Taking a day off from boat plumbing

Before heading down to the boat on Saturday, we stopped at the Home Depot in Glastonbury, Conn. and found the place not very busy. We were steered to the plumbing department manager who turned out to be a nice guy. We asked a lot of questions about PEX but his answers were limited to the brand of PEX that Home Depot carries: SharkBite. Nice stuff, but the fittings are expensive and there are some downsides, it seems, to using SharkBite PEX in our boat application. At least they seem like downsides for us, who aren't plumbers by any means.

To make the visit even more informative, the plumbing guy at Home Depot asked us why we were even considering PEX when we could use ordinary marine water hose. Good question and one that we will consider before we go much farther with this project. We'll talk to Rob, our expert about this.

After Home Depot, we went to the boat and began to figure out how we were going to drag new hose (PEX or not) from the engine space, though a bulkhead into the area under the cabin sole and then into the galley.

Under the sink in the galley, we can't seem to reach the "T" that taps hot and cold water for the galley faucet. We removed the stove and that gave us a little more access. We stuck a camera at arms length back behind the galley sink and that showed an unopened box of spaghetti right in our field of view. Frances must have tossed it back there sometime last season or the season before and it landed beyond the shelf under the sink. We were just able to reach it and remove it after which another picture showed that the "T" fittings we need to access are underneath an air conditioning hose.

Bad photo, but you get he idea. We're going to have to pick up that AC hose (which we can't reach right now) to pull up the hot and cold water "T" fittings.

Next we opened the engine hatches and crawled down between the engines to make a sketch of the path that both the boat's cold water and the hot water take from the boat's water tank, the city water connection and the hot water heater.

Our "schematic" isn't very pretty, but it does show how the old water hoses are connected. It does omit one more connection and that is a "T" in the cold water line in the head that goes to the marine toilet, but that's all new and we aren't going to change it.

Taking a day off

On Sunday, we spent the day at the New Britain Museum. We promised ourselves that this winter, with fewer boat projects, we'd take some time and do fun things.

The New Britain Museum is one of our favorites. We wanted to see the "Aloha" exhibit of Hawaiian art. It seems that the museum's first director, Sandy Lowe, was Hawaiian and his exuberant personality instilled lots of interest in Hawaii among the wealthy families of New Britain in the 1920s through the 1950s.

As a pleasant bonus, we also saw the extensive exhibit of Maurice Sendak's many drawings and children's books. We all remember "Where the Wild Things Are" but we learned that this was only one of the 63 books he wrote or illustrated.

On the way out, Frances adopted her "Wild Things" pose.

It was truly a day well spent.