A couple of weeks ago we made plans to fish offshore. The evening before some heavy weather moved through and therefore I was leery of the conditions the morning may bring. I checked the weather radar before leaving the house and it indicated some showers offshore, but it was hard to tell just how far off they were and their intensity. We decided to ride out and take a look at it first hand. As we ran through the jetties we passed a couple of other boats on their way back in. As we cleared the mouth of the jetties we could see two large storms moving to our east and south east. We turned on the radar and it indicated a fairly good sized gap between these two storms, but it was hard to tell what may beyond. We turned on the VHF to attempt to get a report from someone further offshore just in time to hear “Vessel taking on water, this is the United States Coast Guard do you have a bilge pump on board, and if so is it keeping up?” Not the type of thing you want to hear if you are trying to decide weather to fish or not. The vessel in distress responded, “Our bilge pump has failed, we are using buckets to remove the water, so far we are keeping up.” Having been in a boat that was partially swamped in the surf once before I had a clue as to the fear that was going through the Captain and crews mind, and since they were actually offshore I knew it must have been far more unnerving than my minor experience. After listening further we discovered that there was a boat less that a 1/4 mile away from those in trouble that was responding to the distress call, and Sea Tow was on their way with a gas powered trash pump to provide assistance.
This past winter as I was preparing my boat for the upcoming fishing season I realized that the float switch on my bilge pump had gone bad. While I was replacing the switch I started thinking about the pump itself. What if it went bad under a time of need? The more I thought about it I realized that a back up bilge pump could be worth it’s weight in gold. About a month ago I finally