A Beach Day, and a Late Night!

Yesterday was another beautiful day in paradise! After some schoolwork in the morning, we headed to shore to see if the kayaks were available. Sure enough, they were, so the girls and I had a fun paddle around the shoreline. When we returned, Greg was chatting with a couple of cruisers from New York and they were sharing Lake Ontario sailing stories. We fed the bananaquit birds sugar from our hands, played with huge hermit crabs, and then headed to the beach. The afternoon was lazed away with another family from Montreal, a couple from Ottawa and then we were joined by a couple new to cruising, whose home port is Omaha, Nebraska!
By sunset, we were all tired and hungry, so returned to our respective boats.
After we had finished dinner, the girls had gone to bed and were sitting chatting, we heard the bilge pump, which is a good thing. About 15 minutes later, we heard it again, this is not a good thing. We raised our eyebrows at each other, and got up to see what was going on.
The bilge is the bottom part of the boat, under the floor, but still inside the hull. Invariably, boats leak, spills happen, and in some conditions (none that we ever hope to be in) waves can crash over the boat, putting seawater in your boat. This is all resolved by your handy bilge pump, which once the water in the bilge reaches a certain level, is turned on by a float switch and pumps the water out of the boat. Depending on several variables, this could happen up to 5 or 6 times a day. Every fifteen minutes means not only that there is something wrong, but also that your batteries will not last very long, thus resulting in a sunk boat.
Greg quickly lifted the bilge cover to see if the cause was obvious ... Unfortunately not, and worse still, his first thought was that our water tanks were leaking. In a land of saltwater, fresh water is more precious than gold, so a leaking water tank is truly a disaster. The initial monitoring of the water levels appeared to support this theory. Happily, with further investigation we found that the fluctuating water level was only a result of the rocking of the boat. Another half hour of brain wracking and searching, and still the source of the leak was still not found. Dig further into the bilge and engine room, remove brackets holding water filters for better vantage, find flashlights and headlamps and try to shine in the right spots. Aha! The bilge pump output hose is leaking. Oh no! This means that all the water the pump is trying to pump out of the boat, it is actually pumping back into the bilge. You see where this is going .... a perpetual situation if ever there was one on a boat. Now we dig through the lockers looking for a new piece of hose. No luck. Finally, Greg says 'I know exactly where there is some',
'Great! Let me grab it, where is it?'
'At home, in the garage.'
'O...Kay...., now what?'

To make a long story short, my MacGyver husband scavenged a piece of hose from the manual bilge system by combining it with the secondary bilge system, replaced the leaking hose, and fixed it!
By midnight he was well on his way to having the hose replaced, shortly before 1, it was all complete. A manual and automatic check of the pump, along with a check in the bilge for moving water confirmed that the problem had been resolved.
Now, on to the clean up. Bilges are not the cleanest part of the boat, it is where the engine leaks it's oil to, where the dirty water that smashes around under your floor settles and where you store your grimiest pieces of equipment. Greg, having reached into this water numerous times over the last few hours was greasy past his elbows, as well as having smudges of grease all over him from reaching over the engine. A quick scrub with a cloth and soap, followed by a rinse in the ocean made him respectable enough to step in the shower to finish cleaning up. We fell into bed exhausted around 1:30, hoping to get a few hours sleep before the excitement of Madeline's Birthday began this morning.