sink drain plumbing and pump

Cal 40 galley sinks are located on the port side, so they fill with water when sailing hard on starboard tack.   To make the sink usable on starboard, particularly on the Transpac when you reach for a few days, we borrowed an idea from kayaks and Optis.  We put a Bosworth Guzzler diaphragm pump under the sink, and made it operable by pulling on a line.  The Bosworth pump company makes pumps that are perfect for this and have a spring internal to the pump so that the handle extends by itself and only needs to be pulled down.  It works great.  In a few pumps you can empty the sink even when rail down on starboard tack.  This is one of our best upgrades.  The line with the black ball, coming out of the cabinet below the sink, is the line that actuates the pump and empties the sink.  There is a Harken Bullet block turning the line under the pump handle, and a Harken upright Bullet block just inside the fairlead in the cabinet through which the line runs.  An additional benefit is that any diaphragm pump has two integrated valves, so if you forget to close the thru hull when beating on starboard, the sink doesn’t fill, although we also have a normal valve that we shut off when we remember.

As is visible, we removed the dedicated sink drain thru hull and instead have plumbed the sink drain into the port side cockpit scupper.  It  tees into the scupper above the scupper thru hull, and has its own ball valve which we shut off when the boat is unattended.  The objective was just to minimize thru hulls.

Sally found an outfit that makes custom SS sinks and counters for restaurants and fishing boats, and had them make a custom sink with built in drainboard and fiddles for Illusion.  It allows Stan to spash water around with abandon when washing dishes and it all finds its way down the drain.

In the photo above you can see two quick disconnect plumbing fittings.  We have two freshwater tanks (one in bilge and one under head counter) and two freshwater pumps (an electric pump and a foot pump in the galley).  These quick disconnects allow us to hook either FW tank to either pump.   If we are really trying to conserve water we run the pressure pump on saltwater, leaving the galley foot pump as the only source of freshwater on the boat.