I’ve always been nervous about our EPIRB.  This is the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon we carry for notifying authorities via satellite that we are in distress and where we are.  When you need one, they’re worth their weight in gold.  When you don’t, they seem like a big liability to me.  If it weren’t for our precious cargo, I might not carry one at all.

Unlike the SPOT satellite messenger, an EPIRB is monitored by government search and rescue agencies including the US Coast Guard.  Like everything else they do, the Coast Guard takes EPIRBs very seriously.  I’ve heard of people setting off their EPIRBs for silly and frivolous reasons.  I’ve heard of mutinous crews decided they’ve had enough and setting off the EPIRB surreptitiously.  When the Coast Guard shows up, or a commercial ship is diverted to assist, I imagine there must be some severe consequences if the emergency is not legitimate.

We inherited our EPIRB with the boat.  I dutifully changed the registration for it, entered all appropriate emergency contact information, and had the unit serviced.  Then I tucked it away in a corner of the boat where nobody would mess with it.  No water, no magnetic fields, no little hands.  Ours is a manual-activation model which can only be activated by a) flipping up a plastic tab on the top, or b) removing the unit from its wall-mount bracket AND putting it in the water.  

Tanya’s phone started ringing at 5:42 this morning.  I was up, but ignored it at first.  I vaguely wondered if there was some emergency to cause someone to call that early.  Then I got a Google Voice message from a New Orleans area code.  It was mostly gibberish as usual, but it did pick up “coast guard”, “beacon”, and “take too”.  That got my attention.  Tanya’s phone rang again and I answered it.  It was our emergency contact that I have registered on the EPIRB.  She had been called by the Coast Guard and was our EPIRB going off?  No, of course not.  I went and looked, and it was sitting quietly right where it was supposed to be.  In the bracket, out of the water, no magnetic fields, no little hands.

I returned the call to the Coast Guard.  Was everything all right?  Yes, everything is fine.  Did your EPIRB go off?  No, I don’t think so.  I’m looking right at it.  Can you read me the Beacon ID on the side of the unit?  Sure, hang on.  I touched it, and suddenly it erupted in a series of beeps, strobes, and flashing red lights.  Well, I guess it did go off.

Like all my other interactions with the Coast Guard, I found them courteous and efficient.  They received signals at 5:32 and 5:40.  I was up at that time, the boat was quiet, and I did not hear any beeping from the other room.  They had tried to call my cell phone, but got a strange busy signal and could not leave a message.  My phone was right next to me and it did not ring.  Likewise, it did not ring when they called Google Voice.  I imagine our emergency contact tried to call it as well.  

The process appears to have worked pretty well.  There's no telling how long the EPIRB was going off, but it took 10 minutes from the first received signal until Tanya’s phone rang the first time.  Why these things have to happen at night, I don’t understand.  I wish my phone had rung, and I’m sorry our contact had to be awakened.  I’m just glad I was awake.  We generally don’t hear or get up to answer phones, and it’s a rare morning when I’m up at 5am for no good reason.  If I hadn’t been, I might have woken up to a man with boots and a gun knocking on the hull.

As for the EPIRB, the transmitter portion clearly works, but I'm not a big fan of the whole "out of the bracket and in the water" thing.  Seems totally superfluous for a manually-activated unit and less than failsafe.  I’ll be calling the manufacturer when they open this morning.  I’m not sure what they can do to make me trust this unit again, but I’m not wild about spending about $700 for a new one either.  In the meantime I've secured it by removing the battery.

I believe all the medical bills from Rachel’s recent adventure are now in and we can tally the damage at $4,733.55

We do have health insurance, but it is a high deductible plan and covers very little until that is met.  We very rarely seek any medical care, so don’t really have much cause to use it.  It does re-price charged amounts based on negotiated network agreements, and I think it also covers an annual checkup for everybody, but we don’t do that.  The insurance would really only pay for itself if something really bad happened and we sought treatment in the U.S.  Otherwise, it just sucks $650 out of our monthly budget.

