The weather was perfect for the last weekend of Summer on the Chesapeake Bay. The air was crisp, the temperature in the 70s and the wind was light -- but present. Just add water for a perfect sail, right?
We were delayed getting to Robin. Thelma, our beautiful girl, had been chewing her feet and Saturay morning, one foot was too tender for her to step on. We got an emergency appointment at the vets, and I came home with antibiotics and steroids. Our pet sitter, Terri (who also works at the vets,) knew what to do, so we felt comfortable leaving Thelma at home with plenty of visits during the next two days.
So it was a bit before one o'clock in the afternoon when we reached Cambridge. For once, we had packed light, so the boat was loaded as soon as we stepped aboard.
I went below and turned on the battery switch, and when I went back on deck, I heard the splashing of bilge water coming from the side of Robin's hull. Apparently -- although I've never tried to follow the wiring, the bilge pump cannot come on unless the battery switch has been turned on. Normaly, the pump is wired directly to the battery so that it can operate regardless.
Monica and I moved quickly, getting things ready to get under way. This meant a few trips back and forth from the car. It was now that I realized the the bilge pump was still running and that the bilge water was still splashing into the marina water there on the port side of the cockpit.
By now, the bilge should have been empty. So we both became conscious of the extended run as we finished our drill to get sailing on this beautiful day.
But the pump ran and it ran. And perhaps after ten minutes, when it finally stopped, Monica said she didn't feel good about leaving the dock when we didn't know what had put so much water in Robin's belly.
I had to agree. I also had to find the cause.
Obviously there were two possible sources of water. It could be water from the onboard freshwater tanks leaking into the bilge. Or it could be outside water coming aboard somehow.
My first choice was a leak in the tanks. There are two tanks mounted beneath the cabin sole, each with a capacity (I think) 0f 50 gallons. I was pretty sure one of them had run dry on the trip from Connecticut to Cambridge back in July and early August. I did not know how much water was left in the other tank.
To look for a leak, I had to lift two heavy trap doors in the cabin sole. Each has a little lifting ring mounted in it, but the doors are so heavy you usually need to slip a screwdriver blade through the ring to give yourself enough of a grip to lift.
When I did this, the first trap door didn't budge. In fact, it felt as though I was going to bend the ring out of shape. So I tried the other trap door. Same problem.
Finally, using a hammer, I drove the screwdriver into the crack between one of the doors and the sole, and then I pried.
With a lot of effort and some minor damage to the sole, I finally got both doors up. But I could see no problem. Next, I examined all seven through-hull fittings and the hoses attached to them. There were no obvious leaks.
Finally, I started the engine and put it in gear. Robin's propeller kicked up a current in the slip as she strained against her dock lines. With my head in the engine compartment and a flashlight in my hand, I looked for water spraying from some part of the engine cooling system. Again, nothing.
But as I was leaning from the galley into the engine compartment, I placed a hand on a piece of foam insulation inside the compartment -- and it was wet. This insulation was on the back of a board that was directly under the companionway hatch. Suddenly it struck me that the outside water might have come from the sky.
Two weeks earlier -- or a bit less than that actually -- there had been a non-tropical storm with high winds and much rain. Maybe the winds blew directly against the companionway and the deluge from above managed to get insided the cabin by the spaces around the hatch.
I felt a rug inside and it was wet. Now this began to make sense.
Perhaps the rain flooded the cabin floor and sat there. Now that I thought about it, Robin was sitting in the water nose down because her fuel tanks -- which can hold over 500 pounds of diesel and are mounted near the stern -- were nearly empty. If rain streamed through the companionway and landed on the floor, it could have sat there, unable to reach the drain near the companionway, causing the trap doors to swell before the water slowly seeped down into the bilge.
There is a third trap door that opens under the companionway ladder directly into the bilge. I lay on the floor looking down into that pit for some time and the level of the residual water in the bilge that the bilge pump could not expel didn't seem to change, nor did there seem to be any small streams trickling down the sides of the bilge as would happen were there a leak somewhere else in the hull.
So we watched a bit more and stayed at the dock for the night and Sunday morning, when Robin hadn't sunk overnight, we cleaned the cabin and then went for a little sail. The wind was light as a baby's breath. We used only the genoa because it wasn't going to be a long sail. But the breeze, light as it was, was nevertheless steady and kept the genoa filled and we made 1.5 knots and 2 knots and even 2.5 knots once and the rounded tip of the tiller pressed against my palm, trying to round Robin up into the wind, even when I pushed back gently. The tiller pressed repeatedly, like a child testing your resolve, testing the limits, all very gently, and for an hour we sailed until it was time to go back to the slip.
When the dock lines were once again secured and we had reversed the process of the day before, taking stuff back to the car, we had one more surprise. The bilge pump started again and there was that splashing -- nothing like the amount on Saturday, but enough to make us wonder. Was it the rain?