We so wanted to go sailing this weekend. All week, we’d been trying to decide where we were going to anchor and how nice it would be to get out of the marina and hoping there’d be some wind — but not too much — to fill our sails.

So we were a bit bummed to say the least when we woke up on Saturday morning to rain pouring outside on deck. Maybe we didn’t want to go sailing that badly.

Try as we might, we had a free weekend ahead and couldn’t put off one of our most dreaded projects any longer: rebuilding our leaking manual bilge pump and changing out the rotten 25-year-old hose attached to it and our cockpit drains. Over the past year, we’ve hauled meters and meters of this ancient black rubber hose wrapped in a peeling clear plastic wrap out of the boat and replaced it with nice new Trident hose: diesel tank fill hoses, water tank fill hoses, head discharge hose, head to holding tank hose, electric bilge pump hose, galley and head sink drain hoses….

Actually, we were glad to finally get this project checked off. We’d been putting it off for some time since wrestling hose in the bilge is rather back-breaking and most of the old hose is covered in the same sticky black crude-looking oil that covers the sump under the Perkins. And, we’ll feel a tad more secure out on the water with a working manual bilge pump since our electric one is usually clogged with pet hair.

We began by hauling the old bilge pump and cockpit drain hoses out of the boat. This part is actually quite easy and so so satisfying even though it’s a bit messy and a bit of a challenge not to dump the remaining putrid contents of the hose in the boat.

Smelly, rotten hose, gone by noon on Saturday:

The next part is not so fun. The thing about nice new hose is that it’s very stiff and doesn’t want to bend for anything, at least in the direction you want it to. The remainder of our weekend was spent literally wrestling the hose to get it in it’s new place through lockers and bulkheads, across the bilge in areas impossible to reach, and attached to the proper thru-hull fittings (always located behind furniture with only 2 cm sq. of working space). Hours spent contorted in painful ways half hanging in the bilge, hands covered with cuts, muscles screaming out from so much tugging in unnatural directions. Michael spent most of Sunday morning like this:

While we were at it, we also took Rivendell over to the bilge oil pumpout, and by flushing copious amounts of water through the sump were able to suck out most of the sticky black sludge that had previously covered the bottom 6 inches of this five foot deep pit. What on earth had gone on in this boat’s past to cause this environmental disaster? Additional sludge scrubbing with numerous towels and a vaccum cleaner full of old wire ties, bolts, bits, screws and hundreds of other unidentifiable objects we could finally see the bottom of the sump! What a moment that was!

By 9 pm on Sunday night, with bruised bodies and aching joints, the rebuilt Henderson bilge pump was back in place with new hose leading to our nice dry, clean(er) bilge, the electric pump was unclogged, and our new cockpit drains were happily draining rain. Don’t we know how to have a good time!