We have a leak

Things on boats break, especially boats in salt water.  You really don’t expect things to break when you are just sitting at a dock, though.  I guess we should just always expect it.

Last night Wendy made a delicious dinner of Pad Thai. We went out and bought some ice, something we rarely have on the boat, and then had Pad Thai with margaritas on ice.  It was as a great night, good food, good drinks, very relaxing, right up until it wasn’t.  Wendy finished her meal and headed to the sink to wash her dishes, right about the time my friend Delaney called.  So, I’m talking to Delaney and I hear the water start to run in the background and shortly after the pump came on to force more water into the accumulation tank.  Everything operating just like it should.  Then Wendy noticed her feet were getting wet.  Uh, oh, something was leaking.  She yelled out that we had a leak and Delaney says, “I guess I’ll talk to you later.” I raced into the galley, pulled open the cabinet door under the sink where all the hoses, pump and accumulator are, and felt like I had stuck my head into a lawn sprinkler.  Something had come loose and water was spraying everyone under the sink.  I quickly shut off the water, but that only slowed the spray.  Wendy ran back to the switch panel, flipped off the switch for the pump and the sprinkler slowly died down. 

Under the sink is a dark place at night, we don’t have a fixture that sheds any light directly under there, so I wasn’t sure where the leak was.  All I knew was that there was a leak and everything under the sink was wet.  Wendy held a flashlight for me while I removed everything we store down there.  Paper towels, dish towels, cleaning rags, cleaning supplies, all soaked.  I pulled out the tool box, found my 8mm socket and proceeded to tighten every hose clamp in the cabinet.  There are about 30 of them, but I think I got them all. Wendy went back and flipped the switch for the pump to the “On” position and I watched the sprinkler start up again.  It was a connection that didn’t have a hose clamp.  The water pump has some sort of quick connector and that was the problem.  The hose has a fitting attached to the end of it, that fitting pushes into the pump, then a little slide comes down over the fitting and the whole thing stays in place, unless it doesn’t.  Somehow the slide had slid and the fitting had popped part way out, so the pump wasn’t pumping water into the system it was pumping water into the cabinet.  I put the fitting back into the pump, pushed down on the slide, wrapped a towel around it and Wendy turned the pump on again.  I carefully opened the towel and saw that there was no leak.  Whew.  Problem resolved.  Then we just had to clean up all the water, wipe down everything that got wet, leave everything sitting out and the cabinet door open all night so that it would all dry out.

The offending slide clip.

 

One of the rules of cruising is that you never leave your pump on when sailing.  If you need to use the water, you turn your pump on until the accumulator tank is full then turn it back off.  You can use water for several minutes before the tank needs to be recharged.  The reason for this is that you can’t hear the pump running while you are sailing, so if you have a leak like we had the pump would literally pump all of the water out of the tanks and onto the floor.  There is no danger of sinking from that, it is simply transferring the water from the tanks into the bilge, but it does mean that all of your fresh water will be gone.  At best that would be inconvenient, at worst, life threatening; people don’t do well without water.  While this incident wasn’t fun, it did help to reinforce that rule in our minds.  Even when you have a well-organized and properly maintained water system, leaks can and will happen because things break on a boat.