Life on a boat is not all champagne and roses. When your lovely new bath won’t empty – and neither will the basins, nor the kitchen sink – it can only be one thing: a problem with the grey-water tank.
As opposed to the black-water tank, which stores whatever gets flushed down the toilets (strictly bodily waste and a minimum of toilet paper only) and has to be emptied at a special pump-out station, the grey-water tank is for bathwater and, possibly, slop from the kitchen sink. Occasionally, you’ve got to open it up and clean out the built-up residue – from soap, shampoo and sloughed-off skin. If you don’t, it can block the sensor that activates the pump.
Problem is, the dreaded grey-water tank lives in one of the bilges, cunningly located in the bilge under the floor hatch in the middle of the saloon. Accessing it without sustaining physical harm requires someone of a rather less substantial and more flexible build than that of my husband. He said, and I quote: “It requires a young lad of the type that we used to put up chimneys.” Nice one, Roy.
In the end, getting the pump to work again was a long and fairly complicated process, with our helpful boat-builder Simon Piper at one end of the line – still on his holidays in France – guiding a sweaty but determined Roy on the other. (In case you’re wondering, Roy says the problem arose because he, Roy, hadn’t put the sensor back correctly the last time he cleaned the grey tank, though he thought he’d done so.)
Warning – Potentially boring explanation
The grey tank couldn’t be opened to clean around the sensor, because that would have flooded the bilge. Instead, to get the pump working again, Roy had to do an electrical bypass of the sensor in the tank (a process definitely too tiresome to go into here) – and for someone like him who avoids getting his hands dirty and likes to call all things electric “elec-trickery”, that was an amazing feat. And all this in a space too small to swing a rat.
Our grey-water tank problem cleared up for now, and a useful lesson no doubt learnt for the future, Roy and Simon – who is himself a good six foot four and built like a brick shit-house – seemed agreed on one thing: that it would be useful to have a highly trained chimpanzee on board to deal with such bilge-related problems. That, or a very short wife with really long arms.
