An idyllic day of toilet maintenance in Chichester harbour

It was all going well until Alex needed to go to the toilet.

We ran out of wind halfway between Brighton and Chichester.  Disappointing to have to put the engine on after sailing all the way from Gillingham but the alternative was missing the tide for the Looe channel north of Selsey Bill.  Without any wind, we would have found ourselves going backwards for the evening and we were already cold enough not to fancy it much.

As it was, we motored the 3 hours to Chichester, ‘put our foot down’ hard to get across the rapidly ebbing tide and scraped across the bar with 0.5m water under our keel to pick up a buoy off Hayling island.  Dinner at a relatively civilised 9pm, woke up to sun, views, little wind and the hope of a lazy day.

Then toilet trouble.  The thing was happy enough to pump matter out (thankfully!) but not to flush.  At least water for flushing is easy to come by, even if a bucket-over-the-side isn’t as convenient as a pump.  Presuming the inlet to be blocked, we started dismantling the pipework.  Pipes attached to holes below the waterline are secured with double jubilee clips, which becomes amusing when you find out how hard they are to shift.  Wrestling with them is unnerving because of the force it applies to the through-hull fitting – these are bullet proof when installed well and in good condition but you really don’t want one to fail.  Ours are metal and have spent the last 20 years in a corrosive marine environment.

The whole set-up is unsatisfactory on many fronts and is on our future projects list to sort out:

1. A mix of metric and imperial sizes means nothing fits properly – things are either so tight they are near-impossible to remove or need tape to make them seat.
2. The though-hull fitting is connected to a T-piece (as the salt water is used both by the toilet flush and a salt water rinse in the galley). The geometry is too complicated and hard to clear.
3. You can’t unscrew the T-piece because it fouls the handle on the seacock. Didn’t really fancy dismantling that, but there didn’t seem to be much of an alternative.
4. Best of all, the inlet for the toilet flush and galley is about 6” in front of the discharge from the toilet. Fantastic!!  Noted not to use the toilet and the galley at the same time…

With everything in pieces, we recovered a reasonable quantity of seaweed and blew the rest back out through the seacock.  Hadn’t realised the stuff was so effective for plugging holes, might keep some in our emergency kit in future.  Finally, as we’d got all the cushions up in the aft cabin, we did some engine checks.  It was the first decent run for the engine and it looks fine.  Good news after all.  Time for tea and the rest of Jerry’s ginger biscuits.  Just need to go to the toilet first…