What's a Bilge PumpFiveo1

What's a bilge pump?

A question that arose as I stood knees deep in water. My 27-foot Catalina was making its sluggish way toward an unoccupied dock. Even halfway underwater, a sailboat is extremely safe. It's the other fifty percent that causes concern.

Rick and I had left my slip in Long Beach Harbor that Saturday morning for a few hours of spearfishing in front of the Palos Verdes cliffs. A trip I had made many times before. Nothing beats a sail. Wind in the sails. Cold beer in the fridge. A grill hot and ready to fry up our catch.

The coast of California is a truly beautiful and changing environment. From San Diego to San Francisco, the landscape continually shifts. The water is brisk — refreshing and cool against the stark contrast of the 100-degree sweltering heat of Los Angeles. You could cook an egg on the 405 freeway. That's Southern California for you.

Rick was more like a brother than a friend. He spent his days running a machine shop with his wife. Solid guy. The kind who doesn't ask stupid questions when you say "we're taking the boat out." He just shows up with beer.

My 1979 Catalina sailboat was a spectacular find. Fifty dollars. Six months earlier. I had been wanting a boat for years, and my hot, crazy, Latin second ex-wife wanted it for her Instagram feed. That should have been my first warning sign. When your boat purchase is motivated by social media and a woman who once threw a shoe at your head for breathing wrong, you might want to rethink things.

But no. I bought the boat.

I was working a corporate job at the time. It gave me weekends free for harebrained ideas and a paycheck to back them. This particular harebrained idea was spearfishing.

So there we were. Rick and me. Open water. Cold beer. Spearguns. The sun was out. The fish were not.

That's when I noticed my feet were wet. Not damp. Not a little splash over the deck. Standing. Knees deep. In the cabin. While the boat was still moving.

I looked at Rick. Rick looked at me. Neither of us said the words we were thinking, because saying them makes it real.

That's when one of us — I honestly can't remember who — asked the question that would define the next hour of our lives: "What's a bilge pump?"

Not "where is the bilge pump." Not "did you check the bilge pump before we left." Just... what is one. As in, what does it do. As in, we were two grown men on a sinking ship and neither of us had the faintest idea how to keep water from coming in or getting it back out.

I like to think we handled it with dignity. We did not handle it with dignity. There was panic. There was fumbling. There was Rick sticking his head into compartments that had not seen sunlight since the Carter administration. There was me shouting instructions I was making up on the spot. There was, eventually, the discovery of a device that looked like a small plastic pump attached to a hose. We turned it on. It made a noise. Water continued to rise.

Turns out bilge pumps work better when they're not broken.

We limped toward an unoccupied dock. The Catalina, to her credit, refused to sink. Half underwater and she still wanted to sail. That's dignity. More than Rick and I had.

We made it to the dock. We tied off. We stood on solid ground, soaking wet, out of beer, and completely fishless. Rick looked at me. I looked at Rick. "So," he said. "What's a bilge pump?" I still didn't know. But I knew what a broken one felt like.

We walked to a bar. We ordered beers. We did not talk about the boat. The boat, somehow, did not sink. I patched the leak the next weekend. Replaced the pump. Took her out again. Checked everything twice. Rick never asked about the bilge pump again. He didn't have to. We both knew the answer now. What's a bilge pump? It's the thing you don't think about until you're knees deep. And then it's the only thing in the world.

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WHAT IS A BILGE PUMP? (THE ACTUAL ANSWER)

Since I didn't know then, and you might not know now, here's the straightforward explanation.

A bilge pump is a device used to remove water that has collected in the bilge of a boat. The bilge is the lowest compartment inside the hull, and water inevitably finds its way there — from leaks, waves crashing over the deck, rain, or (in my case) whatever the hell was wrong with my Catalina.

If you don't pump it out, the water sloshes around, damages cargo, ruins your beer, and eventually sinks your boat.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BILGE PUMPS

Bilge pumps are not new. In fact, they are very, very old. Because wooden ships have leaked since the first person carved a log and pushed off from shore.

