Picture this.
Your wife is grumpy because the tumble dryer you bought is sitting in the middle of the kitchen attracting mess.
The kitchen (galley) you have has four walls, none of which are particularly well utilised – lots of extra storage to be had there. Two of the four walls have movable furniture. So you reorganize to fit the tumble dryer in, right?
Nope. If you’re my (lovely) husband you stew on the problem and come up with a lateral solution.
Eva Luna has a galley to the port (left as you enter) side of the boat. It’s narrow but was, until recently, home to a washer dryer, a coat rack (constantly strimmed back of coats and hanging things to keep it under control), a storage space (reserve water carriers, picnic bag, captains chairs for sitting on when sailing), and some racking (sports essentials like hockey sticks and tennis racquets, buoyancy aids, and tupperware-type boxes).
This space, he decided, was perfect for the new tumble dryer. After all, I was desperate to get it out of the kitchen.
But there was a troublesome hot water tank (calorifier) also in the storage space. (Getting an idea of where this is headed yet…?)
No problem. Let’s move the water tank.
Had he come to me at this point, I would have reminded him that we had this space earmarked to put my office things, as working at home means my powers of shutting out noise are stretched to the max as the kids play with (and fight over) the new PS3 (which they saved and bought themselves, by the way – I’d not have funded it!) over my head.
But, bless him, he could see I was busy, had a chat with the right person and said tank was shifted. (Note: all the ‘stuff’ that was being stored here has now joined the tumble dryer in the ‘kitchen’, in which there is now only room for one person to pass at a time, and cupboards and drawers are uncomfortable inaccessible, leading to further piling.)
This is where we get technical, and I reflect that I could never live on the boat without Owen.
In order to move the tank, they had to drain the coils in the calorifier. (These were apparently, unhealthily black and gunky.) Once the dry tank was successfully relocated, secured and plumbed into its new spot, it tried to refill and start.
A drama begins, around which there is a lot of hypothesis. This is what we think has happened.
As the calorifier started to fill, the circulation pump on the Webasto (our heater/heating system) failed, creating an airlock in the Webasto. Consequently, the temperature probe melted, and, in turn, the metal inside the heat exchanger melted.
The Webasto let off steam until it could release no more (that’s a lot of steam in a small space), then ground to halt.
I suspect that, in English, this means that while they were moving the calorifier, no-one thought to turn off the Webasto, but daren’t voice that thought.
So picture this. It’s freezing outside, and our heater and hot water source is snookered. Our space is full of junk and nothing’s accessible. Suddenly life aboard was looking very stressful.
