Following yesterday’s rain, today started with a foggy morning hanging over the surrounding hillsides.

As I was looking in the engine room for some materials that I had stored down there, I noticed that the bilge area underneath the engine contained a lot of water. After checking around in the engine room and under the galley floor, I spent most of the morning pumping out the bilges to get rid of the accumulated water. I then spent a lot of the afternoon looking for where the water was coming from. When we arrived at the start of summer, we were told that most of the water under the galley floor was from condensation in the barge from over the winter. But now after three months of summer, this explanation was wearing a bit thin. Eventually, I found that a rust splash was evident on the bilge floor underneath the drainage hole from the shower, and feeling around the base of this outlet confirmed that it was wet. By checking the outlet fitting in the shower base, I found that it was loose and that a small opening was evident around the outlet; just enough to let water through when the shower was being used. This accorded with our previous observations that the water in the bilge was worse when we had guests on board, taking more and longer showers.