Some time back I recall reading about the sinking of a boat in Lectronic Latitude where the couple aboard had a leak but could not find the source...
Most folks wanting to cruise tend to be obsessed with the idea of storms and collisions but hardly break a sweat over such things as fire aboard or the possibility that you could lose your boat to a badly installed toilet or the failure of a bit of hose. Actually fire or sinking due to simple plumbing problems are far more likely to sink your boat than a storm or being rundown by a ship.
You might want to keep that in mind...
On "So It Goes" we have two thruhull seacocks for plumbing (one unused but kept simply because I may get around to building that watermaker one of these days the other is a sink drain) and four cockpit drains that are badly designed and are on the must redo in a sensible manner ASAP list. Of course, compared to a "modern yacht" we have hardly any holes in the boat to inspect if we happen to notice that our floorboards are floating around the galley which some might (I certainly do) consider a real advantage over the numerous seacocks and thruhulls that most boats sport these days.
Worse, if having thirty-three holes drilled into your boat is not bad enough, for ease of building and cosmetic reasons many of these thruhulls are placed in locations that are only accessible by very tiny contortionists or folks heavily into Kundalini yoga or, even worse, simply walled off behind stuff and forgotten.
In the consumer yachting world the answer to the problem of all those holes in the boat is selling you alarms and sophisticated systems that phone up your iPhone to tell you that you are sinking... Now, I'll admit that the idea of an alarm that calls me up in the middle of the night to let me know that I'm sinking is kinda cool (especially if it were to use Majel Barret's silken voice but with my luck it would more likely be Robby the Robot) but it hardly addresses the fact that you are... ummm.... SINKING!
Pumps, of course, make a lot of sense (I happen to be partial to the Henderson MK5 and have several) but they do not address the problem at its source and stop the flow of water in...
There are some cool foam plugs these days as well as the old standby wooden ones to stop up a hole/thruhull when needful but how do you use one when you can't reach behind the 6KW genset whose seacock may be the source of the water ingress?
So here is a quick and handy test to see if you have a too complicated (spelled unsafe) boat...
1. How many seacocks and thruhulls do you have?
2. Do you know where they all are and how to get to them in a hurry?
If the answers to #1 and #2 requires ponderation of any sort exceeding ten seconds you have too many holes in your boat.
Listening to the always great Pousette-Dart Band
So it goes...
