What Were They Thinking?
DOING A LITTLE WORK ON YOUR BOAT? IT’S POSSIBLE YOU’LL SEE A FEW THINGS THAT’LL FLAT-OUT ASTOUND YOU. OR WORSE! BY CAPT. BILL PIKE
You’re not going to believe this, maybe. While installing oodles and oodles of new PEX tubing and Sharkbite fittings on board my 30-year-old boat, I discovered that the vent hoses from the two poly water tanks did not discharge overboard in the conventional manner, i.e., through proper fittings on the hullsides.
“You wanna know where the overflow goes?” I asked my friend Jerry when he came over to check out why I was yelling. Jerry thought for a moment and then suggested: “The bilge?” “No,” I replied, “not exactly.” What a previous owner had done—or commissioned—was to simply run very short vent lines and dump them inside (as opposed to outside) the hull, just outboard of the water tanks. So while lots of freshwater overflow would indeed find its way into the bilge and get pumped overboard by the bilge pump (a troubling prospect in its own right), a good bit would also collect behind the outboard stringers under the water tanks and just lay there like it was in a pond, breeding all sorts of bacteria, mold, bad smells, and other nastiness.
“What were they thinking?” Jerry marveled, shaking his head. Then he told me a story about a boat with even dicier vent lines. The lines, he said, had originated from a set of fuel tanks but, instead of exiting the boat via proper fittings in the hullsides, they’d been simply plumbed into another set of hoses that served as vents for the holding tanks. “Can you imagine what could have happened with this kind of mess?” Jerry suggested. “The fuel tanks and the holding tanks were essentially connected—one could have cross-contaminated the other. It was crazy.”
Of course, tank vents are not the only onboard components that can be goofily jury-rigged. Electrical systems, especially on older vessels, often provide surprises. Again, on my own boat, during the recent PEX-Sharkbite rehab of the freshwater system, I had occasion to hire Jacksonville marine electrician Erik Zaricor to figure out an obfuscating 12-volt terminal strip that was melted on one end and crowded with wires emanating from what looked like a thick, black 110-volt cable on the other.
“Well,” said Erik when he first laid eyes on the rather mysterious chunk of electrical componentry, “you’ve obviously got a 110volt circuit here.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “But what about the 12volt wires coming in from the bilge pump in the shower sump?”
The question got Erik’s attention—he looked a little closer. “Well, well,” he said and then, armed with a multimeter and a stout heart, soon discovered that the cable was actually an old, 110-volt extension cord that a previous owner had pressed into service for 12-volt usage. As we extracted the darn thing from behind a bulkhead—it was approximately 7 feet long—Eric allowed as how, being a marine electrician for many years, he’d seen plenty of electrical squirreliness, although nothing quite so quirky as using an extension cord in a 12-volt system.
Ya know—it’s quite popular these days to say that necessity is the mother of invention. But hey, apparently, necessity can also be the mother of insanity. At least when it comes down to older boats.