Ancient Rome (circa 3rd century BCE): The first bilge pumps were force pumps invented by early engineers like Ctesibius and Archimedes. These used pistons to push water out of tubes and were typically made of bronze. Written accounts from Phil of Byzantium, Vitruvius, and Hero of Alexandria all describe these early pumps.

Roman ships used bilge pumps to siphon collected water out of hulls. Archaeologists have found evidence of these pumps on shipwrecks, including a 200 CE wreck near Grado, Italy, that contained lead pipes believed to be part of a bilge system.

1500–1900 CE: According to Thomas J. Oertling's definitive book "Ship's Bilge Pumps: A History of Their Development, 1500-1900" (Texas A&M University Press, 1996), all wooden ships leak. This stark fact has terrified sailors since the earliest days of ocean travel. Oertling documents three main types of pumps used during this period:

— Burr pumps: A cone-shaped leather bucket on a wooden spar (about six feet long) that drew water up a tube. In Dutch and German ships, two men would thrust it down into the bilge box while six men hauled it up by rope. An exhausting process.

— Chain pumps: A continuous chain with small buckets that ran over upper and lower sprockets. According to Sir Walter Raleigh, this was one of the great improvements introduced to the British Navy during his time. Two men working a chain pump could lift a ton of water in 55 seconds.

— Common or suction pumps: The earliest representation dates to 1431. These used a moving upper one-way valve attached to a rod and a stationary lower valve with a "claque" (one-way flap). The pump had to be primed with water to seal off the lower tube from air. Atmospheric pressure did the rest, though suction could only lift water about 28 feet.

The first recorded use of metal parts in ship pumps was 1526. Before that, pumps were made entirely of wood because the only tools for boring iron tubes were those used to make cannons.

1768: Richard Wells designed an apparatus to help crews remove water from damaged ships with less exertion. His design used a conventional piston pump driven by a waterwheel. Wells claimed his invention would prevent the exhaustion that caused men to "submit to their unhappy fate, and desponding sink into their watery grave." He never patented it. The model survives in the collection of the American Philosophical Society.

1850s: The iron flywheel was developed to maintain momentum of rotation, working with a camshaft to drive two piston rods. This quickly became standard on packet ships and clipper ships.

1971: Sven O.G. Tumba patented a bilge pump driven by wave movements. A float connected to a piston rode the waves while the pump housing remained submerged, creating pumping action from the ocean's motion.

1974: R. McAusland patented a bilge pump built directly into the mooring line. As waves tensed and relaxed the line, an elastic pumping chamber expanded and contracted, drawing water from the bilge and discharging it overboard. It also provided "snubbing action" — shock absorption — to the mooring line.

Modern boats: Most small yachts today use hand-operated diaphragm pumps (more efficient than old plunger types) or electric automatic pumps that sense rising water and turn on by themselves. Large ships have power-driven pumps capable of lifting hundreds of tons of water per hour.

THE POINT OF ALL THIS

When I asked "what's a bilge pump" while standing in rising water, I was not asking about piston-driven force pumps from ancient Rome or chain pumps from the British Navy. I was asking because my boat was sinking and I had no idea how to stop it. But the history matters, because it tells you something: sailors have been asking this question for over two thousand years. Every person who ever climbed onto a wooden boat and felt water lapping at their feet has had the same moment of panic. The only difference is that most of them checked their pump before leaving the dock.

Me? I bought a fifty-dollar sailboat because my ex-wife wanted Instagram content. You learn. Slowly. Sometimes while wet.

Further reading, if you actually care:

— Oertling, Thomas J. "Ship's Bilge Pumps: A History of Their Development, 1500-1900." Texas A&M University Press, 1996.

— Oleson, John Peter. "Greek and Roman Mechanical Water-Lifting Devices: The History of a Technology." University of Toronto Press, 1984.

— National Park Service, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park: "Historic Manual Bilge Pump on Balclutha Returned to Working Condition" (2014).

— Oxford Reference: "Pump" entry on historical ship pump types.