March 28-29, 2000 -- The Bilge Pump From Hell

Right after the net, we went to the grocery store to pick up enough supplies to get us through until the meat order we planned to place from Bush Brothers arrived. We had only intended to pick up a few things. We wound up with a full basket! When we arrived back at the boat, I started working on storing what we purchased while Mike started working on a bilge pump that we thought needed to be replaced. The bilge pump was running, but not moving any water. Well, after about an hour of work and a lot of fussing, Mike finally got the old bilge pump out. Mike called me down to help him get the replacement hooked up and in place. We wired everything up and flipped the switch. The pump ran. No water was moved out of our bilge though. I went back to stowing things while Mike worked on the one way valve, the next possible problem area. About an hour later, Mike called me down again because his hands were hurting from working on the one way valve in strange positions. We wound up cutting it out. It wasn't the one way valve. We hooked it back up and the pump still wouldn't work. At this point, we were at a loss as to what the problem could be. We took the rest of the day off. On March 29, first thing in the morning, I ran the Cruiseheimers net. This was the first time in 6 weeks that I was able to do that. It felt good to get back into the swing of things! The net went surprisingly well for being so out of practice! Next, I placed the meat order. Then, with the new access hatch installed on our fly bridge, we were finally able to truly address the washer dryer problem. We found that a little $0.75 washer had worn out on the condensing motor. Unfortunately, we would have to replace the entire motor because of the way it was built. Since our traveler system was apart, we decided to armada and rebed the blocks that our boom and out haul lines used, so we pulled them off. The canvas guy came out and put on the screens for our saloon windows. We could feel a temperature change right away. Finally, We noticed that the aft stateroom bilge pump was on. We checked it out and found the pump was air locked. Simply turning the pump off and back on freed the air lock and the pump worked fine. This gave me the idea to put some water down the forward bilge exit. We put a hose in the thru-hull turned it on and ran it until water started coming out. Then, I headed inside and flipped on the bilge pump. It worked! Apparently it was also air locked! 6 hours of work, down the drain!