The fresh water system was less that sterile when we bought the boat and we've done a lot of work to raise our water quality. I’ve already talked about replacing all of the plumbing hoses throughout the boat, new faucets, shower, installing a system wide water filter, etc. The last step in all of this is to really clean the tanks.

Pearson 424s have three tanks. 60 Gallons port and starboard under the salon settees and a 50 gallon bow tank. Our bow tank was decommissioned by the P.O. and used as anchor locker. The salon tanks are fiberglass and are structural to the hull, have three internal sections with baffles between each. They are fed by deck fill plates connected to the tanks on the upper foreword end of thanks. There are overflow hoses as well, that I need to go through and ensure they run into the bilge, according to the other P424 owners they were vented into the lockers (lame).

Our port tank has a single 6” aft Beckson deck plate. This is a screw-out plate that is not water or air tight under pressure. The starboard tank has three such plates one in each section of the tank. Eventually, I want to replace all of these with stronger inspection ports and add real gauges so we don’t have to disassemble the settees to look in the inspection port to see if they are full. For now, we’re adding two Seabuilt stainless steel inspection ports to the port tank. I’ll replace the others when there’s not so many other things going on.

The parts have been ordered and I’ll work on getting them installed this coming weekweekend so we can clean the port thank.