I read an advertorial on BoatUS.com on pump capacity and because Google is smart it serves my an article on a sailing crew fighting to keep up with the incoming amount of water after a collision with a whale or container or refrigerator. Which made me added 2 essential parts on my safety list on preparing our Seawind 1260 for an circumnavigation.

Bilge pump real capacity

Interesting article with one picture saying it all. In a normal situation you will lose ~50-70% of the advertised capacity of a bilge pump. 70% of 2.000 litre per hour ( ~510 gph) is a 10 ltr bucket per minute. Alternatives are water intake of your engine, 70-100 litres per minute and the manual bilge pump at a max of 50 litres per minute.

It will handle a leak on your water system, rain, sea or bow water in heavy conditions. But it is a false feeling of safety to think it will keep you afloat.

Industrial Sewage Pump

Part of the problem is the use of 12 volt DC. You need a lot of ampere to obtain a higher wattage. So switching to 230 volt AC is a first step. Second step is you need a more industrial design to pump a higher volume. So after looking around I opted for a sewage pump of Vevor, heavy duty, big hose etc. You need electricity, at least one engine running and your converter higher up, not in the engine room.

Anti-leak agent

Everybody odd to have conic wooden plugs for an broken valve or hull transit. But for a real crash or a rip that is useless. A lot of stories and experiments on other solutions. Remarkable good is stuffing a pillow into the crash hole securing it with wooden beams etc. In a closed bow compartment stuffing in fenders, classic cork life jackets etc to suppress the water and obtain bouncy, also works. For larger cracks a sail outside the hull, but it is difficult to deploy and to keep it in the right place. And of course there is fiberglass and epoxy.

A Spanish company, aplTec, took that idea to the next level and developed a product called Composite Patch, a easy to deploy fiberglass sticker to repair survives, even underwater. It´s around now for a decade and seems to work quit well. The shelf life is 18 months.