The saga of our holding tank follows, feel free to skip the next long paragraph.
Since our boat until this trip has never been in water where one can open the valve and release the holding tank contents, we didn’t know what would happen the first time that was tried. The answer was, not much. Bob cut the wire/seal on the valve (standard on all boats that stay in fresh water) just before he & Ron headed out to the Jersey coast. Only about quarter of the tank emptied when Bob opened the valve so we knew we had a potential problem. KYC Bahama gang, can you picture us looking for a Patrick if we couldn’t sort this out. We went to the pump out at the marina this morning and asked if we could leave the valve open with the hope that the suction would pull in some water through the hose and in the process unclog it. It didn’t appear to have worked as the instruments registered the tank as being 8-10% full once the pump out was done. We have also been putting some septic tank clog treatment stuff we got from Chris into the tank. We left the vent open (don’t report us) when we brought the boat back to the slip and when I checked the instruments a couple of hours later – Bob had put some more of the anti clog stuff in the tank – the instruments showed 0-1% – yea! It appears no one will have to go diving to unclog us. It’s not a big issue on the ICW as there are pump outs but there aren’t any in the Bahamas and the holding tank is not that big.
We walked to the village to pick up a few groceries and look around. It’s a small village and quite a few places were closed, being a Monday, but also by October many shops/restaurants are open only Th/Fri/Sat. There was a plaque saying the village had been established in the mid 1600s and George Washington had passed through the village eight times.
We’ve decided to stay here until Wednesday morning, the third night is free:) Bob and Chris are going for a trip to a place down the bay tomorrow to look at a couple of boats, Chris is thinking of replacing his boat with maybe a trawler or motor yacht.