While we would prefer to pay directly for medical care, we find it very difficult to do so.  In our experience, cash discounts are paltry or not available.  The only time we really felt mildly successful with this tactic was when Sam was born.  No, our insurance does not cover maternity costs.

The discount offered by the hospital after Rachel’s recent trip was only 10%.  We gambled that the negotiated network price through our insurance company would be better, and it was.  The insurance company re-priced that $4,733.55 down to $871.15.  That’s an 80% reduction.  Am I happy about that?  Sure.  But the $8,000 I spent on insurance premiums over the last year tempers my enthusiasm somewhat.  I’d be much happier to get that kind of discount directly and not pay for the insurance at all.

I’ve been threatening to drop the insurance for years, but I’m afraid to do it.  There are no guarantees in life, and I’m slightly uncomfortable with the unknown.  I’m not paralyzed by it, but so far I’ve been willing to pay $650 a month to feel better.  That’s probably about all the good it does.  

What are the odds we’ll ever need the insurance anyway?  Apparently, better than I might have thought.  My 4-year-old nephew was diagnosed with cancer last year.  My brother’s family coincidentally has the same insurance as we do and it made a huge difference in the financial burden of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.  I have no idea how it might have turned out without the insurance, but he’s once again a happy little boy.

When we think about it logically, continuing to pay for health insurance is inconsistent with the other lifestyle decisions we’ve made.  One of our mantras is “safety does not exist.”  But by paying for health insurance we're keeping one foot in a system we despise in the hopes that it might someday save us from something terrible.  Just as there are no guarantees that something terrible won’t happen, there are also none that modern medicine and insurance can save us if it does.

The kids’ bathroom renovation is complete.  We call it the kids’ bathroom because the adults abandoned it immediately upon making the master bathroom operational earlier in the spring.  No adult wants to share a bathroom with four kids.

The renovation was a prolonged project involving demolition of the old floor, replacing it with teak grates to match the other heads, painting the walls, and installing a new toilet.  For three weeks, the kids had to huff it up to the marina pool to use the bathroom there.  There were several nights when the Eli, Sam, and Rachel had to sleep in alternative locations due to fumes from various paints or epoxies.  They’re now rewarded with an electric toilet of their own: a Raritan Sea Era fresh water.  

Like the Raritan Marine Elegance in the master bathroom, the Sea Era uses a centrifugal pump.  I assume the pumps are equivalent, and hoped it would be the Marine Elegance’s equal in terms of uncloggability, but in fact I think it might be better.  I plumbed the Marine Elegance with 1” hose since I wanted to reduce the volume of stuff standing in the hose.  With the kids’ bathroom I had several compromises already made for me, and the Sea Era’s discharge was going to use the 90 degree elbow option and 1.5” hose.  I don’t know if it is the shapes of the bowls or the difference between the discharge line diameters, but the Sea Era has a much more powerful flush.  I prefer the Marine Elegance’s smooth one-piece ceramic shroud to enclose all the parts, but that just wasn’t going to fit.

Our goals for the project were to make the floor easier to keep clean and dry, and improve access and air flow to sump area underneath.  To accomplish that, we tore the old solid floor out completely and replaced it with a pair of teak grates.  The toilet sits on a solid teak shelf and one grate slides beneath it.  The other grate drops in place in front of the toilet.  We also ground down, faired, and repainted the walls and sump area to improve the appearance and overall cleanliness of the area.

While it must seem that we get excited about very mundane things, this bathroom has been on the wish list for a long time and we are very happy to have it addressed.  While we still have work going on, this bathroom is probably the last big interior improvement we’re going to make.  It got pushed way down the list because our original concept involved removing thru-hulls, which requires hauling the boat out of the water, which requires an act of God.  In the end, we decided just to keep the thru-hulls for now and retain the option of flushing directly overboard.

A few things that happened today...

Sarah has successfully taught Rachel how to play “How Big is Rachel?”, whereupon the latter squeals with delight and obediently raises her arms above her head.  Rachel's other recent trick is to grab at anything in reach.  Like she’s suddenly discovered she has hands.

