The wind picked up yesterday afternoon and we are now on the dock in Nanaimo waiting for the winds to slow down a bit. This gives me some time for repairs and maintenance.

Today I took on the maintenance task of replacing our raw water washdown. I am not sure if all the 4788’s are plumbed this way, but our raw water washdown is plumbed to a fauced in the side compartment in the cockpit, and to the front compartment by the anchor and windlass. This is very handy to be able to wash the back deck, or to hose the mud off of the anchor as it comes up.

A few weeks ago I discovered that ours had failed, and I ordered a replacement on Amazon, but I had not had time to replace it. Now the most difficult part of this project was to dig out the shrimp trap, dive weights, and all the other stuff stored under the back deck to get to the pump. Once I accessed the pump it was quite easy to do the replacement. The hose fittings were the same size so they just popped out of the original pump and went into the new one.

The electrical was the interesting part with 3 connections on the hot wire and the ground, it appears that this might be the third time that the pump has been replaced, each time previously slightly exending the length of the wire, and adding more points for corrosion to get into the wire. 2 of the connections were done with connectors, however not connectors designed for the marine environment. The last connetion looks like the just twisted the wires together and wrapped it in tape.

Lets just say that I did a better job putting it back to together with only one connector for each wire. Sealed and wrapped in electrical tape.

We now have a quiet and fully function washdown pump. If it wasn’t for the 20 minutes to clean out the compartement, and the 20 minutes to reload it, this would have been a reall fast project.

Here is the before and after units.

While I am off doing this, Marcia is at the farmers market with Deanna and off to the grocery store. She is also off to Canadian Tire to pick up a new starting battery for the generator, since it seems to be on its last leg.

Now all we need is the wind to calm down and we can head north towards desolation sound.

The wind was so strong that this seaplane had to abort their departure and start over.