More plumbing progress this week again thanks to our friends at Whale Marine.

We have 3 new shinny electric bilge pumps now installed, with a Gulper “high and dry” for the small bilge area created by fitting the new water tanks, a high volume Orca model in my upper bilge area (this will also have an alarm fitted) and in the forward bilge, a rather smart yellow Gulper IC model which is also “high and dry” having a water level sensor fitted to the pick up head. All very cool kit.

Like Istvan Kopar in the last Golden Globe Race I’m also relying on Whale’s classic Mk5 manual units (which I believe have been around since the 60’s) for hand pumping, following Istvan’s design we will have 2 below decks, one in the cockpit and dare I say one in the heads ;).

Finally to make sure we can get all that water out of the boat we’ve rerouted and updated all the pipework and added two additional seacocks on the transom.

Thanks again to the Whale Pumps team, David Arnaud for his technical support and Scott Orr for pulling it all together for us, I think we’re going to be in good shape on this front!