Sarah ran on the dock today for the first time since she turned her ankle on the library stairs last week.  I say she’s healed.  Running on the dock is strictly forbidden, but yet somehow deeply ingrained into children.  I was cured of running on docks when I was about her age.  My younger brother and I were sent late one night to use the facilities up at the bathhouse of some marina in the Keys.  We were very well-behaved on the way up, but on the way back it seemed necessary to race.  In the heat of the race, my brother took a short cut and ran straight off the sea wall.  It was about six feet down to the water and he came up hollering.  My only real memory of the incident is an image of my poor dad hanging three-quarters over the wall and my mom holding onto his feet.  I shudder to think we may have to do that someday.

Sam tried to choke on a Life Saver.  Of course he failed, but it was still interesting.  I always wondered.  During the melee, Rachel, who was riding on Tanya’s back at the time, grabbed a big knife off of the kitchen counter and held it Psycho-style behind Tanya’s head.  That was the missed photo opportunity of the week.

The carpenter has finished replacing the floors in our port bathrooms, and a new Raritan Sea Era electric freshwater toilet arrived today to replace the old Jabsco.  This toilet is a different footprint from the Marine Elegance I have already serenaded, but I expect it to be equally uncloggable.  To start with, we’re skipping the fancy programmable flush buttons and going with simple momentary switches.  That’s the most effective way we’ve found to manage tank capacity in the starboard forward head.

Our marina is getting a new dockmaster.  We’ve been through this before, but it always gives me a bit of anxiety.  Which rules will he choose to enforce? 

Given all her daily activities, Tanya often leaves an unfinished load or three in the laundry room.  Protocol is for anyone who needs the machines to remove the offending articles and leave them on the folding table.  Occasionally a kind soul, usually a grandmotherly type, will move the clothes to the dryers or fold them.  But today Tanya returned to the laundry room only to find our curmudgeonly Irish friend folding Rachel’s “f*****g” diapers.  Apparently he drew the line at folding my underwear, which suits me fine.

The temperature this morning is 45F degrees and the wind is blowing 22-28 knots.  We recorded a gust of 44.5 knots sometime during the night.  That might be a personal record.  The forecasted high today is 52 and the low tonight is 24.  The little voice in my head is doing a Sam Kinison impersonation.

The fact is we’re here by choice.  Maybe not a conscious choice, but it was our own decisions that caused us to be here.  This weather is a disappointment, but not really a surprise.  Two years ago it was a surprise.  We’re still hoping, perhaps in vain, that it will be a mild winter, but also wishing we were somewhere else.  I feel a resolution coming on.

We know some people are abandoning their boats and heading to friends’ houses and hotels tonight.  We're going to stick it out.  We’ve learned that we can get pretty good results from four 600W space heaters spread around the boat.  It’ll still be cold, for sure, but hopefully tolerable.  At least there isn’t supposed to be any wind.

With five kids, and three being energetic boys, it’s inevitable that we’re going to have some cuts and bruises.  We’ve had to have one kid stitched up, but so far we’d managed not to have any broken bones.  

Well, no longer.  We’ve got one now, and a leg no less.  

So which little hellion was it?  Did Eli fall from a tree?  Did Aaron get hurt during a wrestling free-for-all?  Did Sarah wipeout on her rollerblades?  Was Sam injured in some daredevil stunt gone awry?  Nope.  

Last night, on the eve of her 7-month birthday, Rachel took a dive off of her changing table.  Tanya was right there, but sometimes two hands just aren’t enough.

It was a little hard to tell at first, but by morning it was obvious she was really hurt and Tanya took her to the emergency room.  The left femur is broken just above the knee.  Not sure how it happened, but I suppose it could have been much worse.  And for the second time in as many months I find myself thinking, “I’m sure glad that didn’t happen in the Bahamas.”

Other good news is that Rachel was fitted with a brace and not a cast.  A cast would have covered half her body and required she be sedated.  I’d hate to be the doctor who tries to “put under” one of Tanya’s kids.  He might get put under something himself.  

