Rainy Days and Rescue Tape

A gray couple of days, with torrential rains early one morning and high winds and low clouds all day another. We didn’t do much but lie low ourselves...read, do crosswords or sudoku puzzles, handle some e-mail correspondence and phone calls, relax and do a few boat tasks. We’ve gotten spoiled with all the wall-to-wall sunshine of late, I have to admit! Ron readily admits to being a bit dangerous when bored, as he is a man of action and can only read so much before going stir-crazy. So, we did some bicycling along Grace Bay and a bit of shopping, as one of Ron’s flip-flops had a blow-out and thus a new pair was needed. We bicycled the next day as well, again when the weather was only cloudy and windy rather than raining. Still, a very quiet couple of days.

We did have one exciting episode Friday evening, however, when we realized the salon ice-maker was having an issue. I went to get a refill of some ice, and there was a bit of water at the base of the ice-maker...not much, just enough to make me wonder if I’d dropped an ice cube accidentally. But, it looked like there was water coming from the unit...my second thought was that because power had been intermittent all day (due to the stormy high winds), maybe it caused the ice maker to defrost a little and leak. But, to be safe, we opened the front access panel, and there was water inside too.....hmm? After a thorough inspection, however, we realized there was a pinhole leak in the water line, because water was misting everywhere! Oh no!! (We didn’t even see the leak at first, it was that fine a mist, but we found it soon enough.) We shut off the fresh water supply and proceeded to troubleshoot and investigate our options. Unfortunately, there is no shut-off valve to the ice-maker itself in the engine room where it is plumbed into the fresh water supply (we need to add one!) so despite the tiny nature of the leak, it actually presented quite a large problem, because if we didn’t fix the leak, we wouldn’t be able to use the fresh water system! Not a happy situation!

We considered our options: scavenging through the supplies that we had aboard, or going to the local hardware DoItYourself-type place to look for compatible plumbing supplies, to repair and replace the leaking line. (Happily, that was actually an option here as they have a well-stocked store very much like a smaller-scale Home Depot!) But....even better, we had an answer aboard: Rescue Tape to the rescue!! 

I’d gotten a few sample rolls of assorted types of Rescue Tape, made of this very fabulous silicone self-sealing material, a few years ago at one of the Trawlerfest/PassageMaker University sessions when we were up on the Chesapeake. We’d not had any real need for it before, but thankfully, I remembered that it was there amongst all the tape in the tape cabinet. So, we gave it a go, stretching it and wrapping it tightly around the icemaker line --- and --- no more leak! The stuff is amazing! It’s supposedly rated up to 950 PSI, and all we needed it to do was handle the 22 PSI in the ice-maker water line, which it did quite handily. Gotta love the stuff! We’re definitely getting more when we’re back in the States! Needless to say, we are monitoring the ice maker with an eagle eye to make sure that it is operating normally with no leaks. So far, all is dry and we're quite happy!

The repaired water line, wrapped with Rescue Tape