TO THE ROOT OF THE MATTER

Phil Sampson discovers that things are not always as they appear...

- 

Boaters can sometimes be complacent about issues we probably ought to be confronting. That's certainly true in my case, when I noticed a dribble of oil in the forward bilge of our Fairline Targa 34. A couple of years earlier, there had been a lot of oil in that bilge due to the bow thruster oil reservoir breaking free of its mountings and depositing its contents all over the floor of its hatch. That oil ended up in the bilge, by way of a gulley in the hatch base and the first I knew of the problem was when I went to turn off the seacocks, which also live in the forward bilge. The source was easily traced and suffice it to say that the reservoir is now trussed up with enough tie wraps to make even the most hardened bondage aficionado blush.