It’s also fitting that this post follow Tanya’s Thanksgiving post, since we had three heroines step up to tag-team the Fantastic Four while Tanya was at the hospital and I am flying back from the Left Coast.  Even the regular Friday boat-cleaning chores got done.  Wow.

Rachel, of course, will be fine.  Damage to our checkbook remains to be seen.  Tanya had to meet with a social worker, but an "investigation" won’t be necessary.

We’re not bad parents, really.  This is just one of those things that happen.  It’s kind of a miracle any of us survive childhood.

It seems we’ve gotten a bit behind in our posts lately.  There are lots of good reasons for this, but now I’ll try to get us caught up.

I’d been tempting fate in more ways than just claiming my toilet was clog-proof.  I’d also been claiming I don’t get sick.  Best we can figure, it had been about five years since I had been.  Spending lots of time on airplanes and in cold weather with no ill effect had bolstered my confidence.  Then everyone on the boat got a cold except me, and I was feeling downright superhuman.  Notice this is all past tense.  Because then it all caught up with me and a bad cold took me down for two weeks.  I even missed a week of work, which for me is unheard of.  Now I’m on the mend and looking forward to another 5 years, but my cold is going around the boat and Tanya and Rachel are suffering.  

I found yet another area of rot in the port-side cabintop.  It’s been a long-term problem which I really wish had been found in the survey.  This is the third repair.  The good news is that I’m a lot better with the epoxy than I was in the beginning.  Hopefully I’ve got it licked this time.  

Usually the rot I find is the fault of owners or boatyard workers who don’t appreciate the critical importance of bedding hardware correctly, but this time it was the builder.  The source was the jib track and I didn’t find any evidence that it had ever been removed.  I removed it and to do that I had to pull down part of the ceiling in the salon.  I tried to preserve it, but the ceiling isn’t really removable, and I think we’ve finally found the excuse to replace it with something a little more attractive.

Our interior projects have really gotten out of hand.  We’re way beyond the initial scope and there’s still more I want to do.  It’s really hard to stop when we have a carpenter we like and does such good work.  At this point I could have bought a pair of shiny new 54hp Yanmar diesels for what I’ve spent on woodwork.  

He’s not the most punctual guy, though, and completion dates are very slippery.  I used to get all tense about this because I had my eye on our departure at the end of the summer.  Well, we’ve finally admitted that that isn’t going to happen.  The time to leave is right now and we’re not ready.  So we’ll be here for the winter.

I have work through the end of the year requiring me to travel, and unfortunately I need the work.  I had multiple opportunities this summer for work I could have done while cruising, but none of them came through for me.

It’s disappointing, but not all that surprising.  It was a known risk when we came back to the dock.  Now the big question is how we’re going to stay warm.  The last winter we spent aboard in Florida left a very bad impression on us.  

Although fundamentally they work just like a heat pump in a house, our air conditioners are not set up to reverse-cycle for heat.  And due to some quirks in our electrical system and the way our interior is laid out, we currently can’t run enough space heaters to keep the whole boat warm at night.  These are the most expedient methods to heat the boat, but both have very high electrical demands and only work at the dock.

Burning diesel for heat is a much more strategic use of fuel and would allow us to reasonably heat the boat away from the dock.  The question isn’t just about hot air either.  We like hot water even in the summer.  Currently, we make hot water either by an electrode in the tank, or through a heat exchanger with the generator.  Neither is very energy efficient.   Ideally, we wouldn’t need to run the generator anyway.  Add to this that our hot water tank is leaking and needs to be replaced.  Taken together these problems lead me toward thinking about a whole new diesel-heated water tank and hydronic heat system with hot water circulating through radiators around the boat.  This would be an awesome system… in Alaska.  It’s a lot of overkill in a boat destined for the tropics.

