The Morning Our Boat Tried to Sink Itself

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Grab a coffee, go for a walk, or sit back in the cockpit, relax and press play.

“OooOowww shit, shit, shiiiiiiiittttt!”

That was the sound of both our adrenaline levels going through the roof at roughly the same moment, on a completely unremarkable Wednesday morning, while seawater came gushing in through a failing seacock on our liveaboard sailboat.

But let’s back up. Because like most boat disasters, this one didn’t start with a bang. It started with a toilet.

It Started With a Toilet, As These Things Do

We’d had a good night’s sleep, which in hindsight should have been our first warning sign. Nothing good ever follows a good night’s sleep on a boat. I did my workout, went to use the head, and forty-five minutes into our Wednesday, things started to unravel.

“Why is the manual pump so hard to operate?”

I assumed it was me. Human error is usually the culprit. Then Ramon tried, and the pump fought him just as hard, which meant it wasn’t me, it was the boat, which is somehow always worse. Naturally, he decided to take it apart. I can confirm it was a decent shitshow. Literally…

Here’s the thing about boat problems nobody warns you about: you never know how bad something actually is until you’ve already started dismantling it. Including, apparently, the hose that deals with the daily bodily waste of two people and one cat. How bad can it be, right?

A few seconds later the smell had claimed the entire boat as its own. Ramon, who was a plumber once upon a time, kept a flawless poker face throughout. My face, meanwhile, was pulling the kind of expression that earns you lifetime wrinkles.

I jumped into the water and fought the current and the wind, trying to unblock the seacock, but to no avail. Ramon wrestled the hose like he was wrestling an anaconda for the better part of an hour. And eventually, we won. Years of calcified poop and pee from all three of us (yes, including the cat) came out, and we could use the head like functioning adults again.

Small victories. We’ll take them.

How a Seacock Leak Nearly Sank Our Liveaboard Sailboat

While cleaning out the man cave (our name for the giant lazarette where all our tools and the toilet pump live), I lifted a floorboard and had to use some force.…
It swung just hard enough to hit the seacock, the through-hull valve that lets seawater in and out of the boat below the waterline, right on the threaded fitting. Just enough to spring a decent leak.

Water started gushing in, we were taking on water way too fast.

If there is one thing you never, ever want your boat to do, it’s let seawater in by the bucketful when land is nowhere close. And of course, that’s exactly when these things love to happen. We weren’t anywhere near that remote, thankfully. But close enough that “figure it out yourselves, right now” was still very much the only option on the table.

If anything’s going to happen, it’s going to happen out there…

Engineering, Brought to You by Panic and Whatever We Had Lying Around

We turned on the bilge pump and started thinking… very fast… our adrenaline was through the roof, and our hearts were racing.

In moments like these, you find it extraordinarily challenging not to be overwhelmed by panic. Your whole body and mind are consumed by fear, and logic feels galaxies away, yet you have to find it, preferably at the speed of light.

One wrong decision, and the boat would sink seven meters to the bottom of that anchorage. Then your mind starts racing: how are we going to get a crane, lift her back out, and fix her? STOP. FOCUS. How are we going to solve this?

First attempt: underwater epoxy, it didn’t hold. It was three years old, and the pressure of the incoming water was simply too much.

Second attempt: beeswax and butyl tape, layered on top of the epoxy. That didn’t hold either.

So we scraped off all the epoxy, and the water came pouring in again. Then we applied butyl tape and wound it on thick and tight. Then we wrapped a scrap of neoprene from an old dinghy around it and secured it with a hose clamp, tightening it as far as it would go.

That held, and several hours later it’s still holding, and we are cautiously, nervously optimistic it’ll keep holding until we can fix it properly.

We currently don’t have the budget for a proper haul-out, which is expensive wherever you are and one of the costs people regularly forget when buying a sailboat. Want to learn more about the hidden costs of owning a sailboat? We got ya! Read: The Real Cost of Owning a Sailboat.

So for now the plan is: check it again in the morning, and if it’s still behaving, maybe add another layer of epoxy on top for good measure. This is an emergency patch, not a repair we would trust offshore. A leaking through-hull fitting needs to be properly repaired or replaced before heading offshore.

We need a few more months, preferably a year or more, to save enough for the haul-out she actually needs. And when it happens, it has to be a proper one. Hopefully, it will be the last one before we cross the Pacific Ocean. Out there, “good enough” isn’t going to cut it. Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, much like our Atlantic crossing, when things had a habit of falling apart at the worst possible moment.

Boats really do keep you on your toes. Who knew… 😉

So, No, We’re Not Selling

By the end of that Wednesday, a life on land sounded genuinely appealing. This particular seacock, by the way (the one we installed three years ago), was never meant to be a long-term solution. Exactly the kind of hidden issue we warn about in 7 Mistakes When Buying a Sailboat.

A few days before we splashed, after six months on the hard, we tried to service our original Blakes seacocks and one of them snapped clean off mid-repair. So we installed whatever we could find at the time, told ourselves we’d swap it out properly later, and sailed off anyway. As you do.

It was a good reminder that buying the right boat isn’t just about how she looks at the dock. The condition, construction and systems underneath the surface matter just as much. It’s one of the reasons choosing the right sailboat in the first place matters so much.

“Later” was scheduled for 2027, but the seacock evidently had other plans.

This Is Boat life

If you’ve ever renovated an old house, you know the feeling: you start one project, and somehow five more reveal themselves before lunch, each one politely reminding you that it exists.

Boats work exactly the same way, with one crucial difference: problems demand immediate attention. With a house, you can usually close the door on a project and deal with it in a few weeks, or months, whenever you finally feel ready.

A boat doesn’t grant you that luxury. It doesn’t care whether you haven’t slept properly in a week because you just crossed an ocean or that the last six anchorages were rolly enough to throw you out of bed more than once.

You fix it now, or you risk losing your entire home and everything in it to the sea. That’s the deal. Nobody negotiates with a leaking hull.

Fair winds, and dry bilges for all sailors,

The Mutiny Crew

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Thank you!

Thank you! We’re incredibly grateful for everyone who has believed in us since we started living and sailing on Mutiny. You know who you are! We would also like to thank those who always discouraged us and tried to wave our dreams off as if they were idiotic, irresponsible daydreams. Thanks to you, we are always encouraged to go that extra mile.