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Today I was working in the bilge performing routine
maintenance. I was servicing the bilge pump located in the deepest part of
the bilge where water collects before it is pumped overboard. This was not
a big job. Routine stuff. No worries mate.
No worries until my hand bumped a thru hull fitting and it broke off
allowing a stream of water to pour into the boat. Hmm. This was an
unexpected complication. There was now a three-quarter inch hole in my boat
located about eighteen inches below the waterline. I quickly put my finger
in the hole and stopped the water from pouring in.
 I have cone
shaped wooden plugs preplaced in the bilge for emergencies such as these. I
used a hammer to drive a wooden plug into the hole and stop the leak.
Now I had a problem that I urgently needed to fix. I went to a nearby
marine store and purchased a new bronze thru hull fitting. The mission was
to replace the thru hull fitting while the boat was still in the water. My
friend , Ted, volunteered to do the work on the inside of the hull if I
would put the new bronze fitting through the hole in the hull from the
outside. I put on my dive suit, jumped into the water and swam over to
where the plug was located. I put caulking compound on the thru hull
fitting and jammed it through the hole in the hull from the outside as Ted
pulled out the wooden plug. He quickly attached the retaining nut that
holds the new fitting in place.
Two hours later, the job was done and the excitement was over. There were
no leaks and I made a momentous discovery. I learned that when you break a
thru hull fitting, it is inconvenient and irritating, but it is not a
disaster. Even if I had been offshore, 1000 miles from land, it still would
not have been a disaster. A wooden plug would have taken care of the
problem until I made it to shore where I could easily repair it. That was
an extremely valuable lesson because it puts thru hull leaks into a
non-threatening perspective.
Since this was the second time I had broken plastic thru hull fittings, I
decided to replace the eight remaining plastic ones with bronze. A few days
later I beached the boat on a sandbar in the Mooloolaba River and at low
tide we put in new bronze thru hull fittings.
Was this a good or bad experience? Some people would say that it was bad.
I think it was a blessing. I can’t think of a better place to break a thru
hull fitting than in a marina with a marine store only one hundred meters
away. The same situation would have been markedly different offshore or at
some remote anchorage in the Pacific Ocean. I can’t think of a better place
to replace all eight thru hulls than on a sandbar in Australia. It was a
very convenient inconvenience. This was not a disaster. It was a blessing
that waited to happen at just the right place and time.
How do I know whether something is good or bad? Most of the time, it’s the
thoughts that I think that make good things good and bad things bad. I
choose to look on this as a positive experience that made my boat safer and
made me into a more competent sailor. There is no doubt about it. This was
a good experience and I am lucky that it happened when and where it did. |
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Today we took the day off. We went with Don and Aggie
Reed to Land Cruiser Park. Don and Aggie are cruising around the world on a
steel ketch named "Honey Moon". They are on a five year circumnavigation of
the world. They are Aussies and have traveled extensively in the outback of
Australia. They gave us heaps of information about driving and camping in
the outback Aussie style.
Land Cruiser Park is about two hours west of Mooloolaba in the Aussie
hinterland. It’s where Queenslanders go to do extreme four wheel driving.
The park is actually a farm that has been converted into a four wheel drive
playground. It has camping areas and challenging four wheel drive tracks.
The tracks are color coded. Green tracks are easy. Yellow tracks are
difficult. Red tracks are extreme and may be impossible if muddy or
severely rutted.
The park makes its income from admission fees and from recovering vehicles
impaled on trees, rolled over and stuck in deeply rutted tracks. The mud
pits and hill climbs are not for the faint of heart. The green tracks
consist of easy hill climbs and fording shallow streams. Yellow tracks are
steep and rutted with plenty of twists and turns. They offer ample
opportunity to damage your vehicle while weaving through the trees as you
ascend and descend the steep slopes. The red tracks are very extreme with a
high risk of vehicle damage and rollover if you make a mistake.
We rode in Don’s turbocharged Nissan Patrol. We survived the yellow tracks
without incident only because the car performed perfectly and Don drove it
in a flawless manner. I did not know that a vehicle could drive up such
steep deeply rutted tracks. The yellow tracks were so challenging that I
would not consider attempting a red one.
 
You are never alone as you negotiate the trails of Land Cruiser Park. In
fact, alien life forms occasionally appear in the park. Most people never
see them as they are usually invisible to the human eye. However, digital
cameras can detect them when the human eye cannot. If you closely study
these photos of Donna at Land Cruiser Park, you might be able to identify
one of the rare alien life forms from Down Under. |
