Narrow Escape by Marie Browne

Author:Marie Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783755196
Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven:

In July The Sun Is Hot, Is It Shining? No It’s

No ….

Well, Actually Yes It Is … Amazing!

“Your dog needs a bath.” Drew stepped into the boat and wrinkled his nose at the smell. “What on earth has he been rolling in?”

Mortimer looked slightly affronted as I rolled over on the sofa and sniffed his back.

“Mort doesn’t smell,” I said. “It’s the boat that smells and if you’d like to explain to Geoff that it smells I’d be very grateful. I don’t think he believes me, he thinks I have olfactory psychosis.”

Geoff looked up from the book he was reading. “Oh all right,” he said. “The next time we go to pump out I’ll look for the source of the smell.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I can tell you where it’s coming from if you like.”

Geoff sighed. “I know where it’s coming from, I just don’t want the job of fixing it.”

I was slightly miffed. “You’ve been telling me that you couldn’t smell anything.”

He coloured slightly. “Well, I only get whiffs of it now and again.”

“But … but … you made me think I was imagining it.” I was quite grumpy about the whole thing.

Geoff stuck his head back in his book.

I carried on glaring at him and eventually he looked up at me.

Closing the book he shrugged and gave me a slightly embarrassed smile. “I was clearing out our grot cupboard at the other end of the boat,” he said. “When I took all the coats and other bits and pieces out I got a really strong snort of it.” He sighed. “One of the pump-out tubes is in there and I’m fairly sure that one is completely blocked up.” He shrugged. “It’s a horrible job to replace it though. I was sort of hoping the smell would just go away all by itself.”

Well, I could understand that. The one thing that all boaters and boats have in common is the age old problem of what to do with waste. Some of us have big tanks that have to be emptied once a month or so. Some have cassettes that they drag over the flood defences in wheelbarrows and know that they are going to be avoided while they empty them into an Elsan point and then wash them out with hoses. Some have sea toilets which whizz everything up and then dump it straight into the river. Thankfully, these are actually prohibited on a lot of waterways and unless they are coupled with a black water tank can restrict the boats movements quite extensively.

We were quite lucky in some ways. Because Minerva had been a commercial boat before we purchased her, we had two huge holding tanks. They took up quite a lot of space and had massively restricted the size of the bathroom we could build. It did mean, however, that we didn’t have to pump out as often as a lot of other people.

The tanks are connected beneath the floor by a large cylindrical pipe and we have pump out points on each side of the boat.

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