Electric pumpout on a Hunter 36

S/V Lavandula — a 2008 Hunter 36 with the deep-fin keel and the in-mast furling main — has lived at the Boat Haven inner-basin transient slips since her current owner bought her in 2021. The owner is a retired civil engineer from Seattle who took early retirement during the pandemic, sold his house in Madrona, and moved aboard. He spent the first eighteen months learning how a 36-foot fiberglass sloop differs from a single-family home (it leaks differently, mostly). He spent the second eighteen months attempting to keep his holding tank empty.

For the four seasons he has been aboard, he has done his pumpouts at the dock-foot mobile pumpout at Quimper Marina (the public unit, the $5 quarter-fed one, which runs eight months of the year — winter Sundays are when he is most likely to remember and to find the unit operational). On a Hunter 36 with a 20-gallon polyethylene holding tank under the V-berth, that means an every-six-day pump for one person living aboard with conservative head use. He has, by the time he came to us in February, kept a four-year notebook of pumpout dates and tank levels at pumpout — the kind of dataset only a retired engineer maintains. The notebook records that he has missed exactly three pumpouts in four years (twice because the Quimper unit was down, once because he was at his daughter's birthday in Bellevue and forgot). Each missed pump cost him a tank-overflow event into his bilge. He is done with this arrangement.

The refit he came to us for is to remove this whole arrangement from his weekly thinking. What he wanted was an on-board electric pumpout — a 12-volt pump that he could run from a panel switch, that would empty the tank through a hardened deck fitting on his afterdeck, into the Quimper Marina dock-foot hose (which he can roll to his slip with a 25-foot hose extension we built for him). He wanted the pump done and the through-hull replaced with one of the bronze full-flow ball-valve Groco units we have been installing this season. He wanted the macerator-discharge through-hull permanently capped, because a Puget Sound NDZ vessel does not need it and the cap is one fewer below-waterline failure mode.¹

What we installed

The pump is a Jabsco 37202-2012 — a 12-volt electric self-priming diaphragm pump rated to 8 GPM at 30 PSI, designed specifically for marine waste-discharge use. We considered the larger Jabsco 37072 (15 GPM) and the Whale 8002 (12 GPM) as alternatives; we settled on the 37202 because the smaller pump matches the Hunter's electrical budget without the larger pump's run-time advantage being actually useful on a 20-gallon tank. The 37202 will empty the full tank in about 4 minutes; the 37072 would do it in 2. The owner does not need 2 minutes.

The pump is mounted on a Coosa-board panel screwed to the inboard side of the cockpit locker bulkhead, immediately aft of the holding tank — about 18" from the tank's pumpout outlet. The pickup tube runs to the tank's existing 1.5" NPT top-mount pumpout outlet (which had been blocked off when the boat was built and unused for fourteen years). The discharge runs forward and up to a new deck-mounted Perko 1283-series stainless flush deck plate on the after deck, port side, immediately adjacent to the boat's existing diesel fill — close enough that the Quimper pumpout hose, when she comes side-to to the dock-foot fitting, reaches both.

The wiring

The 12-volt feed runs from the boat's house bank, through a 30-amp Blue Sea Systems toggle breaker on the DC panel labeled WASTE PUMP, through a Cole Hersee 24213 splash-proof momentary switch in the cockpit (so the pump only runs when the switch is held), and to the Jabsco's positive terminal. Ground returns to the house-bank common. We labeled the breaker, we labeled the switch, we labeled the pump itself with a Brother P-Touch tape that names the pump and gives a maximum continuous-run rating of 10 minutes. We tested the full sequence at the dock the day after launch.

The discharge plug

Because Lavandula is permanently inside the Puget Sound NDZ — and because she has not had a working macerator since 2019 (the original Raritan PHII macerator failed in late summer of that year and was never replaced) — her macerator-discharge through-hull was permanently sealed at this refit. The original 1.5" bronze through-hull was removed; the hole was glassed over with three layers of biaxial cloth in West System epoxy, faired smooth, and bottom-painted with the rest of the hull. There is no longer a below-waterline plumbing path from her holding tank.

