Moving water

Our friends on s/v Letitgo show us an easy way to move water from where it shouldn't be to somewhere else...

Our dock neighbour and friend, also a veteran catamaran sailor who sailed from the West coast to New Zealand and back, parted with us a very wise advice few weeks ago.  While filling his water tank he discovered that a fitting had broken during the winter and the entire content went into the front cabin.  Not the most pleasant of Spring surprise though a hard reality.  This is when he showed us his creative portable bilge setup.  Luckily on multi hulls we have separated “water tight”compartments but not all are linked to the bilge pump, hence the need for this clever device!  You can plug it as you need it, vacuum whatever needs to be done and then store it for the next event.  As you can see on the picture below,  yesterday while purchasing the replacement strainer screen for the water system, I acquired the entire elements to have my own portable pump.

Here are the ingredients you will need:

• 15ft of bilge tubing,
• 30 ft of 16 gauge electric cable,
• one male 12 volt plug, one clamp
• and one rule 500 GPH bilge pump.

I don’t have to teach you how to put it together, but for $30 it is a nice little system to have on board even just to empty the dinghy when you leave it out and it rain really hard.  Not that we will ever do that around here, no.

We have a similar system on Eolian, and it has served us well.