Nearly sunken yacht
Regularly going on sailing toerns and as it is the case with chartered yachts, they are often held together by bodge jobs. During season they are returned on Saturday morning by the last crew to clear the port by afternoon with the next crew for the next toern, so no time for big repairs in between or the charter company is loosing money.

During such a trip we often entertain ourselves with discovering such "repairs" or trying our own luck to keep the boat afloat - usually we return the yacht in a better shape than before. So the story:

We are leaving the beautiful port of Rab on the Croatian island Rab, which I can only recomend to everybody visiting this corner of the adriatic sea and reach open water just some miles southwest. On of my fellow sailors was eagerly waiting for this, as he had to use the toilet, which is only allowed at the open sea. On his return he pops up the hatchway and signals our skipper to come down with him, as there is "water poring in". Lots of yachts have been sunken by people forgetting to close seacocks (fnar!) or burst hoses from the installations going to the outside below the water level. We all get a little nervous as there is clearly a splashing noise from inside the boat, skipper commands us to turn the boat around and head for the port and bail water out of of the bilge, we can see already ourselves in the live raft gnawing each others limbs of in despair.

So our skipper goes down and has the honour of giving the water inside the boat a little taste test (yummie!) to give us the all-clear as it happens to be fresh water. We discover the the cold water hose under the sink in the bathroom disconnected from the faucet and as the water system is powered by a little compressor pumping the water out of the fresh water tank as long as there is no resistance (faucet open), it happily flooded our ship with water we already had abord. So the first bodge fix was to turn the compressor of - viola, no more water in the bilge.

At port I manufactured a plastic disk from a bottle cap with a pocket knife which fit into the fitting and closed the outlet, but as only the hot water was now connected to the faucet it would again start to pour from the now disconnected hose as soon as you turned the single handed tap from hot to cold. So the floating hose was bent 180 degrees like you do with a garden hose to quickly stop the water and wrapped to itself with some layers of duct tape. Held for the rest of the trip.

As we have a victory beer to soothe our nerves from the leak alarm in the nearest bar, I am awarded with the McGuyver medal with silver ribbon for saving us from a wet grave by a bodge job, crafted by my fellow crew from a beer mat and a stripe of duct tape, which I still have as a souvenir from this legendary toern. What was to follow, was fixing the binoculars, the dinghy, some drawers in the kitchen, the echo-lot and fixing us with lots of carlovacko beer which is sold in convenient 2 litre PET bottles with yacht-saving caps.

Ahoi!
(threeverse ultima ratio regum, Tue 15 Mar 2011, 22:53, 1 reply)

worst lolcat ever

(mersault, Wed 16 Mar 2011, 12:42, closed)