The deck-pumpout fitting, in the same logic, is the only path off the boat for her sewage. The owner has the plumbing he wanted, and the regulatory exposure of the boat is reduced by one through-hull (always a worthwhile reduction).

The 25-foot hose extension

The Quimper Marina dock-foot pumpout has a fixed 12-foot hose, which reaches the boats on the immediately-adjacent slips and no further. Lavandula's slip is C-14, which is four slips down the finger from the pumpout pedestal — about 27 linear feet to the fitting. The owner has been carrying the boat to the pumpout by motoring out of his slip, around the basin, and re-docking at the pumpout slip every six days for four years. He no longer wants to.

What we built him is a 25-foot extension hose: 1.5" Trident 101 sanitation hose, with a stainless-steel Camlock-style male coupling on the pump end and the matching female coupling on the dock end, with a third Camlock cap for sealing the hose ends when stored. The extension stores in a custom-fabricated 30" galvanized hanger we welded into the cockpit lazarette, where it stays dry and out of the sun. The owner now walks the hose down the finger pier, plugs it into the dock-foot fitting, walks back to the boat, and pumps from the cockpit.

The Camlock-style fittings are not, strictly speaking, the right answer here — they are the chemical-industry standard, not the marine-sanitation standard. The marine-sanitation standard is the 1.5" smooth-bore deck plate. We did it this way anyway, on the rationale that (a) the Quimper dock-foot pumpout already has a Camlock retrofit on its hose end, (b) the owner can rinse the hose at the dock-foot freshwater bib after every use, and (c) the convenience tradeoff is, in this specific case, what made the install useful. We document the non-standard choice in the install report, and we have flagged it for the owner's annual cross-connection inspection.

Cost and time

The refit invoiced at $3,180 plus tax: $410 for the Jabsco 37202 pump, $190 for the Perko deck plate and stainless backing hardware, $260 for the through-hull cap-and-glass on the bottom, $110 for the Cole Hersee switch and the Blue Sea breaker, $240 for the 25-foot extension hose and Camlock fittings, $130 for miscellaneous Trident hose and clamps, and $1,840 in labor across 11 working days. The Port's haul-and-launch tariff was $470 (15-day slot at the discounted spring rate).

The aside

(One first-person aside per feature, from the tradesperson who led the work. — Editor.)

The Hunter 36 — and most of the production-fiberglass cruising sailboats of the same vintage — was designed with the assumption that the head would discharge overboard. The factory plumbing on this boat in 2008 ran from the manual head, through a macerator, through a bronze through-hull, into the water. The holding tank was an after-market add-on, installed by the second owner in 2014, and it was installed without much attention to how the existing through-hull would be reused. What we did here — capping the through-hull, routing the pumpout through the deck instead, and adding the electric pump — is the install the boat should have come with in 2008, if the 2018 NDZ rule had existed in 2008. It did not. The bill for retrofitting that decision now falls on the third owner, who paid for it cheerfully and is, four weeks later, the happiest customer we have. — S.A., 14 April 2026.

For context on why all of this matters: the Puget Sound NDZ was adopted on 9 April 2018 after a five-year public process and EPA approval, and the rule became effective on 10 May 2018.² Every vessel inside the NDZ — and the NDZ now includes Lake Union, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and most of the inland waters — must either lack overboard-discharge capability or render that capability "incapable of being used." Capping the through-hull, as we did on Lavandula, is the cleanest way to do that for a vessel that has no need to leave the NDZ.

Returned to the water

We launched Lavandula at 0840 on Tuesday 14 April 2026, on a 7.2-foot incoming tide. The owner ran a full pumpout cycle at the dock-foot fitting that afternoon (Quimper Marina's pumpout, with the 25-foot extension we built). The cycle completed in 4 minutes 12 seconds against the 20-gallon tank, with no Camlock leaks at either end. He has, four weeks later, sent us a one-line note: "I have not thought about the pumpout in 28 days. Thank you."