If that statement isn’t dripping with sarcasm then you just don’t know me. I checked on the boat the other day with Ethan with a couple small tasks I wanted to complete but was welcomed by an overwhelming smell of sewage. Thankfully it wasn’t actually sewage, but it was nearly as vile as the bilge had filled with water, collecting all sorts of bio matter and then molding over. To make matters worse, there was a bilge pump down in there somewhere which clearly wasn’t doing its job. In went my hand to feel my way to the bilge pump, snap it off of the strainer so that could feel whether the impeller was blocked… nope, it spun just fine.
Open up the electrical panel only to find that circuit had been rewired by the previous owner… and clearly not to standards. Knowing I couldn’t do much at this stage, I called it a day.
Returning a few days later with a waste pump in hand, I was finally able to pump the disgusting water from the bilge. I pumped, rinsed, scrubbed, filled and rinsed no less than 5 times before I finally felt like digging in there again. I managed to rewire the circuit removing strange alien connections at critical junctions which were certainly not doing the system any favors. Finally, I reworked the connection back to the battery (bilge pumps connect direct to the battery so they can’t be inadvertently switched off) and the sweet sound of a humming pump emerged from the bilge. whew, hopefully that’s the end of that.
