Boat Project - Wife goes to the spa while husband cleans the bilge.

There's our little white bilge pump in the center, I pulled it up so it wouldn't pump the bilge cleaner overboard

   It was actually just a coincidence that while the wife went down the road to the spa I stayed at home and did a little Kingsley bilge cleaning. Bilge cleaning is otherwise known as: the complete opposite of spa-time (or was it?).

Kayak bilge pump with hose attached to manually pump all of the water out

   For any of our club members who are soon to be boaters, our bilge is an area beneath the floor in the main area of the boat (the main area of the boat is called the salon, or more historically accurate - saloon). The purpose is to collect any water that happens to get inside the boat. When it fills to a certain level, our automatic bilge pump kicks on and sucks the water out. When we take showers on our boat the water drains into the bilge. Also, our fridge has a drain to the bilge, if it ever defrosted and started leaking the water would go there. We have a manual bilge pump also - it has a handle up in the cockpit to pump the water out if the automatic ever quit.

Using the dock hose through the hatch to fill her up

   The whole reason for the cleaning was to continue the work that we had started when we purchased Kingsley. Our bilge was mostly full of sand and dirt - most of which we got clean the first time around. I wanted to finish cleaning this up and have a closer look at our keel bolts (the bolts that hold our keel on the bottom of the boat...a.k.a. super important). In the picture below you can see that I pulled our automatic bilge pump out so it wouldn't start pumping the bilge cleaner overboard.

Rub-a-dub-dub - that's the manual bilge pump hose

   In the end the keel bolts look fine and the bilge is looking' pretty good too. There wasn't any oil in the water from the engine - that's good. As it turns out, the wifey returns from spa to find hubby's hands soft and smooth. I may have got a little spa moisturizing of my own after scrubbing the thing for about an hour.

~Paul & Amber (at spa, doesn't count)
Everyone's Travel Club

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