Or so say our friends across the pond when something is messed up a fair amount. Bollocksed-up works too, but sadly there is nothing on the boat called a “Seabollocks” because it sounds like there should be.
Getting the boat hauled on schedule and getting the bottom painted all proceeded according to plan. Part of our work plan includes “service all seacocks” when the boat was out of the water, and this is where we hit a snag. One of many, but this one you can directly track a week’s or more lost time to.
For the non sailors in the crowd, a “Seacock” is not an aquatic fowl or a nautical profanity, but rather a valve of a specific nature which is attached to a hole in the boat for the set purpose of keeping the ocean out when you don’t want it. They need to be tough, corrosion resistant and they need to work. It goes without saying they are rather expensive – this can be assumed by the fact that they are used on boats.
There are times you want the ocean to come in the boat, to do things like cool your engines or refrigerators or get turned into fresh water by the water maker, or times you need a hole back out to the ocean for dumping wastes from sinks, drains, or when off shore the heads (aka “toilets” if they aren’t on a boat) so the seacocks are connected to hoses to get the water and outflows to the right places. The Seacock is there in case one of the hoses to the above systems breaks so you can quickly stop the leak.
We have something like twenty-two holes in Evenstar that are protected with seacocks. That’s a lot of holes in the boat.
As we got ready to launch we “Exercised” all the seacocks which is something you are *ahem* supposed to do regularly but of course we’d been remiss on for a while. Exercising a seacock is a fancy work of rmoving the lever back and forth a bit to open and close it a couple of times. This prevents buildup from deposits in the ocean or marine life from blocking the seacock in one position. If you do this regularly it should be a one handed operation that requires minimal effort. It should not, for example, require the use of a ball-peen hammed to pound on the handle until it starts moving.
After gently persuading a few of the more recalcitrant seacocks with our hammer they all got moving. Except one. This of course was not a small seacock under a sink you can reach by opening a cabinet and moving the spare toilet paper out of the way. Of course this was one of the biggest seacocks in the boat (two inches in diameter) in the most difficult spot to reach (well, some short armed folks on board had trouble with a couple of others, but at least they could SEE those) in the lowest part of the boat that isn’t the bilge.
This particular seacock was resisting all persuasion. It is located in the far corner of the engine room, behind the engine. If you lay across the engine and kind of twisted around without quite dislocating your shoulder you could probably get enough grip on it to open it. If it wanted to move.
According to sources, a two inch three feet below the waterline will allow 136 gallons of water per minute into the boat. So this is serious business – these things can not fail. In this case, it was locked open as this particular seacock connects to our cockpit drain and some of the vents in the engine cooling system. So if that hose breaks…bad things happen.
I will not go into gruesome detail about seacock installation for you here – if you are curious here is a nice overview. Suffice it to say it is serious business because of the potential for disaster if it is done poorly. We decided to defer this unplanned project to the marina because I wasn’t about to learn this one on the fly and we had too many other things to do, including some travel.
It took a while for it to get sorted because we unfortunately didn’t find it until we were almost ready to give the all clear to launch and the yard had to get some people on it. But they did a bangup job and it is now the prettiest, shiniest and best seacock installation on the boat.
