Annapolis – 1 mile by dinghy, 2 kilometres walked
I am adjusting to temporary bachelorhood rapidly. This morning I was up at 5:30, but instead of making a caffeine-free hot drink and writing, I flipped open the laptop and finished off the last two movies I tried to watch with Ana at night but fell asleep.
When daylight arrived I got to work emptying and refilling the composting toilet. I have a love/hate affair with boat toilets and have spent many hours of my life removing them, installing them, deodourizing them, fine tuning them, unclogging them, usually without gloves or protective gear because that’s for sissies. Toilet jobs usually end in heartache, except that one time my buddy Andrew foolishly agreed to help me replace the sanitation hose (this transports the nautical logs from the throne to the holding tank) on our last sailboat Bella Blue and he got shot in the face with chunky sewage after the 18 feet of inclined hose built up a significant amount of back pressure that exploded when we removed it. And he was right in the firing line. Now that was funny.
I got so sick of repairing and replacing the manual Jabsco toilet pumps that last year we invested in an electric push button macerating toilet which has worked flawlessly. And I no longer need to give visitors the fifteen minute training session on how to use the damn thing. Now, they just press a button and the toilet does all the work. The other toilet on the boat is a composting toilet and it is a marvel of low technology. It consists of two chambers. The first is a pee chamber which gets filled from pee being directed through one of two holes at the front of the toilet bowl. If you’re left handed, you aim for the left one. If you’re right, go right. If you're ambidextrous, feel free to alternate. The other chamber is for the numero doses, the turds, the logs, the pipe. That one is accessed by flipping a lever on the side of the toilet which opens up a hatch to the drop zone. You make sure you’re centred over the bowl and hope for the swish shot – nothing but net. If you are misaligned, there may some manual cleanup required, so you need to focus and keep your aim straight and true. The poo-poos drop into a chamber which has been preloaded with this moisturized coconut husk that is loaded with hungry bacteria that make fast work of the solids. It works so well that we’ve found the solids chamber is completely odourless. In fact, it’s the pee that smells, and can induce some gagging when we dump it.
Today, it was time to empty the solids bucket as it has been about 3 or 4 months since I last changed it. It is as easy as putting a garbage bag over the top then tipping it upside down, and it all just drops into the bag and smells of nothing other than soil. I was thinking of sprinkling it in the nice Annapolis flower beds near the park, but it was a ways to walk so instead I tossed it in the garbage bin.
My next job was to reroute some speaker wire that one of the previous owners had strangely decided to run right through the engine compartment near the shaft. This had been bothering me since we bought the boat and it finally rose up in the project list. That task me right through to early afternoon so I broke for bachelor lunch and had beans on toast with a side of radish and high volume Deftones (Around the Fur album…perfect) then I decided to go into town for a little walk and to see if I could find some cream cheese for jalepeno poppers I wanted to make for sundowner snacks. I hadn’t really been into town that far yet but it was hopping – people everywhere, locals and tourists, so many bars and restaurants and nice shops. But right at the top of Main Street I found a little convenience store run by a sweet Latino lady. She had cream cheese and she also had twelve packs of Yuengling for thirteen bucks so I grabbed one of those too.
Ben and Kate had originally been traveling the Erie Canal with two other buddy boats but had gotten ahead of them when they hooked up with us and they had been several days behind us. Today, one of the couples – Kevin and Ann – arrived on their sailboat Domino so I took my snacks over there and the five of us met up in their cockpit for a sundowner. They are a lovely couple and we had a great conversation – I was just sad my Ana wasn’t there because she will really like them. But she will meet them very soon.
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