Let's start with Zephyr. Yesterday, Tracy came out of the aft stateroom and said she smelled something. When I looked into the bilge--I'd emptied it a few days ago getting prepared for the new bilge pump. Well, it wasn't empty any more. About 6 inches of very black water. It looked like we had another problem. Up came the forward floor boards. Brown water was slowly seeping toward the bilge. The forward head had begun leaking again!! Last Winter, the sewage tank had split its seams. I'd repaired it with 5 layers of fiberglass. Out I went and into the forward sail locker where the tank is. Out came equipment to get to the tank. No leaks!?! I ran a paper towel around the entire tank--dry. That means one of the lower hoses had leaked-big time! We started up the engine and headed for the pump out station to get the tanks emptied as soon as we could. Unfortunately, a big boat was blocking our path. There was not enough room the tie up. The stern tank emptied fine. I even flushed it with some water to make sure all the pipes were empty and "clean". Forward--where the problem was--the pump wined but you couldn't hear anything going out. The contents of the hose were frozen!! It broke loose and out it went. Again, I flushed more water into the tank to get everything "clean" for my job later.
Next, the bilge--yuck!! I had to put the manual bilge pump hose back down and start pumping. Out it went thank God. I then dumped lots more water down there and flushed it out four times to try and get as much of the bad stuff out or at least diluted before I started the cleanup later. This is definitely NOT living the dream.
Back to the docks--forgot to tell you--the dock lines were frozen lumps of rope. All the cold weather had reduced them to tangled lumps of frozen line. It had taken us a while to get them untied and would take us a while to get them retied and Zephyr made fast to the dock. We'll be retieing them again today before the storm comes.
A lead in to what is coming--Blizzard Warnings!!! Say what? The "perfect storm" is descending on the Seattle area. We are set to have a big low pressure coming in from the coast and a high pressure coming in from the East all set to clash right over Seattle. It's 16 degrees outside with a high of 27 for today with winds expected to hit gust of 90mph East of Seattle and winds of 40--50mph here. Just West and South of us, the forecast is for anywhere from 6 to 24 inches of snow!! We are slated for only a few inches on top of what we already have. I didn't bring my snow shovel with us when we headed out from Denver back in April. Guess I should have. It is supposed to start this afternoon and go through tomorrow afternoon. Boy, what fun? At least we are tied up to a great dock with power for the heaters and not at anchor depending on our diesel heater. It does make for a great backup source of heat though.
I finally got our DuoGen wind generator up the pole and set for producing power. It had frozen in the down position and would not go up to the top of the pole. With the upcoming winds, it should be interesting to see what she will produce. I've set the switches on the batteries so that the battery bank that gets most of the power from the generator will need a charge once the wind starts up later today. I've been emailing back and forth with the manufacturer over the past few weeks with lots of questions as to the power output. I guess we will see this afternoon and evening.
The normal high temperature for this time of year is 45. Not bad. Unfortunately, we are only getting into the mid 20s. And the forecast is for the same for the next week. Once we hit "normal" we will be working on our tans.
The Sea Marine company Christmas party is set for this afternoon. We were invited to attend. If anyone had told us we would still be here for Christmas back in July when we got here, I'd have thought they were crazy. Guess not. I had a diesel class scheduled for this afternoon over in Seattle but it was cancelled. Something about bad weather. Go figure.
Well, we are set to hunker down and do a bit of bilge cleaning today. Nice inside work.
Stay warm out there!
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