La Vida Dulce: Doldrums

Well, Summer is coming to a close, school buses are holding up traffic again and we're still mooching shelter from friends and family. Pete and Gina let us hide out in their home for six weeks while they stayed at their vacation home on Virginia's Eastern Shore. But all good things must come to an end. They were scheduled to return on August 13th (Friday the 13th!!!) so they could prepare to go back to being teachers for another year. That's gotta be a tough transition to make.

Anyway, Cheri and I packed up and moved out, thinking we'd be moving onto the boat and sailing back to Herrington and getting on with our lives. This was not to be. The tank didn't arrive from Wellington Plastics in the five days planned and took another week beyond that. Grrrr. Musta had some trouble getting through customs. I can just see it. US Customs probably wouldn't take big black boxes lightly. No ticking sounds but it could be a bomb. I'm probably lucky they didn't blow it up to diffuse it. So the tank didn't even arrive until late on the 12th and you just know everyone had to sit around and stare at it for a while. And of course not much of anything is gonna get done on Friday the13th. So now we're shooting for the 20th.

We send Cheri and Bella down to Florida again to stay the week with her Mom and I move back in with Ed and Ellen. I'm really getting to like the pillows on their guest room bed. The week I spend at their place is also the week of the worst storms Maryland has seen in the past 500 years. It rains so hard you can't even see the front of the car and I have an hour commute in each direction. That's an hour if things are going well. They weren't. My commute from Reisterstown to DC takes me onto 695 (Baltimore beltway), I-95 and 495 (DC beltway). These are easily the 3 worst roads to be on at 6am and 6pm because you have the biggest conglomeration of idiots and race car drivers, all going in the same direction, idiots at 50 mph and race car drivers at 90. Just doesn't work. Add in some raindrops and the idiots slow down to 20 and the race car drivers speed up to 95. Most days I'd leave before 6 in the morning and wouldn't get back to Ellen and Ed's before 8 at night. I did realize through all of this that there are thousands of people out there who do this every day. And they call that living? I can't wait to get back on the boat and sail away from this madness for good.

So, Cheri comes back on the 19th and we find out that the boat won't be ready until the 27th. Yikes! What're we gonna do? We are now truly homeless with no plan, other than sleep in the car and shower in the men's room at work. Then from out of nowhere Cheri's music teacher, Sharon (and her husband Fred) offer us the use of their home while they're on vacation in Canada. The Lord is definitely looking out for us. I just don't know how we'll ever be able to repay all this kindness. Gonna take a lot more than a bag of McNuggets, that's fer sure.

So, where do we stand with the repairs? Good question. The tank is installed. I saw it with my own two eyes last weekend. It's in place with the lines reconnected and nicely braced and battened down. This week (the final week?) my old buddy Mac will be doing the final fiberglass work. Mac is a genius with fiberglass, even built his own boat from scratch. I have no doubt the work will be top notch.

A nice upgrade we're doing on this project is a sensor and readout so we can tell how full the tank is. I don't ever want to have to clean up from an overflowed pump-out line again. Yuck! I mean it's just disgusting! Definitely worth a few bucks to be able to avoid that. The unit we're putting in is made by Electrosense (click here for their website). A common way for reading out tank volume is with a float, just like in your toilet tank or your gas tank. Not such a good choice in this environment because it can easily get stuck. Then ya hafta go in and clean it. No thanks. Another way is with pneumatic tubes or hoses but these can clog. Then what? Blow through the hose to clear it? I don't think so. Probably the most common readout for a holding tank is an electronic sensor that mounts on the outside wall of the tank. This seems like the way to go because there's no moving parts and it doesn't actually come in contact with the contents of the tank. The problem with this system is that it can be fooled by buildup on the inside of the tank. Maybe an even bigger problem is that there have been reports of a high rate of electrical failure. The unit made by Electrosense mounts at the top of the tank and has five sensor rods inside, each being a different length and custom tuned to our tanks volume. The rods are mounted in a 1.5" PVC plug which threads into the top of the tank and contains the electronics for the sending unit. Low voltage signals are sent over a Cat5e cable to the display, which in our case will be mounted at the Nav Station. The only time this thing uses any power is when you push a button on the display which lights up the LED's of the rods that are immersed. Pretty simple and a nice power saver too.

I just received a few more pictures from John showing the most recent progress. I'll include them here for your perusal. The one with the blue squiggly line shows the black poly tank in place with bracing. The blue line is the Cat5e cable for the sensor readout. This picture was taken at an angle so the black tank is actually laying horizontally under the floor.

The next picture shows the new wood panels installed with an access panel for hiding stuff way down there. After that we see the next level being glassed in. This provides another level of storage below the bunk and has multiple access panels. There's a ton of storage space under this bunk!