All I wanted was working bilge pumps

[Shrek]

So the missus and I go for a sundown booze cruise last Thursday night after work. The weather was perfect and the lake was pretty calm. Beautiful sunset.


and then I notice that the bilge pumps are not working.

It's not like there was a lot of water in the boat or like we were leaking, but no bilge pump is never a good thing. Problem is the 22 year old harness is crap. Every time a crimped on end fell off, the PO just ran a red wire to the broken circuit, stripped about 3 inches of wire, and wrapped it around the batter post before "securing" it with the wingnut...stupid PO is a wingnut.

So on a beautiful Saturday morning, I sat in my super awesome boat ... in my driveway ... and started to unravel the bird nest of wire. I traced every wire and was able to eliminate most of the extraneous stuff and the broken stuff and pulled a few new wires, bought an updated fuse block and breakers, and started to wire everything back in. Started with the positive side of the battery switch. I was able to reuse the original main power leads so I crimped on the good 3M rings and shrink tubed them with a bit of dielectric grease and as I was doing the ground, I felt the black wire give a bit more than it should.

The black wire was broken under the deck, half way between the transom and console.

So I tore every wire out of the boat and started from scratch. I'm most of the way done now. About to go home and wire in the bait well and the bilge pumps, and then tidy up my new harness. No pictures because I probably would have hurled the camera at the neighbor kids or something else antisocial. I guess I must like this boat because I swore I was done working on boats