Wed 4 Jul

Another day in the marina, another day of fixing the boat! As you might remember, we installed a new pump yesterday that should in theory be able to pump whatever is in the waste water tank over board. Well, after installing the pump yesterday, we thought we’ll give it a go today. And guess what – it did not work! We filled up the waste water tank, opened the valves in the plumping and – nothing!

The pump worked, very hard in fact, but no water was being pumped over board. Our suspicion was that since the tank hadn’t been used in years there is probably something somewhere that clogs up the plumbing. This meant we had to take apart the plumbing bit by bit to try and see where the blockage was – a rather smelly job.

Just as it was about to get really nasty, a friend called because he needed help with his boat. Perfect excuse for me to hand this job over to Camilla, who did a fantastic job in taking everything apart and cleaning all the pipes. I think she was a plumber in a previous life!

Once we got the plumbing sorted and the pump was happily pumping, the only small job that remained was fixing the meter that is connected to the tank and tells you how full or empty it is. This meter had a bunch of random wires connected to weird places, and without proper documentation we had to trial and error our way around this thing until it finally worked. Reminded me of my days of a software engineer – keep changing random things until it works, and never touch it again! 😀

Another similarity to software development comes to mind – the whole job should not have taken more than an hour, but ended up taking us the whole day. We literally said “Let’s quickly fix this in the morning before it gets too hot”, and ended up finishing the job in total darkness around 10 o’clock. Never knew that owning a boat and writing software had so many things in common!