In this month’s SEAMANSHIP column, Martyn Clark offers valuable tips on how to deal with being holed at sea. While few of us will ever have that unwelcome experience, we should all have contingency plans, just in case. Doing so is simply a matter of being a prudent mariner. One trick I’ve learned is to use that time spent whiling away the hours at the helm to think about emergency situations and how I’d deal with them, step by step. That way, if and when an emergency arises, the solution is well thought out ahead of time.

I had a near-sinking experience some years ago. I was helping a friend crew a 46' wood Rosborough pilothouse ketch from Florida to Antigua. My friend had recently purchased the boat from a couple who had lived aboard for several years but cruised little. When the previous owners did leave the dock, they’d apparently only motor a few miles up and down the Intra Coastal Waterway. They’d have parties aboard, and one owner would play the piano as they travelled (yes, believe it or not, there was a small piano aboard). The boat had never done any serious sailing—and that was to prove its downfall.

We left at midnight so we’d make a landfall in the Bahamas in the morning. There was a nice steady breeze, so we set sail and made our way over a moderate, rolling sea. After an hour or so, we set watches and I took the first one. I set the autopilot and stood watch in the pilothouse. Every so often, I checked the sails and instruments and lifted one of the floorboards to take a look around. During one such check, when we were about two-thirds of the way across, I noticed the bilges were full and water was sloshing back and forth just below the engine flywheel. Something was very wrong. I was facing every boater’s nightmare!

...the bilges were full and water was sloshing back and forth... I can’t recall whether or not there was a problem with the bilge pumps, but I woke the owner and we immediately dropped sail. It was time for desperate measures. We yanked up the floorboards to see where the water was coming in, but with the rolling motion and the depth of the water, we couldn’t tell. Knowing we had to do something fast before the engine or batteries went underwater, I climbed down into the flooded bilges. Somehow I managed to reach underwater, shut off the engine intake thru-hull and disconnect the hose that supplied cooling water to the engine. We fired up the engine and the raw water pump slowly sucked the water out of the bilges. Eventually we managed to get both bilge pumps going and could hook up the intake hose to the engine.

After careful examination, we discovered that a number of seams between the planks had opened up. We figured that the boat hadn’t been to sea for so long that as soon as the hull began to work, the water just poured in. Not good. I spent the rest of the trip cutting, fitting and screwing caulk-smeared boards over the worst of the gaps while the bilge pumps struggled to keep up with the inflow. We managed to arrange an  emergency haul-out at one of the islands—Nassau, I think—and after some serious re-caulking and a few thousand dollars, were back at sea.

While I don’t think engine manufacturers will recommend sucking water from the bilges through the engine manifolds, anything goes in an emergency. And while it is unlikely that most of us will ever face a sinking, it would serve us well to think out any possible emergency and plan a step-by-step response.