Hair spray. No, really. //425 words, ~1 page

The endlessly kind & helpful Rick installed a foot pump for my fresh water. This means no more flailing away at the wretched hand-lever whenever I want to drink or wash something.

Installing it was a really stunning case of one damn thing after another -- 5 hours to do a job that we thought should have taken 2 -- but it finally looked good to go and he had to leave, so I sent him off and went to fill the water tank so I could try it out.

It did pump, but it couldn't hold the seal, so each time you went to get water you had to stomp on the pedal several times just to get started and then put up with a couple geyser-like bursts before getting good flow. I replaced all the freshwater tubing when I got the boat, so, full of a sense of my own righteousness, I couldn't stomach a sloppy freshwater system. More fool I.

Turned out it was leaking anyway, so it had to be dealt with. Mind you, it was leaking a lot more by the time I gave up trying to fix it.

Weak points in the system: we had to change tubing size to get the inflow tubing onto the inlet nozzle, and the nozzles on the foot pump were smooth -- no christmas-tree ridges, no screw threads, just smooooooooth, oily plastic, for which there is no really good glue. As far as I could tell, it was leaking in all 3 places: size-change, pump inlet, pump outlet.

I went to Pagano's, where Medium Chris (as opposed to Big Chris, the boss) had -- I thought -- wasted 10 minutes of my precious time that morning explaining this multi-part system for connecting 2 sizes of tubing. I found him, sent up a flare, and he dropped the inventory he was working on to get me a really impressive-looking Chinese puzzle of brass that connects dissimilar sizes of soft-walled tubing absolutely air-tight. He also told me a trick for dealing with slick nozzles so bizarre it has to be true, or at least worth trying: cover it with hair spray, crank your hose clamps on tight, and let it dry. The hair spray dries as glue, and it forms a water-tight seal. Chris says he heard this from another boater, so it must be true.

Buzz-cut Rick is coming over again tomorrow. He thinks he's going to haul me up the mast. Little does he know he'll be messing around with hair spray.