Just a lover of boating, writing about what he loves. Stop by for interesting articles on everything from buying a boat, boating adventures and engine maintenance.
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One of my favorite views when cruising on The Bear's Den II. Just have to make sure I don't look this way for too long!
Several months ago, I noticed the shower drain in my boat was not removing water as it should. Rather than water running down the drain, it just collected in the pan at the bottom of the shower. Recently, I decided to tackle the job and figure out what was going on. I knew I was going to spend the entire July 4 th weekend on the boat and I wanted to be able to take a shower without worrying about the water building up. If you are not familiar with the workings of a basic shower sump system on a boat, it is actually pretty simple. The drain at the bottom of the shower empties into a box down in the bilge. Since the box is most likely below water level, there is a pump in the box that pumps the water up, out and overboard. Often the pump has a float switch attached to it to cycle the pump on when the water gets to a certain level and off when the box it empty. A Basic Sump Pump Setup In my case, I had already checked the line from the shower drain to the b
If you have ever experienced hydrolock on your boat engine, you may already know that it can turn a great day on the water into a really bad day in a hurry. What is hydrolock? To put it simply, it is when water gets into your engine cylinders. While this can also happen to car and truck engines, it is more likely to happen with marine engines because of the environment that boats operate in and it is more likely to happen on boats that have exhaust systems that release exhaust under the water’s surface. First, let’s talk about how the typical 4 stroke gasoline engine works. There are four steps (hence the term four stroke) that a cylinder goes through for each combustion cycle: 1. First the intake valve opens and the piston moves down which sucks air and fuel into the cylinder. 2. The intake valve closes and the cylinder moves up which compresses the air-fuel mixture. 3. The spark plug fires, igniting the fuel-air mixture, thus pushing the
My last article dealt with proper navigation lighting and in the article I referred to a few rules of the road, specifically when it relates to which boats have the right of way. There seemed to be a lot of discussion on the topic, so I figured I would write about it this week. If you drive a car, then you understand that there are situations where one vehicle has the right of way compared to another. The same concept applies to vessels on the water and understanding the rules is very important. On many occasions, lack of understanding of these rules had led to dangerous situations and sometimes even loss of life. First, let me provide a few definitions: COLREGS – Abbreviation for Collision Regulations and is an international set of rules defined to prevent collisions between vessels as sea. It must be noted that some regulations differ slightly on inland waters (lakes and rivers) so it is important to know the rules in the area(s) that you boat. Give
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