In The Clear By Michael



This is how Hurricane Jova looked to us today, from
the deck of Del Viento. Note all of the lines and fenders
around the Beneteau here; that is how we all looked,
preparing for the worst.

Jova spared the Banderas Bay area. Other than a brief spat of about 20 knots of wind late last night, we've experienced uncharacteristic drizzle, cool air, and cloud cover for the past 48 hours. Unfortunately, the pictures I saw of Manzanillo (near where the hurricane made landfall) don't look too good. There was a lot of flooding and a 21-year-old woman and her 5-year-old son lost their lives in a mudslide. Many other smaller communities, including Zihuatlan, Melaque, Barra de Navidad, and Chamela, were also hit hard.



With today's drizzle keeping me inside, I decided to tackle our head problems once and for all. This meant ripping out all of the existing plumbing to re-route it, and hopefully finding the source of our ongoing problems. At best, it is an unspeakably nasty job and once started, there is no turning back. Windy and the girls disappeared for the day.



This is what the inside of all the hoses I removed looked like,
and some looked even worse at some of the T's and other
junctions. Things should work a lot better with this replaced.
Be very glad this picture is not scratch-n'-sniff.

Marine sanitation hose is very stiff and some of the hose in our system is wire-reinforced. Once I loosened hose clamps, none of the hoses would pull from their barbed connectors, and that makes sense. I remember installing this hose on our last boat, it meant soaking the ends in boiling water for a few minutes to soften it up enough to pass over properly sized fittings. Of course, being a boat, all of this unwieldy hose is installed in very hard-to-reach places and passes through multiple bulkheads. I ended up using a hacksaw, Dremel, big wire cutters, and bloodied knuckles to remove everything in pieces. Unfortunately, it rained almost all day. Accordingly, I had the hatches closed tight. It smelled bad, really bad.

Tomorrow I'll head to Zaragoza (the only decent-sized chandlery within 100 miles) to buy a few meters of new hose and a rebuild kit for the Whale pump used to empty the holding tank. That will take care of the discharge side of the head plumbing system, and I can move onto the intake side...and this project isn't even on my list from a couple days back.

--MR

Storefronts all over Puerto Vallarta and the surrounding towns were taped up in advance of the
hurricane, from mom-and-pop bodegas to larger stores, like this Mega supermercado in Bucerias.