We have a very “do it right” attitude about boat projects on Take Two, and sometimes it takes some effort to balance that with the original goals to be cruising.  The more painful thing to remember is that she’s a 20-year-old boat and sometimes perfection just doesn’t make sense.  So it probably means we should skip the diesel heat.  We’re already planning to fix our electrical shortcomings, which should allow us to run 4 or 5 space heaters.  We’ll just need to give that project a little higher priority.

The other side of “do it right” is we live with a whole lot of temporary fixes until we can figure out what “right” is.  Window covers were on the summer project list since before we hit the dock, but I could never figure out the right way to do it.  I couldn’t strike the right balance between shade, visibility, and ventilation.  Instead, we spent all summer with covers duct-taped in place.  Good thing, too.  After only one season, the covers became incredibly dirty and we were unsuccessful at cleaning them.  I’m now realizing we should skip the covers entirely and put our effort into awnings.

When we do cruise again, a couple recent changes should make life simpler.  We’ve added a feature to our mail service allowing us to receive electronic images of our mail, and direct them to send it to us, scan the contents, or shred it.  I don’t know why we didn’t do this sooner.  Now we know what we’ve received immediately, instead of finding out whenever we happen to request a mail shipment.  In the end I think it will save us money on unnecessary shipments, and allow us to keep closer tabs on our mail.

The other change is to our banking arrangements based on a tip from the Bumfuzzles.  Capital One’s online checking account will allow us to use ATMs worldwide without a fee.  By using ATMs we can get cash as we need it, rather than carrying a bunch with us.  Plus the ATMs give local currency and we don’t have to worry about currency exchange.  The debit card linked to the account doesn’t have any foreign transaction fees like all our current cards do.

The last bit of news is that Sugar has died.  She had been looking unwell for weeks and had gone from her regular 8lb weight down to 5.  The vet ran some simple tests, but when they didn’t turn up anything obvious, I decided to have her euthanized.  This has been surprisingly painful for Tanya and me.  It happened over a month ago now and we’re still not completely over it.  Just when we thought we were, our last monthly mail shipment contained this card from the vet’s office.  Jerks.

In my recent description of our electric toilet, I boldly declared it clog-proof.  While I’m sure many wise men shook their heads grimly at my foolishness, allow me to point out that it’s not that people haven’t tried.

Shortly after our carpenter left the boat yesterday, Tanya alerted me to an alarming noise from the toilet during flushing.  We both came to the conclusion a screw had somehow been dropped in it during the course of the day.  The toilet still worked and I gave it a couple good flushes to see if it could pass the screw, but felt that the screw was ultimately going to win this contest and that I’d better get it out.  

As far as working on toilets goes, this was a piece of cake.  Since the toilet wasn’t actually clogged, I could run a lot of water through it to clear the discharge line first.  And since the toilet macerates as it flushes, the discharge line is only 1” so there was only about a quart of liquid in it anyway.  I was able to get a little bucket under the connection and managed to catch every drop of what came out when I opened it.  Compared to the gallon of shit that always ends up on the floor in the other bathroom, this was a big success already.

Once disconnected, I turned the toilet upside down, loosened a couple screws and one hose clamp and the pump was free.  I turned it around, looked inside, and there, bright and shiny like a little gem, was a 1” #8 oval head screw.  

The carpenter is not going to hear the end of this for quite a while, but actually I’m very happy.  Not that he dropped a screw in my toilet of course, but that the removal went so smoothly.  I had it apart and back together again in less than an hour, which is a record.  The boat did not have to be evacuated, and no mopping with bleach or full-body scrubbing was required afterward, all of which are part of a normal toilet repair in my experience.

While removing the screw, I discovered evidence that another crime had been committed.  I found some string and what looked like a cardboard tube wrapped around the shaft of the chopper blade.  Even with my limited experience, I know a feminine product when I see one.  I guess I can’t blame that on the carpenter.  A guest must have flushed that months ago.  I was shocked that it had been done, but also immensely gratified that the toilet survived unscathed.

I never like disassembling a toilet.  And obviously we’re going to be more careful about telling guests how to use it.  But if the only thing I really have to actively deal with is when somebody drops something metal in it, I’m okay with that.

