on designing in important stuff...

Today's word is retrovation, some excellent "shut up and listen" advice, and the stuff you can't read in prison...

I'm not a big fan of folks who make statements of the "Everyone needs to have/get/do" variety" but I'll make an exception and say that...

"Everyone needs to have a big frelling manual bilge pump."

I mention this because very, very few boats have a decent manual pump of a size that would do the sort of needful movement of water from inside the boat to outside the boat in a dire situation.

For instance, the sort of pump most people actually need looks a lot like this one...

but, in reality, what most people have is something more along the lines of something like this one...

Maybe it's just me but if I'm knee deep in water, the electricity is no longer working because the batteries are underwater, and I don't know where the frelling water is coming from I'd much rather be pumping as much water out of the boat as possible.

Sadly, the real reason most folks don't have a behemoth like the Edson (gallon a stroke) manual pump is because most boats simply do not have a space big enough to mount one and, as a result, are stuck using wimpy little pumps ill-suited to the job.

Which, sorta/kinda, brings me around to designers of sailboats and how, just maybe, that designing in systems like bilge pumps and suchlike should really be high on their list of priorities and not an afterthought left to the boats owner somewhere down the line...

Listening to The Coathangers

So it goes...