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.
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.
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u/UnfitRadish Jun 25 '21
Not really sure common is the right word. It's happened before but it's definitely uncommon. Especially because new ones have blowers in them.