Pump-out Week

The first official pump-out week of the 2026 season ran Monday 9 March through Friday 13 March. The Port harbormaster's office had announced the week in February with the standard letter to all marina tenants and a notice in the Port Townsend Leader. The pumpout boat — the Port's 22-foot Boston Whaler-derivative with a 220-gallon waste tank and a Jabsco macerator pump — ran continuous loops through the inner basin from 0700 to 1700 each day. Our shop's contribution is the dockside Y-valve inspection and any in-place repairs that walk-up boats want done on the spot. Forty-seven vessels came through this year, against a five-year average of 31 for the equivalent week.

The volume is up because the population of permanent live-aboards at the Boat Haven inner basin has been climbing since 2022. The Port's count of slips-with-residency was 28 in 2022; in March 2026 it is 41. Each live-aboard pumps every five to seven days; the late-winter pumpout week catches the boats whose owners have been deferring through the rainy stretch. The Port now talks about adding a second pumpout boat for 2027.

Tuesday: F/V Akimbo

Tuesday morning the F/V Akimbo — a 36-foot Pacific seiner that fishes out of Westport during the season — came in for her annual pumpout-and-Y-valve check before being lifted by the Port for an unrelated propeller-shaft job. The Y-valve, a Raritan three-way that had been installed by a previous owner in approximately 2009, was stuck. The owner had not operated the valve since 2018, when he had transitioned to a Type III discharge at the Naknek-Kvichak dockside facility for the duration of his Bristol Bay season. The valve handle moved 15 degrees and stopped.

We removed the valve, disassembled it on the bench (which is the only way to get a stuck Raritan three-way apart), and found the source: a piece of crystallized urea, deposited over years against the brass valve body, that had locked the ball in position. The fix is a Raritan rebuild kit ($48) and a half-hour on the bench; the longer fix is to operate the valve through its range once a season, on a calendar, regardless of NDZ status. We have written this advice into the new edition of the MSD primer.

Wednesday: M/V Trillium

Wednesday afternoon was the trickier case. The M/V Trillium, a 1986 Tollycraft 44 sundeck cruiser whose owner has wintered her at the Boat Haven since 2011, has a Y-valve installed in a chase under the master cabin sole that requires removing four screws and a teak access panel to reach. The owner has, since 2018, padlocked the valve handle in the closed position and never opened it. On Wednesday, when the pumpout boat operator came alongside and pulled the boat's pumpout hose, no flow registered from the tank.

The tank gauge read full. The Jabsco pump on the pumpout boat could not draw. The diagnosis took an hour of access — pulling carpet, removing the teak panel, lifting the chase cover — and resolved into: a kinked pickup tube inside the holding tank, deposited there during a tankage repair in 2019 by a yard that no longer exists. The owner has known there was a problem for two years and has been managing it by short-pumping every three days at the Quimper Marina dock-foot unit. The fix this week was temporary — an external pickup-tube workaround — and we have him on the schedule for a full tank pull in October. The cost of doing the pull this week would have been $1,800 (an emergency add-on to the booked Travelift schedule); doing it in October, on plan, will be $1,200.

Friday: the tide we did not beat

Friday's last appointment was the S/V Saltflower, a 1979 Pearson 365 ketch on a swing mooring at Mystery Bay. The owner had committed to bringing her down for the 1430 pump-out slot. The tide turned at 1338 on a 5.2-knot ebb; the Pearson made 4.1 knots in the channel against the current and arrived at the Boat Haven pumpout slip at 1518, missing her slot by 48 minutes. The pumpout boat had been re-scheduled to a 1500 emergency call at the south basin (a different Pearson, F/V Otter, whose head had backed up). We re-booked Saltflower for the following Monday morning, on a slack-water tide, and she made the appointment.

The lesson is the one we have written about before in this department: the tide is the master schedule. Every other plan answers to it. On this coast, on a 9.4-foot tide and a falling barometer, you do not motor a Pearson 365 down from Mystery Bay against an outgoing ebb and expect to make a 1430 appointment. The owner has, sportingly, taken responsibility. He will be back next quarter.

Totals

Five days, 47 vessels, 1,940 gallons of waste collected and offloaded to the Port's holding facility for transfer to the City of Port Townsend's wastewater treatment plant under the Port's standing transfer agreement. Two failed Y-valves rebuilt on the spot. One emergency tank-pickup workaround. One missed appointment, rebooked. Our shop's invoice to the participating customers was $1,840 in aggregate, billed through the Classifieds desk per the Port's standing arrangement with the participating trades.

The week ran cleanly. We are doing it again on the last week of May, before the Memorial Day rush, in coordination with the Port and with SEA Marine's apprentice program. If you are wintering a live-aboard at the Boat Haven and you have not pumped since January, write to schedule@bhwet.example and we will put you on the May list. — L.B.

For the background on what a Type III install looks like, see the F/V Cape Fox feature in this issue, and the revised MSD primer at the back of the issue.