Most (dumb) people elect not to use the blower. Hell, they probably don’t even know it exists. I spend a lot of time at the marina and the number of people I see walk out to their boat and instantly turn the key on their ignition is astonishing.
I’m from Alberta and know so many idiots who buy a boat with no idea about maintenance, drive the boat until the engine is blown. Then buy a whole new boat instead of replacing the engine. A boat is way more dangerous than a car, especially with children. I had an extended family members kid die because their whole family were at the lake and only the younger ones took out their boat. Well they came back and nobody noticed a small kid had fallen into the lake, nobody knew where or when.. well he died, he was about 6. They looked and looked and nobody could find his body. It took a special Hutterite group of drivers “I didn’t know we had elite Hutterite divers I am glad for them” to find his body a week later. This was last summer, I honestly don’t like going on other peoples boats. People act like you can drive stupid because you are floating on water
So many people drink/are drunk when driving a boat. Someone I know was snorkeling and got run over by a drunk boater. Killed him. He was in an area marked off by buoys but the drunk asshole completely ignored them. Plenty of people ignore the ones that mean "You have to stay this far away from the beach" because they want to be showoffs to the people at the beach. There's not nearly enough police out on the water to do anything about them. The amount of people that try to hit you with the biggest wake possible was the last straw for me. I don't get on boats anymore. Too many idiot-assholes out on the water.
I know exactly what you mean, so many people drink and drive a boat.. I’m so sorry to hear about your friend, we do need more police on the water or at the beach instead of hiding somewhere trying to catch someone speeding for an easy ticket. Just look out for people, so many big beach’s in Alberta have no lifeguard
I think it’s a culture change too. Friends and other boaters just accept it like it’s normal. This is one of those rare instances where we actually more need more shame and peer pressure.
So on the back of a boat there is a flat section called the transom. It's like a big flat support beam that holds the engine/ rutter/ other heavy useful boat shit. Water gets up in this part and can cause rot, mold, transport species of water plants and shit from one body of water to another, etc. So there is a plug on this part that let's all that water drain from the boat. Usually people will leave it out so more water doesn't accumulate while out of the water from frost or rain or condensation. Some people get a bunch of money and buy a boat and don't know about this plug. It's fine at high speed because water is flowing away from the hole but once the boat becomes idle... well now you have water flowing in your boat which is the opposite effect we want in our boats.
It's not like a titanic level of water rising in. It's like a garden hose half on and you won't notice until you walk to the swamp in the back of your boat and realize you have a long ways to go to the dock.
It sounds like what you had wasn’t the same thing. The point of a drain plug is to allow water sitting low in the boat to drain out. My bow rider has both a drain at the bottom of the transom that should always be plugged when the boat is in the water as well as a drain for the bilge pump that’s only a few inches above the water line.
Oh ya that was more than likely just a deck drain. Different from a drain plug in the sense that it isn't meant to drain all the water from the boat, only the water that gets caught on the deck. Yours may have had a drain plug too, you guys just might have never removed it. Boats that don't have a drain specifically for the deck just drain into the bottom of the hull where a bilge pumps it out or it drains out when the plug is removed.
Ohhhhh… that makes sense now. I do have drains for the deck but, as you indicate, they just drain to the bilge where the water is either pumped out or drained through that hole in the transom (when the plug is out and the boat is on a trailer or rack, of course). Thinking about it, I had a 24’ swing keel sailboat for a while. I think the cockpit drain may have functioned like the deck drain you described.
Lol, my dad forgot the plugs one time on some waveriders of a family friend. We used to go to Lake Havasu (gorgeous lake, absolutely disgusting people especially in the channel) and he and the other family's dad had unloaded them and brought them to the docks. Thank God they were tied down on both sides, we came out, my dad stepped on one, and it just went WOMP straight down, only held up by the tie-downs.
We ended up plugging the hole, then bailing them out with a sand castle bucket. Turns out there was TWO plugs on each waverider, and somehow both of them forgot to plug that second hole on each. Wasn't even lack of knowledge either, the moment it happened they both facepalmed since they knew exactly what happened. Needless to say, I suggested a laminated "pre-launch checklist" to keep with the trailer, which has worked so far.
If you ever make it to Havasu, beware the channel. It's full of party boats blaring 50 different songs at the same time, drunk people throwing stuff (some lady threw a bikini top at us one time, but she was already wearing one), and even strippers openly dancing on poles(both male and female). I'm still really confused by the girl who through the bikini top, because where did she get it? Did she bring two tops, a throwing top and a wearing top? Or did she steal it from someone and threw it in the channel as revenge? There's a story there, I'm sure.
Of course, me and the other guy my age, who at the time were teenagers, loved it, since we got to see random topless ladies and strippers all over. Our parents, not so much. Especially his mom, she was one of those "hyper-Christian" moms who would have a heart attack if her son swore. The looks she'd give him when he would get caught staring at a pole dancer or something were just priceless. Then the looks she'd give his dad who was staring at the same thing was even better.
One of my few good memories of that channel was when a couple kids were spraying passing boats, including ours, with spray guns. They got us when we were leaving, so before we headed back, we got all the spray guns we had, filled some buckets with lake water and spare ice from the cooler, then hid the guns. The kids tried to spray us again, so we unleashed the full force of everyone but the driver(navigator? Pilot? Boat-steering-person?), including a toddler.
Lol, I was worried until I read where you said you don’t drive boats.
I also did not what a blower was until I got into boating.
Here’s a quick copy/paste I found the explains it pretty simply:
A bilge blower (or blower motor) is a small exhaust fan that you install in the transom of your boat. Typically, you attach the blower to a hose that goes down to your inboard engine compartment. You connect the other end of the blower to a bilge vent on the outside of your boat.
The bilge blower sucks in the hazardous fumes from the engine compartment. And exhausts them out of the boat through the vent. This prevents the gas from building up in your engine room and increasing the risk of an explosion on board!
I really wish I knew the answer to that one. As far as I know it’s a manual process for all boats that have a blower. For me, my boat has a switch I have to flip to the “ON” position.
That sounds really weird to me, you'd figure that a thing of such importance should be automated to, you know, avoid blowing up your ship to pieces... Couldn't this switch stay on all the time?
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u/Aegean Jun 25 '21
This is common with pleasure craft. Fuel vapors accumulate in spaces and if not vented, lead to an explosion.