cant u use a bucket with a rope to get salt water and then throw it in the toilet to flush it?

At what point does something like this become "fix it or we don't go"?

This was going to be my first question as well.

I have no idea what the toilet looks like on a boat, but if it is anything like a regular toilet I would just fill the tank manually with seawater.

Seems like they should be pretty close to this point now.

Pretty sure salt water reacts poorly and ****s up the system.

It does sound like it's pretty close to a "fix it or we don't go" thing, but I imagine it's less of a worry for De Captain on this 21-day passage than it would be on a 3-month passage. Still....

Not really in this situation. The boat has a fancy vacuflush system that I believe has to measure the amount of input water through the pump at the same time its vacuuming out. It would be possible to replumb it to a thru hull for sea water intake but that's a fair bit of work. Porter is correct that salt water screws up systems like this. Saltwater reacts with pee and creates calcium that can wreak havoc on the system, not that it would ruin it in 3 weeks or that I would care.

I'd say we're getting pretty close now. I've been going through testing systems and yesterday found out that the shower doesn't work. Shower works but a pump is required to drain the water and there is no pump.

A serious WTF moment. I emailed the owner and got a reply of " oh yeah I forgot to mention that, there is no pump, never was. The shower doesn't work."

I'm about to write back this morning - waiting till I calm down a bit. "You seriously ****ing expect me to go for 3 weeks delivering your boat without bathing?"

Remember this isn't some little piece of **** boat, the boat is going on the market for 225k. Who the **** is going to want a 200k boat with no shower?

What happens in a situation like that? Are you stranded in the departure port? I would assume you have a contract with a clause for this contingency. Where would you draw the line (other than a holed hull or some other obvious catastrophic problem)?

Well I don't think with the boats we deliver It would ever actually come down to that but yes our only choice would be to just walk away from the boat and the job leaving us technically stranded in the departure port.

We do get enough money upfront before ever booking the job to cover our airfare to the boat and back home if we got here and the job fell through for whatever reason as well as enough $ to make it worth our wasted time.

As far as where I'd draw the line it would be at anything I felt was unsafe as opposed to comfort. I'm pissed about the whole situation but it doesn't affect our safety just our comfort and our pricing is based a little bit on how comfortable the boat and trip will be.

The night I arrived I was informed that they had waited too long to order the new liferaft and it might not be here in time. That would definitely be a no go. It has since arrived but I have to install it. Owners will con you into doing all kinds of **** for them to try to save money.

The thing about saying no I won't go is it would have a pretty negative effect on our relationship with the broker who gets us a lot of jobs unless we had a really solid reason for not going.

The thing I've learned about owners hiring you for deliveries is they will tell you anything to get you to take the job and then try to get you to do all kinds of labor for them for free if the boat isn't ready or isn't what they say when you arrive. It puts you in a tough situation since you've already flown in and set aside the time.

i read this entire thread today

wow OP u are an unreal human being

im so jealous of the sights you have seen and the life you live.

Update:

Had a couple of conversations with the owner. the contractor they normally use came out Tuesday and spent about 12 hrs onboard doing projects. A few projects he's been supposed to finish for sometime but in addition he replumbed the head so it's saltwater flush (they'll get it replumbed after our delivery) and installed a new shower drain pump.

The owner also took me to West marine to get everything on my wish list. As for the water they bought a 40 gal. Bladder tank and will buy 40 gallons in 1 gallon jugs so we'll have 200 gallons. This won't be much of a hardship and will allow for showering at least every other day.

We set sail from Waikiki on Monday at1pm. The boat doesn't have sailmail and I can't find an account to borrow so we'll mostly be out of contact though we do have a sat phone for emergencies. I expect to resurface in Seattle sometime during the 1st week of sept. Hopefully with something valuable in tow.

Glad to hear the owner isn't a complete dickbag

Me too.

Quite a "find" at sea:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19207810

Have a safe voyage!

Laty,
thanks for the link, interesting story. I've heard of these several times before and floating pumice is supposed to be somewhat common in the South Pacific though I've never seen any. The thing I hate about stories like this is that they never give a location. Sure they say 1000 miles off the coast and then go on to say North of New Zealand but that's pretty much worthless. If your going to write an article about spotting something floating in the ocean give the lat and lon and date it was spotted.



In other news we had planned originally to leave on Thursday but since my brother arrived on Monday and the owner isn't in a hurry and I'm in no hurry we postponed our departure until Monday. Yesterday the owner comes down to the boat and mentions they're in a bit of a "scramble" because of a "mixup" between them and the insurance company they haven't gotten the additional insurance necessary for the passage.

Most boats carry insurance for their home waters, in this case probably somethign like all coastal waters within 50 or 100 nm of Hawaii. When you do a passage you have to get blue water insurance for a specific passage.

So the day after we were supposed to leave they inform me they haven't gotten the additional insurance but should be able to get it sorted out so it doesn't effect our departure on Monday. Then last night I get a text telling me not to go buy provisions today and "insurance is a problem". Great.

In other better news I just bid on 2 more deliveries which would fill up the rest of our year and both are on nicer boats than we've ever delivered.

Said **** it and went sight seeing yesterday. We were driving along the coast when we came around a corner and a hang glider flew about 20' above the car. There were 4 of them putting on a show. It took us a good 15 minutes to turn around, go back, park and walk out to the look out point.

The hang gliders spent a good 1/2 hour dive bombing tourists after we arrived.


edit: It's hard to tell but there were actually tourists ducking several times.

So we went for a sail. We left Oahu on Aug. 15th at noon, rounded Cape Flattery Sept. 5th after dark and arrived in Seattle last night around 11pm.

Everything went smooth for the most part till the last 7 miles.



We had a mixed bag of wind and were becalmed a fair bit. No wind over 30 knots the whole way though. We saw lots of garbage this year, way more than last year but nothing really interesting or that could be said definitively to be from the tsunami. We saw the typical fishing floats, line, nets, plastic, aspirin bottles, colanders and hard hats.

My brother thinks he saw a partially submerged shipping container just after sundown one night. All of the floating debris and calm weather made the fishing excellent. We caught way more fish than we could eat or freeze. We have probably 50lbs of fillets in the freezer now.



Unfortunately the fresh water tanks onboard were more contaminated and rusty than I thought and once we put to sea the motion made the water look like this after the second day:



Unfortunately it only got worse as the trip went on - to the point where it looked like chocolate milk a couple days ago.

I took a bunch of pictures and shot a lot of video that I need to edit. I wrote up a ship's log/ journal with like 50 pictures I'm going to put out for free later this week



Dolphins really seemed to like the boat and I shot video of a pod of them playing in front of the bow



It wasn't all fun and games though. The fuel tanks turned out to be contaminated as well. That meant spending time in the lazarette working on the genset



We caught some tuna too:



The fuel contamination got steadily worse to the point I couldn't keep the engine running last night and the broker had to come bring us beer and tow us in the last 2 miles.



I have a month off now and then its off to Puerto Vallarta to sail Rocket Science to San Francisco. Plenty of time to answer questions.