Ok, so we've had the boat since October. It's winter in Alaska, it snows, things freeze.... You'd think that as an almost 40 year old woman I'd remember that kind of stuff.
Part of the joys of owning a boat that remains in the harbor year round is that you have to go down to the harbor once in a while to check on it. The first two weeks of December I was on my own. Dave was out of town attending to a family medical situation and I was tasked with checking on the boat while he was out. No problem. Every other day I headed down to make sure it was still there, relatively snow free and that the heater was still on in the galley. I made it through the two weeks without a hitch. The first week of January Dave heads back "down South" for another week and a half and Juneau's weather gets cold and windy. I checked on the boat a little less than I probably should have, but things seemed fine when I was there. Dave gets back and notices that water in the sink isn't coming on. Hmmm... maybe we have a frozen pipe somewhere.
We spent last Sunday down at the boat and it didn't take long for us to figure out what the problem was. Dave hooked up the outside water to fill up the water tank and I went into the galley to put together the tv & dvd player. Pretty soon I heard water running into the engine room. Sure enough, a stream of water was coming into the engine room from a hole in the bulkhead. Some valve thing had frozen and popped off and water was coming into the engine room. Think Titanic, but on a much smaller scale. Needless to say I'm freaking out at this point. Water coming in is never a good thing. Dave, calm as ever, told me to turn off the spigot on the dock. DUH! We spent the afternoon watching a movie and bailing out the engine room. Fun times... fun times.
~Misty~
