Life is riddled with a procession of minor impediments

[ZenArcade]

Ach, well maybe he did a wee bit.....only kidding Matt. Z

[Batman's Superior Cousin]

Missed an appointment 'cause I went on the wrong damn bus, nearly went to Morpeth instead of Ashington.

[Mattofthespurs]

I don't think you did, mind.

Hope not.

[Tiplodocus]

PC monitor broken, broadband router broken, Wii U gamepad broken.

[Proudhuff]

PC monitor broken, broadband router broken, Wii U gamepad broken.

what have you been watching? 

[Fungus]

PC monitor broken, broadband router broken, Wii U gamepad broken.

what have you been watching? 

Breaking Bad.

[SuperSurfer]

... when one has so much to do one doesn't know where to begin, so... ends up watching another World Cup match.

[The Legendary Shark]

Here's a minor impediment that nearly turned into a soggy disaster - yesterday, my temporary home almost sank.
.
For reasons I shan't bleat on about here, I am currently living on a canal boat - a state of affairs for which I was, and largely remain, wholly unprepared and miseducated. The boat, which had been unoccupied for several months prior to my arrival, had always "listed to port" which is, I am informed, the nautical term for the inability to adequately control a boiled egg.
.
Now, every boat has a list, apparently, and it has been known for boaters to spend lifetimes rearranging bricks and old 56ib iron weights all over the place in order to satisfy an insatiable spirit level - but most just give up in the end and have it all near-enough. My boat, everyone agreed, was near enough.
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But, in the mysterious plumbings of this boat, something insidious was patiently working on its own dark project. It seems that there is somewhere a drip and that drip has found its way, over one or maybe even two years, into the 4 inch void between the cabin floor and the steel hull. In what I consider to be a fairly serious design flaw, this void is filled with bricks and broken paving stones and then sealed up without even an inspection hatch. And so, unobserved and unnoticed, drip by drip by drip, month by month, the void filled with horrid, stagnant water. The boat was sinking in slow motion, a millimetre a day, so that nobody noticed - least of all the naiive novice living aboard...
.
The pointy bit at the front is the bow, and between the bow and the doors leading into the cabin is a kind of step area, a small metal sunken patio kind of affair. This area is called the "cratch" (sp?) and its base is below the side of the boat but above the cabin floor, so one steps down off the wharf (the wooden thing for tying boats to so they don't wander off) onto the cratch and down off the cratch into the cabin. My cratch had a puddle in it, at one side. I'd been thinking it was rainwater and had been saying to myself for days that I needed to un-bung the drain hole. Yesterday I finally got around to using the Special Drain Un-Bunging Tool (the sawn off end of a pool cue) but, after a moment's confusion, I discovered that the drain wasn't bunged-up but submerged and that the puddle wasn't rainwater but a piece of the canal. And it was almost running into the cabin.
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Quick as a flash, I stood eyeing the situation, rubbing my chin and looking lost - which is, of course, the international body language version of the SOS. Sure enough, other boaters were soon on hand with advice, help, tools and tea.
.
The long and short of it is that I had to chisel a hole in the floor to get to the flooded and fetid void and then pump like hell. I took around 40 five gallon buckets of water out before, mercifully, someone chipped in with an electric pump which ran for almost half an hour.
.
It was all very exciting and even, in a strange way, enjoyable. Right now, I'm sitting in the boat (she's "riding higher" now than she has in months) enjoying the sunshine, all the hatches are open so the breeze can help dry her out. She was, I am given to understand, probably only hours or a big ripple away from going down like a stone in 10ft of water - if it had happened while I was asleep...
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On the plus side, I'm one small step closer to being a proper longboat captain, having had my first major adventure!
.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

...and here was me complaining t'other week when the landlords above had a pipe burst and water came cascading through our ceiling....

wouldn't have sunk the house anyway! Phew, glad everything's ship-shape shark!

[The Legendary Shark]

Thanks, Foxy. Fortunately, the drip seems to be coming from the internal plumbing rather than the external canal so simply running the water tank dry would appear to have stopped it. The biggest impediment is that now I have to go outside to fill the kettle from the tap on the wharf.
.

[mogzilla]

ooh, nothing worse than a puddle in yer cratch maybe you should change your forum name to uncle albert!
glad its sorted sounds like a lovely life especially with the good weather were having

[The Legendary Shark]

It is - it really is.
.
Winter, I have been given to understand, might not be...
.

[Trout]

Pah. Some shark you are! 

[The Legendary Shark]

Lesser Spotted Land Shark. Water's for the birds...
.

[TordelBack]

Ah the horror of the hidden leak!  I only sail teenchy dinghies, and tend not to live on them, but have spent many, many hours trying to track down the culprits that randomly fill our buoyancy tanks with distinctly unbuoyant water... Like yours, our bow tank lacks an inspection hatch, so our non-emergency efforts are restricted to painstakingly inspecting the washing-up-liquid coated surface in the hope of spotting a wayward cluster of bubbles.  Unlike you, two men can 'easily' lift the boat out of the water, pour out the excess, and turn it upside down for the purpose...

I am trying to work out how your ballast got in there without any sort of hatch, but such are the manifold mysteries of boats.

Good to hear your fellow water-rats pitched in.  Sailors are a fine community to find oneself in, and they like nothing better than to poke about in another man's bilges, so to speak. If only to reassure themselves that there are other boats even less seaworthy than their own.