Adventures in Plumbing and Other Things
Log entry #4: Do not assume it works the way you think it does
What a week…
Sorry about last week’s delayed newsletter but at least we got one out for the week. It was a hectic week, and between work and the foot, it’s not been the most productive time in my life. Before I get into the past weeks’ misadventures a brief update…
Foot Updates
I saw an orthopedic surgeon on Thursday afternoon to evaluate my foot. He confirmed that I have a true Jone’s Fracture of the fifth metatarsal in zone two. This area is referred to as a vascular watershed area. It’s common for breaks in a watershed area to heal slowly, poorly, and in some conditions, it may require a screw in order to heal properly. After taking a look, he offered me two options. Choose surgery and get the screw put in with recovery taking two to three weeks. Or leave it alone and evaluate it in a month to see if it was healing properly. Recovery using a natural healing process, if it goes well, is eight to ten weeks. I don’t like being broken and I definitely don’t like being broken for two months. I like being knocked out and having someone cut me open and stick metal in my body even less. After making sure that the only thing I’d waste would be time if we decided in a month that I required surgery, I opted for natural healing.
It might sound cool to say you have metal bones but this isn’t a comic book and I’m not Wolverine. In the real world, I’m more likely to get a staff infection and play a game of chicken with the Grim Reaper than I am to get superpowers. On the other hand, I’m gonna be soooo PO’d if I traded a recovery of a few weeks from now, for a recovery of a few weeks a month from now.
Medical Trivia on How a Fracture Heals
For the nerds among us who like medical trivia, there are four stages of bone healing:
hematoma formation
granulation tissue formation
callus formation
bone remodeling
The gigantic bruise that makes your foot swell up into a cartoon balloon, is actually a framework used by a bunch of different cells to spread out and form a kind of biological nutrition matrix that sets the stage for the next phase of healing.
During the next phase, which starts around two weeks in (about where I am now), the nutritional framework is used to create fibrous cartilage which will create a physical bridge between the fracture ends. Essentially a soft tissue precursor for the new bone structure. This will in turn be used as a framework for which the actual woven bone will replace the cartilage. This is incidentally the time when things are most likely to go wrong. This is because the mechanical stability of the fracture site is crucial. Basically, fast and efficient healing needs the fracture site to be stressed as little as possible.
During the next phase, the cartilage begins to calcify and young immature bone replaces the majority of the cartilaginous material created during the previous phase.
The last phase, bone remodeling is a long, complex process that can continue from months to years.
And Now, the Kitchen Sink…Plus Other Things
Thursday felt like a very long day. I’d scheduled a Lyft the day before to pick us up and take us to the medical center where my consultation was scheduled. This turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. Our driver was Steve, a very nice gentleman who also happened to be a civilian physical therapist at Camp Lejeune. It turns out to be lucky because he also has a pretty interesting side hustle going on for delivery services, including a license that allows him to deliver alcohol.
He gave us a ton of advice on food, places of interest, the best place for groceries and produce, what areas to avoid, and basically a ton of local knowledge. I’d much rather help out a guy with his own business side hustle than throw money at Instacart.
The doctor was a very pleasant young man who spoke to me as if I were an intelligent adult and explained the situation with as much detail as I asked for. Medically, the two choices were equally valid so he gave his opinion when asked, but left the medical decision to me. His opinion basically mirrored mine (or probably vice versa), which was; that while medically, in my situation, either solution was a reasonable and valid choice, why risk the potential complications that come with surgery, anesthesia, etc., unless forced to deal with them?
With that decision behind me, we made an appointment for the next month and I started trying to come to terms with the fact that I will not be doing much of anything other than sitting on my butt for at least the next month.
Late that same afternoon, we were treated to the interesting and entertaining spectacle of watching a new sailboat come into the marina. The boat itself is pretty, I’d guess 45 feet in length, and crewed by three French Canadian sailors. They came in fast, even for a monohull. We’ve noticed that monohulls unless equipped with things like bow thrusters, tend to come in a lot faster than we do.
A boat that relies on its rudder(s) for steering, which is basically anything with a fixed engine, means that they’re reliant on speed. A rudder only works if water is moving across it, like an airplane wing needs moving air to function, and, like an airplane wing, there has to be a minimum amount of water flow. Below that point, the rudder is useless. This means that to maintain the ability to maneuver when docking a monohull, with its single fixed engine, you have to be moving fast enough to stay above that minimum water flow which, for us at least, is somewhere around 2-3 knots.