When we bought Take Two, all four of the existing toilets went directly into the nearest dumpster.  One of them was replaced with a manual Jabsco model and we temporarily lived that way for about 2 years.  

During that time, we experienced a wide variety of problems.  Incoming sea life caused the bowl to smell awful, and minerals in the salt water contributed to scale buildup in the bowl and the hoses.  The doses of vinegar proscribed by many to combat the salt water were oddly coincident with failures of the joker valve, which is responsible for preventing the backflow of flushed contents into the bowl (which also smelled awful).  Left unchecked, the scale constricts passages and contributes to clogs.  

Oh, the clogs: clogs in the bowl, clogs in the joker valve, clogs in the anti-siphon loop, clogs in the y-valve, clogs in the vent, and worst of all, clogs in the pickup tube of a very full tank.  Clearing a clog is a very nasty and hateful job.  Ten times out of ten, they are caused by too much toilet paper.  For this reason, some boats don’t allow users to flush toilet paper.  But that sounds nasty and hateful in its own right.

For all the trouble we had with the toilet as a system, the machine itself was surprisingly trouble free.  Servicing a family with four children is hard duty and Jabsco toilets are not the pillar of reliability.  They are probably the cheapest units available and have about a hundred parts.  Plus, I’m convinced that children are capable of breaking absolutely anything.  So I think the Jabsco has done remarkably well.

Boats have to be able to “hold it” when in near-shore or protected waters, so that creates the necessary evil known as the holding tank.  I generally give Take Two’s designer a lot of credit for his ingenuity and foresight, but he really screwed the pooch on her holding tanks.  Maybe he figured they were just lip service to local regulations and no one would actually use them, which is probably largely the case for her originally intended use in the Caribbean.  There are four holding tanks, each located under the floors in the forward cabins and under the beds in the aft cabins.  It is very, very difficult to create a holding tank setup that doesn’t stink, and the original tanks just don’t cut it.  The one toilet we used therefore pumped into the tank of the one cabin we didn’t use.  

Removing the contents from the tank can be done with a shoreside hose through a deck fitting, or overboard through a dedicated pump and thru hull.  The pump is a “macerator”, which chops the material with a blade as it is removed from the tank, but the actual suction for the removal is provided by a rubber impeller.  It is a seriously flawed design.  It seems like we get about 2-3 uses out of the macerator before it stops working and has to be rebuilt.  Rebuilding a macerator is my second least favorite job on the boat.

After living with that arrangement for a while I began to conceive what an ideal head setup would look like, and earlier this summer I set about implementing those ideas in our master cabin.  The goals were for the toilet to be clean, odor-free, and most importantly, clog-free.  Six months later, I feel complete confidence declaring partial success.

The centerpiece is our Raritan Marine Elegance fresh water electric flush toilet.  If a toilet can be elegant, this is it.  At $700 and practically four parts, it is a polar opposite from the Jabsco design.  Using fresh water immediately eliminates much of the odor related to the toilet.  Rather than being a simple pedestal, the base is more like a shroud that is designed to be backed up to a wall.  It is smooth and clean and even creates the possibility of running the plumbing through the wall, eliminating the “hose theme” decorating most heads.

The electric flush is provided by a powerful motor and a centrifugal pump.  No rubber impellers here.  And the chopper blade is in the toilet, so nothing but soup ever enters the plumbing.  I think its clog-proof, but I'm knocking on wood just to be safe.

The new toilet flushes only to the tank.  This is to simplify the plumbing, but also to remove the hole below the waterline.  There’s nothing quite like a 1-1/4” thru-hull breaking off in your hand and a geyser of water rushing in.  This has happened.

Our tank is also completely different, primarily because it is not in the boat’s living space.  Our forward heads are against the watertight “crash” bulkheads that separate our bows from the interior space.  While I am loath to drill any hole in my boat, let alone a watertight bulkhead, I felt it was the right thing to do in this case.  The pipe through the bulkhead is sealed with a Uni-Seal, so is still watertight, but I also put it very high on the wall.  The only way it should become any kind of an integrity issue is if the decks are awash or the boat is inverted.  Integrity is pretty much gone at that point anyway.

