Everything is Broken on your Boat.

Dave on Mercedes is full of witty commentary and said “Everything is broken on your boat; you just don’t know it yet”. This bit of cockpit wisdom is reinforced almost daily because as hard as we try to always be diligent with maintenance and be pre-emptive, stuff just keeps failing. Everyday The Bloke wakes and asks “I wonder what’s going to break today?”.

We spent a few days at Airlie Beach. The lock for the washboard - effectively our front door, broke. The lock came away with the key in it and the latch in the locked position. Luckily tools are in the lazerette in the cockpit and it was fortunately an easy fix.

Then another thing. The Bloke went ashore in the dinghy to buy fuel. The outboard fired up on the first pull on the outward journey. The outboard wouldn’t start for the return trip and I was met at the stern by a hot and bothered skipper who’d just rowed 1km back to the boat. 

The repair was assisted by a full rummage through the F@&k Box and whilst the spark plugs were replaced with the 2 new ones we held in our ever expanding ‘spares’ tub, The Bloke is still none the wiser as to what exactly he might have ‘touched’ to get the outboard operational again. However, so far so good. 

When raising the dinghy one morning, the bridle from which it’s suspended broke. Luckily, this happened only inches into the lift and The Elf (the dinghy) was undamaged. Cause? - The splice in the dynema rope gave up. It’s only 6 months old and was professionally spliced. Go figure!

A few days later we heard the bilge pump going and it wasn’t stopping. The hot water tank has an overflow hose draining directly into the bilge sump and seeing as we’d motored a for a couple of hours, due to wind failing to eventuate, we half expected the float switch to activate the pump. But we didn’t expect the pump to keep working without actually pumping. A job for tomorrow. There would be a chandler in Bowen, the next large town, in the event of  a part needing to be sourced.

In lieu of going for a walk at Cape Upstart, the pump was removed and dismantled. My job was to clean the parts and look it over, The Bloke had a much more interesting and unexpected task - locating one of the slide clips that secure the hoses to the pump. Inexplicably, Mr Murphy was on duty and a clip fell deep behind the nearby Hot Water storage drum. Or so we thought. The drum, not only heavy from it’s contents of 40L of water was also warm. 

The Bloke was not getting warm in his hunt for the missing clip however. In fact, he was beginning to think it had fallen into an electrical conduit that runs from one side of the boat to the other.   Out came the endoscope camera to assist with the hunt. 

Sadly the search wasn’t rewarded with finding the pesky part. It was very much looking like a  cable-tie and gaffer tape improvisation until The Bloke successfully ‘manufactured’ a substitute from a thick rubber washer. Genius!

In the meantime I cleaned the pump components and discovered why the pump was failing to suck and runing without stopping.


A small part of the sponge we’d previously used to clean the bilge had been sucked into the pump and caused the flap to remain slightly open. The pump couldn’t therefore pressurise, preventing the contents of the bilge  from emptying even though the float switch was triggering it. The sponge piece was a  ‘Goldilocks’ size. Big enough to keep the flap open yet not small enough to be sucked out with the bilge water and just the right size to create chaos!

Dave is quite right. Everything is broken and often you don’t even know how it could have happened. Although it probably has something to do with Murphy’s Law!