a head in each cabin but both of them stopped working properly after we left Jacksonville. They would flush away anything that was in the bowl but could not bring in water to assist with the flushing, so we had to keep bottles of tap water handy to pour into the bowl to make the toilet flush into the holding tank.

The flushing procedure is pretty simple, just pull the handle up & down 4 or 5 times, but it doesn’t take much to put the toilet out of action.

After disassembling the hand pump mechanism I found one the little flapper valves in the forward head was broken right off & the one in the aft head was so corroded that it would not seal the (flushing) water intake valve properly. (circled in red in the photo below)

I purchased two new repair kits from the Marina store & after spending only about 10 minutes installing the new parts both toilets are now back in action! Hopefully they will continue to work properly until we get home.

This winter I intend to replace these toilets with new electric flush/macerator toilets – similar to what you find on airplanes. I had them on the Nauticat & they worked great!

Next on the job list was an engine oil change. My maintenance practice is to change the oil & filter after every 100 hours of operation.

The engine has a special hand pump on it that you use to pump the oil out of the crankcase. It doesn’t pump very much with each stroke & the engine holds almost 16 liters of oil so I had a pretty good case of tennis elbow after that job was done!

This stuff costs US $25.00 a jug so routine engine service is pricey. However, it’s money well spent & my philosophy is “that if I look after the engine then the engine will look after me!”

Now we are all set to cast off our lines early Thursday morning & head towards the upper end of the Chesapeake Bay.

Cheers!