Animal Crackers

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I went south.

All the way to Maryland via Delaware to the "Water's Edge", on the Chester River, a few miles downstream from Chestertown, Maryland. It was the first weekend at the wharf and on the houseboat! Of course, Memorial Day weekend means the annual reenactment of the Chestertown tea party.

On evening of December 16, 1773, a group of colonists boarded three ships and destroyed their cargo of tea by throwing it into the Boston Harbor. The British Parliament responded in 1774 with the Coercive Acts, which, among other provisions, closed Boston's port until the British East India Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea.

In response to the closing of the port of Boston, the citizens of Chestertown, Maryland met in May of 1774 and set forth "Resolves" forbidding importing, selling, or consuming of tea in Chestertown. According to local legend, residents then gathered at the town center, marched down High Street to the brigantine Geddes, which was anchored in the Chester River, and tossed her cargo of tea overboard.

I didn't see any of the festivities -

I spent the weekend doing the two-steps forward, one step backwards dance. After retying all the dock lines for the houseboat, I connected the water to the houseboat and a few moments later, noticed a red warning light on the steering console that I had never seen before indicating the front bilge pump was running.

To you landlubbers, a bilge pump is like a sump pump, designed to pump water out the lowest spaces of a boat. The bilge is often wet, smelly, dark, confining, and unpleasant.

I opened a hatch and saw what looked like Niagara Falls close-up. Somewhere in the plumbing, on the hot-water side, a supply pipe (hose) had either split or come loose from a coupling. The bilge was quickly filling with water, bad enough, but the worse of the fountaining cascade was caused by the fact that the pump hose had broken off the pump.

So instead of pumping water out of the boat, the pump was enthusiastically spraying it all over the sleeping compartment! The bilge pump in question is rated at 1,200 gallons per hour and the model is called the "Tsunami 1200".

The name was quite fitting.

Quickly soaked to the skin, I managed to get the pump turned off - and the water supply to the boat turned off and then set to bailing out the bilge to the point where I could repair or replace the pump. The steamy heat made it a messy job. After about 50 buckets filled by a coffee cup, and then hauled up eight steps to be dumped overboard, I finally got the water level down far enough to get a portable pump into the space to pump out the remaining water.

At which point I hear, "Ut oh!"

Onboard the boat next to the houseboat, the owner had forgotten to plug the drain hole back in before launching his boat! Water was geysering into the boat, literally in a five foot high column! Compounding to his woes, the boat had an electrical problem and it's bilge pump wasn't working!

Being totally soaked anyway, I waded in, felt around in the dark recesses of his bilge for the drain hole and stuck the plug in. After an hour of standing calf deep in oily water, I found the electrical fault and rewired it for its owner. It was most satisfying to hear the gurgle of the water lowering as the pump did its thing and I was soon able to see my toes.

Back on the houseboat, I soon got the bilge pump replaced, the hot water line shut off, and was able to get the cold water running and enjoy an nice icy shower.

Everytime I hear someone say, "My job is boring!" I have only to think, "Sometimes, and for a great many jobs, you really don't want it to be exciting!"

Chester the Peacock didn't come to the wharf this weekend. His mother, the co-owner of the "Animal Crackers" tells me he spends much of his time sitting on the roof of her house staring off into the distance like his father did. Chester still comes down and inside for dinner though.


Anyway, over the winter, Chester's mother got a new puppy!


May I introduce to you, Barley the Seafarin' Dog, part Pomeranian and part Chihuahua, all licks, squirms and way too cute!

He has already fallen in twice to-date and has his very own life jacket!