Roots and Mooring Lines

Jason’s unblinking eyes were fixed to his phone screen. His chewed thumb swept up the device twice, three times, before locking it, pocketing it, and casting his gaze down to navigate the tree roots that sliced through the concrete of the coast path. Our Boxing Day walks traditionally took us to far West Cornwall, where we’d scramble over carns, tors, cliffs, and rock formations that look like they’ve been placed deliberately, balanced by the hand of a deity. This year, we travelled only five minutes down the coast to the beaches in Falmouth. Jason had convinced himself that our boat – the one we’d moved onto that very morning – was going to sink. And it was the bilge that we had to blame for his silent terror. 

The bilge is the lowest internal point of a boat, where water inevitably collects. People will tell you they have a dry bilge, and they are almost definitely lying. Whether it’s condensation, heavy rain, or a clumsy visitor spilling a drink, liquid has a way of finding its way into nooks and crannies and eventually down to the lowest point. A little is normal, but too much will weigh down your boat and see it on the wrong side of the waterline, so a pump is essential to keep everyone safe. As sea dwellers, we expect a lightly damp bilge and as long as it’s not sea water we’re pretty calm; that Boxing Day, Jason was certain the water had a tang to it. He had swilled a mouthful of it around, using his taste buds to assess if it had notes of salt before spitting and rinsing, as if conducting the world’s most unpleasant, risky wine tasting. 

Was there a leak? A hole or crack we hadn’t noticed? That we had caused? Were we going to return to our new home sitting a few centimetres lower in the water? Was the bilge pump, that we’d set to run before leaving, doing its job? His eyes darted left to right, as if reading the questions that I knew were filling his amygdala to capacity. 

Obviously, it was all fine. The water level had more than halved while we walked, and the salty tang was imagined. 

Problems with bilges are a common experience. Pumps to drain them can get overloaded, can fail, can trip the electrics, or not come on when they’re needed. If there is a problem with fuel tanks or engines, well all that lovely diesel, petrol, or even oil could end up in the bilge too, creating an opaque slurry that requires hand pumping and collecting for disposal. There’s no way of doing that without getting so close to the concoction that the heady aroma of stagnant water and chemicals will leave you dizzy and nauseous. But it doesn’t matter how gross it gets – without a functioning bilge, you’re not going to last sat in a harbour or pontoon, let alone actually travelling on our waterways. 

For the last year and a half, we have used a DIY electric pump, operated by a switch labelled ‘shower.’ It has meant lifting a little hatch in our sole boards and sticking your nose into the hull of our boat to inspect the water level, then (in my experience as a shorter-than-average girly) dangling into one of our lockers until my fingertips brush the hose pipe the pump is connected to. The end of the pipe gets stuck overboard, and it’s at this point you press ‘shower.’ We have also supplemented this by absorbing any water we can’t quite pump out with nappies (yes, the kinds worn by babies – they’re absorbent and easy to access), which we line the floor of the bilge with through wet seasons. This process is fine, but it’s laborious, and requires us to be on the boat all the time, especially in bad weather, which is when we are most likely to be hunkering down somewhere with foundations and that can’t heel in the wind. We needed to make a change. 

We swapped out the manual operation for an automatic pump with a float sensor, meaning we no longer have to take up bits of our floor and stick our heads into the hull to see what the water level is like; once she hits a certain level, the water will be spewed out whether we are there or not. It’s more efficient, safer, and so much more straightforward. 

Between installing an automatic system and the work done to reduce deck leaks and condensation build up, our bilge is like new: we can see the GRP base of it more days than not. But that doesn’t mean we’ll turn our back on the nappy hack, or that Jason will stop texting me ‘Check the bilge xxxx’ on days I get home earlier than him. The bilge consumes our thoughts and we check and care for it constantly, but that will never change, because a bilge is for life, not just for Christmas.