Dirty secret!

I don't normally get really excited about boat gear, but there is one piece of equipment that I have a bit of an obscure liking for and that is pumps. Maybe it's something to do with the fact they could keep the boat afloat in an emergency, but I don't think so. I'm afraid it's linked to the same area of the brain that gets pleasure from cleaning hair out of the shower plug hole, or wax out of an ear (preferably not your own). It's the potential a pump has to get into the smallest, dirtiest place in the boat and clean it out. Ahem, anyway... We had a very nice man from Whale pumps, Simon McFarland crawling round the boat the other day. We were all scratching our heads figuring out where to put holding tanks (there will be two, one for grey water and another for black water) and where best to place the pumps. Whale have come up with this great new generation of pumps called Intelligent Control pumps - they come on automatically when there's a body of water over the sensor. This gets away from the old float switch style which have a tendency to get gunged up, stuck on, or not float free. It's true, there will be less opportunity for me to get my head in the bilge and free the pumps - but I can probably learn to live with it!