Earthly Delights

Last weekend (04-25-14) we installed the Mermaid Condensators on our two reverse cycle air conditioning / heating units.  The installation is pretty straightforward.  You cut about 3" out of a straight section of the water line running from the A/C condenser to the overboard discharge.  There's an arrow on the Condensator that shows the correct direction to mount it.  Then simply remove the old condensation drain that fed into the bilge and replace it with the line supplied in the kit.  This has a filter that'll need to be checked occasionally and a reducer that attached to small diameter tubing that runs up to the Condensator.  Everything gets secured with clamps to prevent any wear from motion.  That's about it.  It sounds simple on paper but the job took most of the afternoon to install these two simple items.  The second one went much faster then the first.

The hardest part was clearing the area around the A/C units to be able to get at them.  On our boat the larger 16,000 BTU unit is located Port side behind the settee in the Main Salon.  You get to it from beneath the settee, which is a storage area, and also behind it, which is another storage area.  The other unit (8,000 BTU) is located in the Forward Stateroom beneath the head of our bunk.  Once the mattress is pulled out of the way a 2' square hatch is revealed that's right above the A/C unit.  Finding a place for all the stuff that got removed for access was the most time consuming part.  The boat was a mess with no where to sit for most of the afternoon.

Once everything was installed we fired up the A/C water pump and checked for leaks.  The Condensators make a little chug-chug slurping sound but once everything gets closed up you can't hear it at all.  With no leaks we put everything back in it's place and fired up the A/C.  We flushed out the bilge using dock water and pumped it out with both the electric and manual bilge pumps to get as much out as we could.  There was still about an inch or so of water down there but that's the best we can do without using a shop vac.  Our bilge is quite deep, probably 48" down and about 18" wide and maybe 36" in length.  In the past with the A/C running we would get about 10" or 12" of water over seven days in there before the bilge pump would kick in and the standing water would get really pukey, stinky.  Part of our weekly routine, March through November, has been flushing out the bilge.  It's been like that for over four and a half years now, constantly flooded.  The only time it's not is when we run the diesel heater and shut down the reverse cycle systems.

It's obvious now that all of that was coming from the air conditioning condensation run-off.  I checked the bilge on Sunday and found the suction end of the hand pump was partly under water.  My biggest concern was that we still had water leaking into the bilge because that would possibly mean it was coming from our water tank.  Island Packet boats are notorious for having leaking tanks, be they water, fuel or waste.  The tanks are all located beneath the cabin sole, the floor, which means that replacing a tank is a nightmare and very expensive.  We've already replaced our waste holding tank and I don't want to have to go through something like that again.  With this in mind I started making plans to figure out if the water tank was leaking.  I was going to add colored dye to our fresh water tank and see if anything showed up in the bilge.  Cheri was going to be out of town this next weekend and I was planning to do it then.

This morning, Tuesday, I got the urge to take another look in the bilge.  We had a good rain all night and odds were good that the water level would be even higher due to rain water running down the mast into the bilge.  When I pulled up the floor plate and shined my light down there I was pleasantly surprised to find the water level had actually dropped maybe half an inch.  The intake box for the hand pump was almost completely exposed and dry now and just the floor of the bilge was still under maybe a half inch of water.  It was evaporating.  This is a first for La Vida Dulce and I can now see a time in the near future when we'll have a dry bilge.  This weekend, instead of coloring our drinking water maybe I'll get the shop vac out and pump the bilge dry.  I'd like to scrub it down with bleach and then give it a few coats of paint.  And then maybe stare at it for a few days.  A dry bilge!  What  concept!

I'd just like to point out here that when we bought the boat in September 2009 we paid big bucks for "experts" to install the A/C systems.  There are a number of things I've come across that I woulda done differently.  In the Forward Stateroom they ran the duct into the cabinet at the foot of the bunk and directed the air right at the head of the bed.  Even with the fan turned down as low as it would run it was still very annoying having wind constantly in your face.  This past Winter I pulled the old duct out and redirected it out the foot of the bunk so it blows at floor level and distributes through the room.  It still heats and cools just fine but is now much more comfortable.  The return for this system was a vent built into the side of the storage area beneath the bed.  The problem there is that the storage area has compartments that are walled off from where the A/C unit is located so the air can't get through.  The system was pulling air up from the bilge.  I cut 4" holes into the compartment walls to get better air flow.  In the Main Salon the through-hull is plumbed with pipe fittings (not hose) to the strainer basket and the basket is mounted rock solid against the floor of the compartment.  The strainer basket gets removed from the top but the glass container screws off for cleaning from the bottom.  There's no way to remove the container and the opening at the top is too small to reach into.  The worst thing they did though, was running the condensate drains into the bilge.  It just doesn't pay to have someone else do the work.  It's only going to be done to my satisfaction if I do it myself.

Another project we took on last weekend was getting our vegetable garden back in shape.  Two years ago Cheri got permission from the marina's owner to use a small piece of land for a vegetable garden.  It's located across the street from the marina near an old tobacco barn so we have water and power and a place to store our garden tools.  The owner let us use some planting boxes they had used for growing shrubs and trees for landscaping the marina.  The boxes are about 7' x 9' and made of 2" x 8" lumber.  We rented a rotor-tiller and dug up an area about 20' x 20' for four boxes with aisles around and between each one.  Our first year we lost pretty much everything we planted to the deer and ground hogs but we did learn a lot.  Last year we didn't do anything because we concentrated all our time getting ready for our trip to Bermuda.

This year we got a good early start on the season.  We weeded and turned the dirt in the boxes, then added about six bags of good topsoil to each one.  We're only doing two boxes this time to keep our work load down.  We then drove in wood steaks around the boxes and added wire fencing.  In the middle we planted 6' steaks and added a chicken wire roof to each box.  Cheri planted a bunch a veggies and we included two flats of marigolds to help keep out the bugs.  Some of the veggies included two kinds of tomatoes, cherry and heirloom beefsteak, zucchini, cucumbers, mint, oregano and strawberries that survived from two years ago, bush beans, thyme, Thai and regular basil, rosemary, lavender, artichokes ( a gift from a neighbor), and some summer squash.  With the help of a little Miracle-Grow I think we'll have a pretty good harvest this year.  Cheri is an excellent cook and enjoys being creative in the galley which is the primary reason we made the improvements we did last year.  Having fresh veggies from our own garden is really great and something not a lot of live-aboards can claim.  This will most likely be our last year for this so we'll try to make the most of it.