I've been having a problem with the water system. At first, there was no water.

The first thing I replaced was the old piston pump. There was a new piston pump on the boat, so I first installed that. That wasn't doing the job, so I bought a new jet pump at West Marine. That one drew water, but was sucking in a lot of air.

The first job was to find the water lines that passed mysteriously under the engine room bulkhead and disappeared. I found them passing under the middle stateroom berth, where they vanished under the sole, towards the forward stateroom. The water lines were an odd combination of copper pipes and rubber hoses. I yanked out what I could get to easily and replaced it with new water hose. Still sucking air.

The next adventure was to find the water tanks. Peering under the v-berth, which was converted from two singles to a queen, I saw a tank cover. I disassembled the berth and, standing on my head, removed the 642 nuts holding the access plate on. I may be exaggerating the number of nuts here, but I have to wonder why there's so many. After struggling with 30 year old nuts, I finally had them all off and pried the lid off. Nope. That's the holding tank. I quickly recruited my girlfriend's son to put the lid back on. Meanwhile, Pam (the girlfriend) asked if I had lifted the carpeting off the sole at the entrance to the forward stateroom to look for the tank. Yeah, I think so, I said. She looked anyway, and there it was.

Standing on my head in the middle stateroom and peering under the berth, I could see where the copper pipe passed through. The hole was too small for 1/2" hose, so last night I went to Home Depot and bought 1/2" copper pipe. After some struggle, I disconnected the old copper pipe and yanked it through to the middle stateroom. There was a crack in it. Yes! With a bit of struggle, which included cutting the copper pipe, cutting it in half again to fit it under the middle stateroom berth and connecting the two halfs with water hose, I managed to get it up to the water tank and hooked it up. I fired up the water pump with great expectations, only to have it suck more air and spit and sputter. That could only mean one thing. The pickup tube in the tank itself must have cracked or corroded.

So, I proceeded to remove the 1,043 nuts holding on the access port on the water tank (again, I'm only estimating the number of nuts here) and they all came off with a bit of a struggle, until I got to the last nut. It spun easily. Too easily. The bolt turned with the nut. With my nut splitter and Dremel in the storage unit, I gave up for the night and decided to attack the clogged head instead. That went much better, but required a shower afterwards. I won't go into details on that one.