Wednesday, April 23, 2008

We stayed in St. Kitts a few extra days at the marina to fix our head. That's the toilet for land-lubbers out there. It had been increasingly difficult to pump, requiring extra pumps, and on the way over to St. Kitts it overflowed with sea water - not a good situation. We closed the thru-hulls and knew we'd be facing another go at the toilet. It's a Lavac, supposedly one of the more maintenance - free varieties of marine toilets. But ours has been a problem off and on, requiring taking apart every few months. Now we wish we had bought a whole extra pump in St. Martin, that will be on the list for purchase in Grenada!
Boy what a mess when we took it apart - calcified crud with sea salt, thankfully not too smelly, as it was all petrified. Lots of buckets of vinegar later, the crud came off and all parts looked much better. A new valve at one end - and put it back together.

Woops! Larry threw the bucket of old vinegar water with crud overboard - and the black plastic nut required to hold it all together. Here's the nut pictured with the scuba gear he needed to go diving after the part. Not a chance we'd find one of these nuts on the island.

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