Articles
Thoughts on kayak bilge pumps
- Category: Safety & navigation
- Published on Friday, 27 August 2010 21:34
- Written by Josh
- Hits: 1932
As soon as I observed Holger's newly installed electrical bilge pump system (earlier in the year at Copmanhurst) instantly I saw the value in the concept and within a week I'd installed one of my own. Haste is never a good thing though and in this case, resulted in a fairly sloppy job that although was functionally and somewhat theoretically sound, was always something I'd planned to redo. When it came time to install the new Lowrance HDS5 sounder into the yak, it felt like an opportune moment. Before installing the sounder I uninstalled the bilge pump system, intending to put it back together again, only this time with some better materials and the benefit of hindsight. But just as soon as I got done installing the sounder I took a good look inside the hull and figured that reinstallation of the bilge would make it look a bit like the innards of a pinball machine. And it got me to thinking...
And that thinking very quickly made me reconsider my affinity to the electrical bilge pump concept, which when considered with the newly added power drain caused be the chartplotter/sounder, raised red flags. The likelihood of a battery running out of power is actually pretty high. Just as pertinent, I think, is that the likelihood of operational failure is also fairly high, for a variety of potential factors. And when weighing this up with the likelihood of failure on the obvious surrogate - a manual bilge pump - it became pretty clear to me which was the most reliable overall option. So I decided to leave the electrical system uninstalled and instead devised a way to secure it's manual counterpart securely into the hull.
I did this by using a coiled paddle leash attached to the underside of my 8" hatch. To dig it out all I have to do it open the hatch, grab the leash and pull it out. Very accessible and reliable.
Perhaps the biggest advantage in the electrical bilge system is that once switched on, one can sit back as the hull empties itself without having to have any hatches open. This is the Achilles heel of the manual system if relied upon exclusively to operate. Picture it - your hull is swamped, you are trying to pump water out from the central 8" hatch while waves are crashing over the side refilling the hull just as fast (or faster) as you can bail it. Not a good situation to be in.
The obvious answer to this is to make an external port that feeds a hose to the base of the hull, ideally dimensioned to fit the business end of the pump and with a watertight screw-top cap for sealing when not in use. I'm yet to get my head around how to achieve this on my yak just yet, but that will be the next experimental modification I make to my yak. I'll report back with results.