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Who is it that you can always trust to take care of your boat like it was their own? Contact us @ to nominate your choice. This month, the top spot goes to John Pereira, service manager at Hinckley Yacht Services in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
reader Carl Linley writes: QUESTION 1: Maybe we are being picky here. But my wife and I hate cleaning the shower sumps on our Grand Banks trawler. But if we don’t do it regularly, the float switches for the pumps tend to get gunked up and so do the strainers. Once that happens, all sorts of other problems arise, including an iffy aroma. Is there any way to prevent this sort of thing from happening? ANSWER 1: I am going to very gingerly go out on a limb here, Mr. Johnson, and suggest that you are most likely using bar-type soap in the shower or showers onboard your trawler. When lathered up, such bar-type soaps, even the high end ones, will typically return to a semi-solid state after they’ve entered the sump, thereby eventually causing the gunky, smelly issues you describe. Try switching to one of the liquid soap products on the market. Your pumps, float switches, and screens should easily discharge the stuff overboard because, after you lather up, it tends to maintain its liquid form. QUESTION 2: My wife and I are tired of trying to keep the anchor rode on our Mainship 34 properly marked so that we know how much scope we are letting out. Plastic tie-wraps get all banged up and fall off and so does paint. Tying colorful wisps of plastic or cloth is useless. Is there anything we can do to circumvent this
— Skip Johnson Shell Point, Florida
whole issue for good? We don’t have a chain counter onboard.
— Nick Scalisi Boston, Massachusetts
ANSWER 2: Here’s an idea that came from a reader years ago, Mr. Scalisi. I haven’t personally tried it, but hey, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work quite nicely. Start by putting your 34 bow-first into her slip so that her pulpit overhangs the dock. Then carefully lower your anchor to the surface of the dock and mark the rode temporarily with a Sharpie at the wildcat or drum. Of course, you want to make sure the anchor doesn’t hurt anyone or cause any problems as you lower it. Now, the next step must be done as precisely as possible—simply power down your rode for approximately five seconds and then carefully measure how much you’ve fed out from the original mark you made with the Sharpie. For good measure, you may want to repeat the process for a 10-second period, making sure that the amount fed out is roughly twice the amount fed out during the first five-second period. Once you’ve got a good idea of how much rode is going into the water per unit of time via the technique I’ve just described, you should be able to use the second hand of your trusty watch to tell exactly how much scope (minus the distance from pulpit to water level, of course) you’re deploying at any given time.