Our Grand Adventure

1st September 2025

So we are a few weeks into our enforced dock time and we have been really glad for this in hindsight! With the many systems onboard and the number of things that seemed to be broken we have split these up into “phases” of our confidence building.

• Phase 1 – Build Confidence in Systems needed to Live Onboard (in a Marina)
• Phase 2 – Build Confidence in Systems needed to Operate the Boat on day / overnight trips
• Phase 3 – Build Confidence in Systems needed to Live Onboard (on anchor)
• Phase 4 – Build Confidence in Systems needed to undertake longer passages

So Phase 1 – what do you need to live onboard in a marina? Turns out, very little! When we moved onboard we had no water, no refrigeration and no bathroom sink. The Grenada Yacht Club has a nice restaurant, shower and toilet facilities, and we can get water from the hose on the dock. We were still drinking bottled water which we buy in bulk from the local grocery store. The boat is still very grubby – but I had already scrubbed out the V Berth so it was ready for us to sleep there 🙂

Refrigeration

We were both very tired of eating at restaurants and not being able to keep food. The boat had an in-bench “fridge” which was really not working. Turns out it had no fridge controller and was running the compressor continuously at low power – meaning the cooler box was kept at a dubious 10deg C – the perfect temperature for breeding bugs and definitely not safe for food storage.

Top loading bench coolers are also… very irritating to get in and out of when you have lots of boat jobs and it’s your main bench space!

So we decided to install a new refrigerator!

Having a reliable fridge is great! We can keep food and cook when we want 🙂 And now our cooler box is an excellent drinks cooler – so we always have cold water and drinks 🙂

Cooking

One of the few systems that actually works on the boat is our gas stove and oven! Both work really well and the only thing we had to do was give it a good scrub and replace the clicker for lighting.

Water

Water… we need reliable water to drink. But we had already identified a leaking tank… and some really, really brown water. Time to sort that out…

So we have four water tanks… and we realised one is completely dodgy and literally the bottom had rusted through. In hindsight, this would be why the starboard hull had more rusty patches that needed repairing.

Here is a little sketch of our fresh water system onboard. (My old colleagues will be happy to know I’m still drawing pictures! haha) Figuring this out was really helpful for us to understand what was going on. It seems that the main distribution manifold had been left with all tanks open; and the one rusty tank had then back fed rust through… all our tanks. We had to do a one by one flushing of each tank to figure out what was happening!

Here is the colour of the water coming out! 🤮

Each tank basically started off this way; then progresses to this after a few flushes through.

That doesn’t look so bad… right?

Ah no, that’s still pretty bad!

So we essentially had to flush through the tanks multiple times, with dish soap a couple of times also.

• Starboard Forward tank – dead and decommissioned.
• Starboard Aft tank – working great
• Port Forward tank – we could not get this one to flush clear even after multiple attempts. The plan is to keep this as coolant tank for the ice box fridge; and spare water for deck wash if we are on anchor.
• Port Aft tank – working great.

After doing this we essentially got to two healthy tanks of water. We have been testing how long they last us for living aboard – we can carry about a week’s worth of water with us now.

Having clean water onboard is a fantastic improvement for quality of life! I can now wash up in the sink (instead of in a bucket)! AND! We can now shower onboard (woohoo!) and the hot water system works! YEY!

I also picked up a heavy duty singer second hand off facebook and can start a few sewing projects… here is cutting a shower curtain down to size for us to use in our shower.

New shower curtain feels nice and fits way better 🙂

Drinking Water

Drinking water is a whole different game though. After seeing the condition of the pipes and tanks we were glad we had decided right after the survey to buy a new drinking water filtration and purification system. We both knew we wanted to be drinking water from onboard; and that filling up water in many different countries could result in some odd bugs getting in.

Step 1 – install new kitchen tap and drinking water outlet…

Step 2 – move accumulator and pump to make room for new water filter.

Step 3 – realise plumbing really sucks and pulling apart 1/2″ barb connections is really difficult. Cue Ryan taking over and bringing the muscle power needed.

Step 4 – realise our pipes are full of rust

Step 5 – go buy loads of water pipe and replace all the pipes in the drinking water line.

Step 6 install new components and add terminal block for power to the new UV filter.

Step 7 – update documentation 🤓

Now we can drink the water onboard after it’s been filtered! Very satisfying!

Fixing the Car

We finished patching the hole in the bottom of the dinghy and we had our freedom again! Woohoo for beach trips, evening swims and not having to lug our groceries all the way from the store on foot!

Things are definitely more cheerful when the dinghy works!

Safety Systems

Improving some of the onboard safety systems has been great for my nightmares – we installed all new Smoke and Carbon Monoxide sensors. As well as new bilge pump and alarm in the forward bilge compartment. And repaired the manual whaler bilge pump! I’m pleased to report far less nightmares about sinking and gas inhalation since we finished these!

Scrubbing

Just when I started thinking I’d scrubbed every single interior surface of the boat… it was time to scrub the deck!

All the welding had left a fine layer of rust dust over the entire deck surface… it looked terrible. So we got some Rust Off and scrubbed the whole thing. Rust Off is the most amazing product! It looks awesome after!

Unfortunately, sunset is the best time to get work done as the temperature is amazing. There is always a conflict between working and watching the sunset with a drink!