Flooding locker on BayCruiser

[Julian Swindell]

Curious incident over the weekend. I found the cockpit locker on my Baycruiser 20 had filled with sea water, which had never happened before. I bailed it out, went sailing and suddenly realised what was happening. The self draining cockpit wasn't draining, water was building up underfoot and when I went on a port tack, it just poured in through the fuel pipe opening near the bottom of the locker. Poured in to the extent that when I opened it, the fuel tank was floating upside down in it. Not a reassuring sight. On a starboard tack it all came flooding back out. This has never happened before and I was quite anxious that I had sprung a leak or something. Then I had a thought and checked the self drainer in the bottom of the port hand sump alongside the engine well. It was shut, and on opening it, the well drained very quickly and problem solved. This raises a few questions in my mind:
1: why are there sumps either side of the motor well in the first place?
2: why doesn't the cockpit floor just drain into the motor well itself? It can't as it is built.

I am tempted, over the winter,to box in the wells completely, as mini buoyancy chambers, and drill large cockpit drain holes under the motor so the cockpit can drain straight out into the well. Can anyone think of any reasons why this would be a bad idea? I am also planning to make the fuel pipe opening less of a water inlet somehow.

The attached photos show the layout of the well and sumps and the location of the hole that caused the trouble.

[Rob Johnstone]

Hi Julian,

On the BC 23, the outboard bearer has a slot underneath it to drain the cockpit floor. The snag is (as I have found) anything on the cockpit floor (including the boat keys) drains through this slot. Your sumps at least give you some chance to retrieve stuff that shouldn't have drained away! Also, it looks to me as if the cockpit floor in the BC23 (75mm  or more above the water line in the outboard well) is higher above the water line than in the BC20. I wonder if there is a chance that the cockpit floor would flood if you adopted the BC23 approach.

Rob J

[Julian Swindell]

You may be right on all those points Rob. I need to check the relative levels of the cockpit floor and sea surface. Does the BC23 have sumps either side of the well? I have never quite understood their logic. I must admit a nut fell off my engine gear lever over the weekend and I found it in the sump. But only after I had bought a replacement.

[Jim Levang]

Julian:

We weren't that keen on the sump scheme so we built ours pretty much like you are talking about with the exception of draining the cockpit through the transom. The transom scuppers are right at the waterline with rubber flaps. The cockpit sole does slope aft and we set the tops of our "mini buoyancy chambers" a bit below the aft end of the sole, just enough to act a a bit of a sump while still sloping back to the scuppers at the transom. The channel that you see in the picture is a 2' PVC pipe cut in half. While a wee bit of water makes it back in through the scuppers sometimes, it has yet to make it up to the cockpit sole proper.

Jim Levang

[Julian Swindell]

That looks a really neat solution Jim. I will think long on it. Trickier to do on a finished boat, but not impossible. I would need to seal off the self drainers in the hull bottom to make sure the mini tanks didn't fill up. Are they completely sealed?

Do you have a hole into the bottom of your locker for a fuel pipe to pass through?

[Jim Levang]

Julian:

The "mini tanks" are completely sealed. I thought about filling them up with some sort of closed cell foam but I couldn't think of good enough reason to bother. I do have the exact same hole in the locker for a fuel hose that you have. It has always troubled me a bit that the bottom of the locker is below the cockpit sole, but it doesn't trouble me as much as having a smaller locker.

Jim

[Peter Taylor]

By coincidence, I asked Matt about the purpose of the sumps when at SB yesterday. The idea is to allow the cockpit sole to drain while avoiding it being inundated by a surge of water from the outboard well (if the well walls were lower). Jim's solution looks good to me although I may try to use the starboard sump as a holder for the battery from my electric outboard,

Peter