You have to come in fast enough to stay maneuverable with your rudder and the engine is only really used to either slow the boat down so it doesn’t ram the dock at 4kts, or sometimes, to use prop walk to swing the stern towards the dock. In tricky currents, this results in a lot of “touch-and-go”, where you bring it in, things don’t look or feel right, and you abort the maneuver, set up again, and make another attempt. And yes, the Portside Marina is surrounded by tricky currents.
Docking a catamaran is super-easy by comparison; having two engines that are set far apart, when we get below ~2.5knts, I just abandon the wheel altogether and rely on the twin engines. I center the wheel and pin it with my knee, then get a hand on each throttle and pretend I’m in a tank. By using forward and reverse throttle independently I can spin in place, and with enough skill, basically maneuver any way I like. This is easier said than done of course and I am nowhere near the skill of a lot of captains we’ve watched (I’m looking at you, Aurora), I feel pretty confident in most situations. You know, as long as I haven’t grounded the boat or run into anyone recently. While I’m on the subject of tricky currents, I cannot thank Capt. Finn Gardner for coaching us on docking while we were in St. Augustine. I had no idea how the, sometimes infuriating, currents around Oasis Marina would set us up for success.
Below is an ugly map of the marina where we’re located. We’re docked bow-in between the floating dock and the fixed dock in Portside Marina. Portside Marina ends where we’re docked. On the other side labeled unimaginative, “Not Portside Marina”, is a completely different marina. And no, this sketch is not to scale.
Anyway, these guys were coming in at around 18:00 just as the sun was going down. We initially thought they were going to dock on the outside fixed-face dock on our port side. There was a ton of chatter going on between the three of them but they were speaking French so we had no idea what was going on. They suddenly seemed to change their mind, speeding up and passing by to set up an approach to dock where I’ve labeled, “1st pass”, on the sketch. They came in at such a speed and angle that Debbie and I were on the edge of our seats. If it weren’t for the fact that would hate to watch them get into trouble I would’ve gotten some popcorn. The captain didn’t like his approach, and we couldn’t blame him it looked like a couple of near misses, so he backed out, and we thought he’d try again. Except that he left the marina entirely got back out into the channel, and then stopped and turned back. They were constantly yelling at each other but we could only judge based on the behavior, body language, and, what the ship was doing to figure out what was happening.
Finally, they came again. Bear in mind that sunset is around 18:35 and they only arrived around 18:00, so the sun is getting low. After a couple of more passes, they finally got onto the dock and started getting her tied off. Well, it didn’t take more than a couple of minutes before someone came down to the boat while they were tying off. We couldn’t hear much but what we could hear indicated that they did not belong at the other marina.
After we realized that they were supposed to be here at Portside we walked out to put our noses in other people’s business and said hello. We helpfully let them know that they weren’t at Portside but at another marina, which they knew having just been told that by the nice man who told them they had to leave. Man are we helpful.
They asked us if we’d just come in today, to which we replied no, we’ve been here since Sunday. Despite my paranoia immediately kicking in and thinking they wanted our spot (over my dead body!), they immediately appeared both disappointed and confused. Now, the marina had closed at 17:00 so there was no one here for them to talk to since before they arrived. They sat over there talking among themselves and the sun was almost completely gone by the time we saw them start casting off lines and backing out of the spot.
They went back out to the channel and turned around to make another approach. We were both convinced that they were going to try and dock next to us on the outside of the fixed dock. By the time they turned and started back in, it was dark enough that you needed flashlights to see anything in detail and they could probably use some help. I put my beloved space boot back on and hobbled out on deck with a spotlight. Luckily, the tide was on my side so getting off onto the fixed dock didn’t require any acrobatics, I could just step off. In the end, I was probably the opposite of helpful but I did let them know that if they needed power or water, they needed to walk the boat up to the end of the dock where our bow was because that was the only power and water hookups.
On Friday, after speaking with the dockmaster, we watched as they moved their boat inside, across us in the slip to our starboard side, between the two floating docks. I secretly hated them for that. I wanted to have two floating docks. Fixed docks truly suck.
We spoke with a couple of them at length early Friday evening and found out that they were originally supposed to be in that slip, but there had been a center console docked there, which we remembered because they had come in and parked before they’d arrived. We’d speculated that the guy driving the center console was part of the marina staff because he was wearing a marina-branded t-shirt, and pulled a bicycle out of the boat after docking and was using it to get to and from the office. My current guess is that it was someone docking the boat there for a fishing charter pickup because a group of 4 or 5 people with rods, reels, and coolers came the next day and left in it.
They’d had to make this unexpected stop because while on their way to the Bahamas, their holding tank developed an issue. The tank itself is metal and they’d spent Friday working with power tools. They’d had to end up cutting the tank because they couldn’t remove it as a whole piece.
