Everything I do on the boat tends to spiral out of control one way or another.  Once the mast was removed, I wanted to clean the spot where it attached to the floor inside the boat.  I removed the can of roach killer, old sock, and wad of hair (can I barf now?) and then scrubbed it with my wire toothbrush.  Afterwards, I filled a little bucket with some water and bilge cleaner and scrubbed it with that and let it sit! It actually made a huge difference and now the spot isn’t so gross I don’t want to stick my hand down it!

So, like the law of chips vs. salsa… I had more soap left over and needed to use it! This resulted in me washing out the area in the very front of the boat behind where the anchor chains go.  The old vacuflush sewage tank was up there and it just smelled like it may have been slowly leaking for a number of years.  Now the boat smells like chemical oranges.

This is where my plan starts to turn into complete and utter mayhem.  I still has some soap left over and while chasing wires yesterday realized that there was some nasty water trapped behind some cables in a storage area underneath the floor in the galley.  I took my hose and soap over there and started spraying and sucking the water out with the shop vac.  This went on for a while until I realized that this run of cables and little corner nook was full of nasty mud and crap.  That bothers me more than is reasonable.  I want this to be a nice, reliable, pretty boat and I’m not going to leave mud caking my cableways, so I started deep cleaning the cable run… But since water runs downhill, this meant I also cleaned the area underneath the galley sink (which was disgusting as well) and then made my way to the huge mess of cables and hoses that’s the main run for most of the boat services underneath the navigation table floor.  I’ve had issues already with mold and general disgustingness while trying to do wiring in the back of the cabinet.  I’ve wanted to replace a lot of the old water hoses that look like they’ve been in a swamp for the past 20 years (because, as I now know, they have!) but I literally couldn’t get them to budge.  Turns out that they were just glued in place with years of grime.  I spent a few hours spraying water into the boat, vacuuming it out, dumping it overboard, and repeating the process to get most of the dirt out.  I have a ton of wiring and most of the water hose that serves the back of the boat all going through this tunnel through the boat that can’t be accessed. After spending literally hours on this project, I got to where the water hoses would actually wiggle around! So… my goal of replacing at least the main run of hose from the water tank to the pump was back on!

I didn’t run the new hose where the old one was so I could keep some space in that run for the other things, there were more holes 6″ up and NOT in the inaccessible space, so I used that instead.  I like to keep my piping systems where I can see them!

There is a small pre-filter for the pump that wasn’t bolted down, but after looking at how the line was run from the pump to the manifold and from the tank to the filters and pump, I *had* to redo it. So much inefficiency! I also removed about 10′ in total of length that just didn’t need to be there.

The pump now runs directly back to the manifold to supply it with cold water and I relocated the pre-filter on the bulkhead to make a nice little loop instead of whatever crap was there before.

Since it was such a nice, cool, windy day the boat didn’t get hot until around 4, so I was in here cleaning the boat and messing around with water tubing until then!  We got a LOT done today between the mast removal, cleaning, and potable water upgrades!