The Salon was removed first to figure out why there was a large, disgusting hole in the floor opening into the bilge. That revealed the biggest termite infestation I’ve ever seen (and I’ve lived in New Orleans the last 15 years – native land of the termite). Then I cleared the storage area and chain locker and found more termites. This leaves the head sitting precariously between two significant termite nests. Naturally, one has to wonder if they were, in fact, two parts of one ginormous, terrifying, termite nest of biblical proportion. It seems like that would be something I need to know.

Yeah, that seems about right. To the right of the picture is where the toilet stand was – that got torn out with the wall and was full of termites as well, so I can’t say this is surprising. But it is nasty. To show how deep and shitty this nest is, I cut a square out of the middle.

It’s still difficult to tell, but that’s a good 6 or 8 inches deep. Nothing but nest.

Incidentally, in the first picture, the blue box is actually the shower drain. The shower floor was glassed to the bulkheads so the water all went into that box. Then a small bilge pump would pump the water to the thru-hull under the sink. The thru-hull in the box actually had an impeller installed there with a wire running up to the pilot house. You can see the shower pump hose in this picture if you can tear your horrified eyes away from the fried rice (termites).

Tearing out the shower floor was very difficult work. The trick, it turns out, is to break up the surface tension of the fiberglass. Once that’s done, things go much more smoothly. And the results are encouraging.