Water Woes

Without much reflection, I recently replaced my broken bilge pump with a slightly larger model.

after all, I thought, surely an 800 gallon-per-hour (gph) pump will outperform the previous 500gph unit? Well, yes, but that’s no reason to feel much safer, as I soon discovered.

The reason is that no pump is designed to deliver its rated output for long—at least not in real-world scenarios. And even a modest breach in the hull is likely to overpower the pumps supplied with most boats—just look at ingress rates on the opposite page in the Fig. 1. Small wonder that the Coast Guard attended over 1,100 distress calls last year to vessels taking on water.

Part of the problem is that boatbuilders simply aren’t required to supply a system that can deal with damage control. Between the strict requirements of the European Union’s Recreational Craft Directive and the American Boat and Yacht Council’s (ABYC) guidelines, boats only need to be equipped with a system to remove “normal accumulations” of water in the bilge—meaning occasional spray, rainwater or slow leaks.

As ABYC technical standards specialist David Broadbent says, “Our construction standards