For those of you who aren’t into boating, our toilets pump into a holding tank, much like if your house has a septic tank. Well when that tank gets full, it needs to be empty. In the states there are about a billion places where you can do this as pretty much every marina, fuel station and mooring field are required by law to provide the appropriate facilities.

Here in the Bahamas, not so much.

There are no marinas that offer any sort of pump out service in the Bahamas except for Atlantis and they deal primarily with mega-yachts. Down island there aren’t public sanitation facilities, so the idea of a shore based pump out is ludicrous. There was a meager attempt made by Rodney – AKA The Pump Out Guy – to provide boat our boat services, but the vessel he uses has sank three times in 2 years, the pump is rarely working and if the moons aren’t aligned and the weather not perfect our less than ambitious private operator may not show up for work.

All this to say, enter the macerator. The macerator is a high powered blender that does just that. It blends up the solid mass in the holding tank, chopping everything to molecule sized pieces before expelling said grind overboard. Viola – empty holding tank.

There are all sorts of etiquette and stuff as to when and where you should discharge and I’m not going to address them in this forum as it is a constantly moving target and arguments are guaranteed to ensue, but yesterday, when I tried to engage our now 3 year old spinning blades of destruction, all we got was a loud “POP!” and a small wisp of smoke from the locker where said device resides.

Uh-oh.

I sprang into action fearing the worst. I grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher and then opened the starboard side fat locker to look for fire. FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! <Beavis imitation>

There was no flames to be found, just a little blackened char where the two DC wires emerge from the pump body. There was, however, a nasty smell in the locker that I imagine you could replicate at home by setting a port-a-potty on fire and standing down wind. Shitty death!

I left the compartment open to ventilate and went below to shut off power to that particular section of the ship. After double checking the power was off with a multimeter, I dug through our spare parts bin to find the spare macerator we’ve been carrying around since 2012.

Most boats don’t carry a spare macerator, but we do as a result of having three previous ones fail exactly after three years of use. Damn you Prince of Darkness (West Marine)!

Anyway, it took thirty minutes to swap out the old and put in the new and then we were back in business.

Remember, cruising really is all about working on your boat in exotic places. More to follow, end of line…