What's that smell? Weekend Projects

We're getting back into our routine of long weekends on the boat every week.  That means PROJECTS!  At least it does on a wind-less Sunday afternoon.

The 900sqft condo has become an upholstery shop...

The major project going on right now is the re-making and upholstering of the salon cushions.  All of the base cushions are cut and I'm about half way through with covering them in Izit Leather.  Oddly enough, the color of the new fabric is pretty much identical to the old vinyl.  But the feel of the new fabric is buttery soft and the combination of a hard density base foam topped with a 3" cushy foam is magical.  I'll eventually do a whole post on the remaking of it all.

We've also had a nagging smell in the fwd cabin - it's driven me nuts since we bought the boat.  It's apparently getting stronger, as Mark can finally smell it.  Thus the chasing of odors over the past few weeks.  Between internet research and, well, sniffing, we think it was simply a few tiny leaks in the silicone that seals the hoses to the forward holding tank.  We'll have to just wait and see if that fixes it.  The hoses are all pretty darn new, so we really don't think it will be necessary to change those out, thankfully.

To be extra sure we got the smell, we also pumped out the heads and rinsed the holding tanks with fresh water.  A boat can never NOT smell enough for my taste.

Speaking of smells - that leads to the next project: cleaning the water tanks/water hoses.  The fresh water has been pretty questionable to me.  We use a specific water hose only for fresh water when we fill the tanks.  We also have a filter under the sink - and all drinking water goes into a Brita pitcher for further filtering.  But I'm a freak and was not satisfied with this.  I did some research and, I believe thanks to the Women Who Sail group on FB (yes, another score for that awesome group of ladies) I found some instructions on "shocking" the tanks.  Basically it gave me a recipe of 1oz of bleach per gallon of water in the fresh water tank.  We have two tanks at 66 gallons each - so I added 1/2 gallon of bleach to each tank.  Then you just open every faucet on the boat and run the water until you can smell the bleach.  You can actually feel the bleach.  Once you've got bleach water in the lines - as stagnant lines are the most likely hiding place for non-wanted visiting mold/critters/whatever, you turn the water off and let everything sit for at least 2 hours, but no more than 24hrs.  We got that project going and then went to work on the heads while the bleach sat.  And maybe we paddled and took the dinghy out for a sail or two...

Eventually we emptied out the tanks completely (this makes me cringe all over again to think about that waste of water...) and refilled them.  They still seem bleachy.  We'll be using bottled water for a while until we empty and refill the tanks again - but I'll likely use the water to clean the boat this time.  At least then it won't be a complete waste.  We also added a newly purchased inline filter to the hose at the dock - thanks to that above mentioned freakiness, I wanted another filter point!

I think that may be the extent of the excitement for the weekend projects.  But don't underestimate the fun of manually pumping out the heads and then pushing the 30 gallons of poop water all the way up the dock to the marina to pump it out into the marina's sewage receptacle thingy.  That alone was enough of a workout for the entire day.  And the smell?  Well, lets just say that Luna Sea smells like roses in comparison!