The tank has two vents, one on each side of the bow.  This is partially to encourage airflow, theoretically feeding the aerobic bacteria that keep the tank “sweet”, but also to reduce the likelihood that both could become plugged at the same time.  If the vent is plugged, by an insect nest for example, then the contents of the tank can’t be removed.

For evacuation of the tank, we still have a deck fitting for shoreside pumpout, and our own pump to send the stuff overboard.  Differences are that each has a separate pickup tube into the new tank.  So there is no y-valve to select between them, and if one becomes clogged, the other will still work.  Clogging is near impossible since the pickup tubes are 1.5” PVC.  Remember, the inlet is only 1” hose.  Another advantage is that I can easily rinse the tank and pump from the deck without having to futz with a y-valve.

The pump is a Jabsco diaphragm pump with a 1.5” bore.  Again, no damn impellers.  It could probably pass a sock.  The overboard discharge is above the waterline, which is not ideal because of smell and the mess it leaves on the side of the boat, but it’s safer and I could install it with the boat in the water.

So how does it work?  Very well, but there have been a few things I’ve learned the hard way.

After six months the discharge hose has begun to develop a distinct odor.  This is disappointing.  I originally used SeaLand OdorSafe hose that I found at West Marine. I know now that Trident 101/102 is much better hose and I’m going to replace the SeaLand as soon as I find some of the Trident stuff.

The Jabsco is on a 50 gallon tank and can accommodate the whole family for about 10 days before filling it.  The electric toilet fills its 20 gallon tank within 7 days, with only two adult users.  The flush cycles are supposedly programmable, but I have been unable bring its water usage down to where I’m happy with the automatic functions.  Instead, I prefer to control the flush water and pump activation manually through momentary buttons on the control panel.  I suppose I could also add a partially closed ball valve to the toilet’s supply to restrict the flow.

Because of the tendency to overfill the tank, a gauge is really necessary for us to monitor our capacity.  For our purposes, I like the Electrosense and ordered the version that runs from a 9V battery. I haven’t yet installed it, but it's really straightforward and I don’t expect any difficulties.

Finally, with separate tank outlets for the deck pumpout and overboard discharge, I’ve discovered the need for a ball valve between the tank and the discharge pump.  When sucking out the contents through the deck, the suction can be enough to invert the valves on the discharge pump.  I expect the Coast Guard may also be happier seeing a valve that can be “locked” with a zip tie.

The issues immediately come to mind for most people with regard to an electric toilet, namely power and water usage, and maintenance, are not so much of a concern for me.  Even when I think the toilet is overusing water, 20 gallons a week is just not that much.  I think our weekly production is somewhere around 400 gallons, so an extra 20 is not going to have a big impact.  Now rolling out a second toilet for the kids does give me pause, and I think I’ll have to find a way to regulate the flush water before that happens.

The power consumption is truly negligible for us.  Total daily runtime is under a minute.  

For maintenance, I really can’t see what could be likely to go wrong with it.  I’m probably just not using enough imagination, but this new toilet is way, way simpler than a Jabsco.  If you really want the ultimate in simplicity, go get a bucket at Home Depot.  But for elegance, I’ll take the electric toilet.

I made some new additions to Take Two’s instrument network this week:

Standard Horizon Matrix AIS GX2100 VHF radio.  This replaced our previous fixed VHF and gives us an “automatic information system” receiver.  Commercial vessels are required to transmit information like name, location, course, and speed (among other things) to other vessels.  Receiving AIS data helps other vessels identify, hail, and ultimately avoid each other.  Many recreational vessels are adding transmitters too, but a receiver-only solution was a much simpler install and suits our purposes just fine.  The GX2100 has its own display on the head unit as well as the optional remote we use at the helm.  It also outputs the data for display on other instruments.

