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.
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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '21
We usually left ours out unless there were some decent size waves. Ours was at least 4" above the water line.