Next up on the “grim and slightly impossible jobs” list, cleaning the engine room. There is quite a lot of rainwater in there, some sand and a whole lot of greasy grime. I scooped out a lot of the debris a couple of weeks ago and then spent the first part of the day shovelling out 6 10kg bags of wet sand. Yup shovelling heavy sticky wet sand… But it needed more in the way of cleaning. Led had previously conducted some experiments with lenor and kitty litter and reckoned that creating something akin to a washing machine with the rainwater would do the trick…

  
I sprinkled Four packs of cheapo tesco biological washing powder liberally round the engine room and gave them a bit of a swizz round. The beauty came with connecting up the new bilge pump and circulating the water and the frothed up washing powder round the engine room a couple of times, hosing down a lot of the hard to scrub surfaces, before pumping it out the side of the boat.

   
    
The whole process of pumping slightly murky water around did look a lot like a colonic. Although I do hope that in real life colonics don’t involve car batteries or give you as wet feet as I got.

  
Good news is that it actually blimmin worked. You might not think it but irons now pretty much up to scratch, falling into my category of “clean dirty”… Ie it looks a bit worn and battered but there are no falling off bits and when you rub it, it doesn’t automatically make whatever it touches black and greasy. Result. And best of all, it smells pine fresh!