MaxSea TimeZero navigation software.  For years, we’ve used a little handheld Garmin as our primary navigation tool.  It works fine, but I’d like a little more functionality and a bigger screen.  Unfortunately, a larger fixed mount chartplotter is a significant investment… and compromise.  So I opted to go with computer-based software instead.

MaxSea can receive the AIS data and does a very nice job displaying it.  The AIS data includes a ship’s length and width and MaxSea uses this to draw an outline of the ship.  From our slip we’re receiving AIS data from up to 20 miles away, which covers all the traffic in and out of Tampa Bay.  I’m a bit of a shipwatcher, and I find the AIS very entertaining.  I know when a ship is about to enter the Bay because I can see the pilot boat leave to meet him out at the sea buoy.  I can’t see Port of Tampa from here, but if he’s headed to Port Manatee, I can follow him through the lower Bay, and then watch the tugs maneuver him up to the quay.  The same data (upper bay only) is available online at http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/, but it’s more interesting to watch with my own gear.

Asus Eee Pad Transformer tablet.  I’ve never felt an attraction to tablets, but I finally found an excuse to try one.  I still wanted a mobile display that could be used out at the helm or wherever I happen to be (like my bunk).  It runs Splashtop Remote Desktop HD and does a pretty good job controlling MaxSea through the touch interface over Wi-Fi.

I chose an Android tablet for this experiment because that’s what my phone runs, and I prefer open platforms.  Although Apple’s market dominance is undeniable, I’ve always found their products frustrating.  If the tablet turns out to be indispensable but an iPad becomes necessary, I won’t have any qualms about getting one of those as well.

Lantronix UDS2100 Serial-to-Ethernet converter.  This is to stream the serial data from our existing NMEA network through our wireless router.  It is a 2-channel model that can simultaneously handle the regular instrument data and the new AIS data, which are at different bit rates.  The converter includes a driver for the computer that represents each serial channel as a virtual COM port, so any computer application should work seamlessly.  Now the navigation computer can read with the boat’s instruments data and send waypoints to the autopilot wirelessly.

There are still a few issues that keep this from being a perfect solution:

The current crop of tablets aren’t quite suitable for outdoor use.  My laptop is daylight-visible, but this is relatively rare and I have yet to see a tablet that can be easily viewed in direct sunlight.  Being waterproof would also be another huge benefit for any device I hope to use at the helm.  And a way to mount it would be nice.  I have only seen one waterproof mounting solution (http://sites.google.com/site/dndistribution2011/), and it is only for the iPad.

I’m concerned about battery life on the tablet, but it shouldn’t be a big deal to plug it in at the helm, which is probably the only scenario where the display would be on all the time.  Being plugged in may not be compatible with being waterproof, though.

The combination of MaxSea and the Splashtop Streamer puts a serious load on the laptop.  I’ve had heat problems with laptops in the past, so I don’t know how well this setup will work in ambient summer temps.

I’d really like to be able to multicast the NMEA data to multiple devices, but I’m not sure I could do that with this setup.  I can envision having multiple tablets, each dedicated to displaying different information.  I may be overdoing it in this regard, though, since it looks like the marine vendors are already moving in this direction with their displays.  The new Raymarine i70 and Garmin GMI 10 products are both multi-function instrument displays.  They are waterproof and daylight-viewable, but they are also fixed in place and about $500 each.  That’s pretty steep when one iPad has more screen real estate than four instruments.

I’d also argue that marine vendors are not doing a very good job displaying wind and heading data in an intuitive way.  I’ve had some ideas along these lines and have created a prototype in Windows.  Part of the reason for getting the tablet is as a development testbed.  But that’s for another post.

Everything we do on Take Two is with a mind toward simplicity and redundancy.  While using tablets and running instrument data over Wi-Fi may not sound simple, it’s really not that bad.  The technology is used by millions of people and the parts are almost a commodity.  Besides, we haven’t removed any existing functionality.  We still have the USB connection for the computer, and we still have the Garmin.  We even have a sextant, not that we know how to use it.  Maybe there’s an app for that.