Seriously, Kitchen Sink. For Real
So after all the excitement of getting new neighbors wore off Thursday, we were relaxing in the salon watching the laptop. We’d just finished the last episode of Bodies, which we highly recommend, and were taking a break. Debbie had gotten up and I was putting my boot on to hobble below and use the head when Debbie noticed that our galley sink was backed up. The water hadn’t drained out of the sink and there was still grease water from doing the pasta dishes. We both groaned and were in agreement that this was not something we needed to take at 21:30 in the evening.
So obviously, we immediately proceeded to start screwing with it anyway. First, Debbie remembered that there was this baby “snake-like” tool she’d seen in the cleaning supplies and we thought, this must be what it’s for. So she went to get that just in case we could get this knocked out quickly.
After poking at it with the baby snake, we had noticed that the drain strainer had a little screw holding it in. We thought, “Hey, maybe if we take the drain strainer out we can get further down and reach the clog. It’s easy enough to try and we can pick it up in the morning if that doesn’t work.
So, I peg-legged my way down to the tools, grabbed the screwdriver set, and came back up. We pulled the screw and I tried tugging the drain strainer out. It wouldn’t budge. At all. Hmmmmm. Well, maybe we could stick the snake thing down into the empty hole where the screw went and get a better angle on it? In hindsight, this makes no sense on any level. It had to be screwed into something to hold the drain strainer down. But that’s not the point here, it sounded good at the time.
So, Debbie starts jamming the snake into the screw-hole and after poking it a couple of times, like magic, the sink starts to drain. And I mean, like magic fast. It was at this point, for no reason I could think of panic set in.
I began gesticulating wildly and making random words with my mouth, like, “No! Not! No drainer!”, before opening up the cabinet under the sink where we keep all of our cooking and baking gear, as well as bowls, cooking knives, and random other kitchenware.
My insane paranoia found form as we watched the last of a gallon of greasy water drain from the sink directly into the cabinet underneath it.
Now, Debbie and I have monkeyed with enough plumbing to feel confident in working with it. When we remodeled the kitchen in San Antonio, we didn’t call in professionals to handle the changes, it was all done in-house. In a house, drain strainers do not hold the plumbing up!!!
I watched Debbie empty out the cabinet and move everything outside onto the cockpit table (she wouldn’t let me get up and help because I was Broken Foot Man. I did feel guilty about it for a second but I got over that in a second or two. Then came the job of sopping up all of the standing grease water.
I was allowed to help re-attach the water line to the sink. After that, we were still left with a clogged sink. Then Debbie remembered something that we found when we started cleaning out the boat of all of the previous owner’s stuff when we first moved onto the boat. There was something that we thought might be a spare part to something but we had no idea what it was so we decided to keep it. Debbie went down to the spare parts lockers and dug it out. Turns out, it was a baby plunger the perfect size to plunge the sink.
So we filled the sink with water, put a stopper in the other sink, and immediately tried out the plunger. And immediately saw grease water come up into the dish draining rack and get the remaining clean dishes covered with dirty water. A brief disagreement about having a bung that was able to close the drain plug there was resolved by grabbing the bag of bungs and finding one that would work.
Round two of plunging the sink solved the issue. It took about 2 plunges to get it unclogged and draining. It was now 21:50, the entire episode having taken about 40 minutes, which is pretty damned fast in boat time. Since we were now awake enough no one was sleeping in the next 10 minutes, we decided to make a couple of kettles of hot water and pour it down the drain for good measure, just to make sure that if there were any grease down there we would rinse it out.
Just because you think you know how something works, does not mean you know how it works.
TIL (Today I Learned)
There were several things that this week taught us.
I’m keeping the boot and we should consider other emergency medical equipment. Last week in Oriental we were a 45-minute drive from the nearest doctor or emergency room without any ride-share access. If we hadn’t had family in New Bern, life would have gotten a lot more difficult. If we’d been anchored at Allens Cay in the Bahamas, this would have been a much larger issue.
Thanks to the great state of Arkansas, I’ve got EMT training, and thanks to the Army, I’ve got combat lifesaver training, which is like being an EMT but you get taught to stick people with a needle and use lactated ringers. That was also several decades ago and while we’d talked about getting some basic first aid and CPR training, this raises it a bit on my priority list. I mean, I’m not going to leap up and get it this second, but I think we’d be wise to get it before we leave the East Coast.
I do not like fixed docks, my man, I do not like them, Sam I am.
I’m finally starting to feel like I’m better at docking than I think I am. I know that I’m grateful that I learned to dock someplace where the conditions were not ideal. I certainly didn’t think I’d be able to bring her into a slip as tight as this one before I did it.