A Hash is a beat through the wilderness on trails marked by ‘hares’ leaving shredded paper piles along the way. We did our first on Saturday in Grenada and it was a blast!!! So much so, we’ve decided to stay in Grenada another week so that we can do next week’s Hash! About 100 people showed up for this Hash – sometimes they have as many as 200 – and the majority are locals, but there’s always a few tourists – including a good contingent of Yoties amongst the crowd. Pics here of us receiving our instructions…
There’s a price to be paid for a Hash however – especially as ‘Virgins’ doing it for the first time – and that is that (for one reason or another…) you get absolutely filthy and smelly – so when we arrived back at the boat we had to strip off everything outside and Sunday morning turned into wash day.
What you get for finishing a Hash
Participants gather for the Hash start
Some may remember that Toodle-oo! is now equipped with a twin tub washing machine! Whoo-hooo! So, Laurie set to on Sunday morning washing our Hash gear. I took advantage of the effort to run our generator to make power for the wash, but also to make some water and to heat some water. All very boring, until the generator decided it’d had enough and coughed and spluttered to a halt.
Monday I looked at the generator and finally concluded that fuel was not getting to it – and my in-depth analysis showed that the lift pump which brings fuel from the tanks, through the primary filter and to the generator was not doing what it’s supposed to. So I pulled it off the wall and looked long and hard at it – and confirmed that indeed, it was not pumping. Fortunately, here in Prickly Bay, we have a ‘Budget Marine’ store, whose catalog (at least the 2016 version) shows they have the exactly correct lift pump… I dinghied over and sure enough, there it was! $250 later, the lift pump is installed, but the generator is still coughing and spluttering. Well, clearly, the fuel lines need to be bled… so for the first time in my life, I set about bleeding the system – turns out to be stupidly easy – one nut has to be cranked open a little bit and wait for air bubbles in the fuel to stop. Trouble is, air bubbles were definitely not stopping.
I decided that I must have installed the fittings to the pump incorrectly – and that air was getting in at the joints. So I went back to Budget Marine and purchased the right (yellow) kind of Teflon sealing tape (as opposed to the while plumbers sealing tape I’d used), disassembles and then reassembled everything. Nope… Still got air in the fuel (more like I have a little bit of fuel in my air…).
Laurie convinced me that a beer and a sit-down would help.
I sat. I drank. I drank some more. I had a thought. Dumb shit!
As soon as I turned to the supply of fuel from the empty port tank to the full starboard tank, the generator barked into action, ready for more charging, water heating and water making!
Anyone interested in a slightly used lift pump?