Let's cut to the chase. We wanted to try emptying the holding tank at the pump out station. And we are morons so we decided to do it on a day when the wind was ridiculous and made coming up alongside the dock pretty much impossible.

I'll spare you the grisly details and the name calling, but know that at one point, Mack was at the helm, I was on the dock, Kenutu's ass was tied off to the pump out dock, and her nose was as far from the dock as a nose can be. Mack wanted to untie and try again, I wanted to solve it. Another couple who are also boaters heard what must be a familiar tone and came to help. We used lines to pull her in and got her nose tied off too. We then cleat hopped her forward to the pump-out station. And after all that shitty-ness,  it was time to handle the literal shit.

I put on gloves, which make me feel empowered to touch anything. If I were a superhero, I'd skip the cape and go right for the gloves. Mack took a post at the pump-out station controls and let me do the dirty work. 

We were pump out virgins before this experience, so if you don't care how it works or don't like hearing about shit and pee, you probably want to move on. The pump out looks like a big gas station nozzle, but instead of pumping gas into a tank, it has a rubber cap that seals over the mouth of the holding tank when suction is turned on. The tube from the nozzle is mostly opaque, but there is a short section that is translucent. This lets you see all the turds and pee coming from the box that lives under your bed. This is not where sweet dreams come from.

After you suck all/most of the gross bits out, you use the water hose that's by the pump out station to put some clean water into the holding tank, thereby giving it a flush or a rinse. Then, you repeat the poop/pee sucking process and suck out the water. You are wearing gloves, you've got this.

Feeling a little bit redeemed by a successful shit removal, we discussed our dock departure plan and left with more confidence and cooperation than we arrived with. Maybe someday we'll learn not to make a shitty situation worse by being shitty to each other. Or we'll become experts at name calling and eye rolling.

Mack spent some time in his favorite place on Kenutu -- under her floorboards -- and came up needing a lot of repairs. It all started with an alternator rebuild. The shop he went to, Wayne Electric, did great work and were fast and reasonably priced. And they gave him a magnetic titty calendar. Which is why I think he went looking for more work to be done.  

Chris from RS Marine met us aboard Kenutu and brainstormed some repairs that could improve her performance. A rebuilt starter was on the menu, as was a new exhaust elbow. Along the way, someone had taken the exhaust pipe and made it smaller on its way out, which was apparently dumb. Chris also suggested a rebuilt manifold, which we knew we needed because we'd already applied some JB Weld to a leak on it. ​

​A couple of fuel filters made it onto the list, since Mack had ordered them online anyway. The ones on Perky had some cumbersome screws and multiple connections, which Chris pointed out would make you want to sink the boat if you had to change the filters and bleed the lines out in the middle of the ocean in waves. The solution was to update the fuel/water separator and the secondary fuel filter with more accessible features and add a pump to make it easy to bleed the lines. ​

As a bonus Chris cleaned up all the gunk on the engine and showed us that revving it and changing gears in the dock is no big deal. Oh, and he left us this very comforting note.