The "Head" Master

On a boat the toilet is called a head. In one hull we had an electric one. It did not work all that perfect and used power, of which we need to be very careful with. So we bought on old fashioned one in Puerto Rico and installed it a few days ago. After a few days it started to show difficulties in the pumping department (I would say the most important job of a toilet). 

Yesterday we wanted to attack the problem; the booklet (yes I cannot live without booklets) gave as a solution: the joker valve!!! Okay!! But my mate thought he knew what it was, unscrewing the pump showed the valve was flipped back, so we were very happy for such an easy solution, but….it was not the problem. 

Now it got complicated, we disconnected the hose from the toilet, which started immediately a little bit of an odor problem; the “Febreze” had to work overtime, it had a hard time living up to his promise “it will eliminate all odors and leave a breath of fresh air.”

Then Jacques wanted to take the hose of the plastic pipe leading into the holding tank and then the fitting broke. I, yes me!, had the great idea of using a rubber hose that would go over the outside of the elbow fitting. But for that needed some stuff. Dinghy down, walking to a hardware store and we found a perfect rubber sleeve that would go precisely over the elbow and for the connection to the hose Jacques had a bunch of fittings from older plumbing leftovers that had the same size as the rubber hose. 

Then we took the task of flushing out the sh@!#t from the area with a small pump hang into the water outside the boat and a hose to pump seawater into the bilge. After that we used the pump the other way round to pump the sh@#!t back into the sea.

At five we tried it out and see: everything was working with no leaks. This really called for a super big and sweaty high five and for a coke with rum to flush the bad smell down. Now Jacques is promoted to certified head master but I hope he will never need to use these skills again.

Ria