Less than two weeks to go until we are officially full-time liveaboards. I’ve been running around trying to find storage bins for everything we’re putting in the storage unit and on the boat. I still have three portlights and the brass bell to scrub with acid before we leave the condo. And I’ve been putting a bunch of stuff on Craig’s List. What doesn’t sell I’m going to put on consignment or donate to charity. The condo is a mess, the walls are bare, and we don’t have any food because I don’t want to move a bunch of food that we probably won’t have room for on the boat. This weekend we are cleaning the storage unit so it’s less of a messy workshop, and organizing it better so we will be able to find our winter clothes in about two months. I’m hoping to get most of our stuff moved onto the boat or into storage by Sunday. I’m taking next week off work so I can get the condo cleaned, the carpets shampooed, and the final walk-through with the property manager done before next Friday.
We finally got a post office box at the Isleton post office. We are officially “delta people.” Rich put new Formica on the walls in the bathroom, epoxied a new outlet fitting and vent fitting to the top of the holding tank, ran the holding tank line to the bathroom, and is almost ready to install the toilet.
A week or so ago he noticed was that the holding tank had about 10 gallons of liquid in it. When we flushed the water heater a few weeks ago we let it drain into the bilge to be pumped overboard. I don’t know how many gallons we drained this way, but I know some of the water made its way into the holding tank because the fittings weren’t installed, but most of the water was pumped overboard by the bilge pump. I also know our bilge is bone dry all the time, which means our stuffing box isn’t dripping as it should be. It’s my understanding that the stuffing box is supposed to drip a few times each minute. Those drips usually flow to the bilge where they’re pumped overboard. So why is our bilge bone dry? During the survey, KKMI adjusted the stuffing box and since then it hasn’t been dripping. We’re wondering if it’s possible the drips are making their way into the holding tank and filling it up every few weeks.
So I Google’d “how many drops in a gallon” and came up with this:
120 drops in 5 mL
3785 mL in one gallon = 90,840 drops in a gallon
525,960 minutes in a year, 1 drop per minute is about 34 gallons a year, or a little over half a gallon a week.
So Rich pumped out the holding tank on July 25th. We flushed the water heater on August 10th. The time between those dates is about 16 days, roughly 2 weeks. If the stuffing box drips 2-3 drops per minute, then that’s about 2.6 to 4 gallons of water that should be in the bilge over a two-week period. If that water is making its way to the holding tank, then our holding tank will fill up in about 4 to 6 months. We haven’t used the holding tank since the day we moved the boat. We had it pumped out back on January 28th. We realized the tank was full again on July 15th…approximately 6 months after the pump out! Houston, I think we have a problem.