We were enjoying a glass of wine and a couple of good books, in Shibumi's main salon, last night. I was reading Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress". Jill was reading a Nora Roberts novel. All was quiet, except for the wind howling outside the boat.
Then the water pump came on mometarily and shut off. A minute later it did it again. That is a sign that someone did not completely turn off one of the faucets somewhere on the ship. I checked each one. They were all off. Not good.
I looked down in the engine room. Sure enough the problem was down there. It was our hot water heater. The 15 year old heater was leaking from within.
We make a habit of shutting off the water pressure every night before we go to sleep.... we turned it off early last night to keep from draining all of our fresh water out of the tanks. I knew it would be useless to try to do anything to fix it in the dark.
This morning, I found that I did not have the proper hose connectors onboard to bypass the heater. Luckily, Ron aboard the S/V Memory Rose had the right fittings. He came over and helped me re-plumb around the faulty water heater.
So we are no longer leaking precious water into the bilge, but we have no hot water. Jill uses the tea kettle to make hot water for washing dishes... until we can find a solar shower or a new water heater we will take cold showers.
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