Science News

Oh yeah

Major score!  Erica found a gigantic fake owl in the v-berth yesterday.  And some more fishing rods.

We've gotten about a day and a half of work in so far.  Erica has had great success throwing things away and cleaning.  I have had somewhat lesser success fixing the drains in the back of the boat.  All of the joints where the drainhoses connect were completely clogged with a delightful combination of mud, bird droppings and fishing weights, so I had to disconnect all the hoses and clean the connectors out, like so:

Oh yeah

We had some good science learning moments today.  First, I noticed that there are two drains in the cockpit that go straight down and out through the bottom of the boat.  It did not seem intuitively right that those would actually drain, since they let water out below the waterline.  Then Erica pointed out, a la Pascal, that water won't actually support a column of water above it, if the top of the column isn't sealed.  She has some cockamamie story about the weight of air, but really it's just gravity.  Secondly, when I found the freshwater tank, next to the filler hose that runs from the deck into the tank there was a thin hose that looked a lot like a vent, also running into the tank.  But why would the freshwater tank need a vent?  Hours later, I had a eureka moment, realizing that if there was no vent, pumping water out of the tank would be really difficult, because you would be creating a vacuum.  Tomorrow, I think we'll learn about electricity, and possibly infectious diseases.

In other news, the sink works.  We can't really take any credit for that, though, because all I did to make it work was press the pump for the first time- good ol' Alik told me it didn't work, and I took him at his word.  He didn't use it as a sink so much as a place to put fishhooks and rusty x-acto knives, so that might explain why he misled us.

In between work days, we went to a hockey game.  It was excellent- there was a short-lived overtime, and several fights.  And a face off in the corner:

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Oh yeah

Back to work tomorrow.  Hopefully we get the boat clean enough that we can take some respectable pictures of it.