Washdown pump

Manuals

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The combination of salt water, stainless and air coupled with warm Caribbean sunshine produces copious amounts of unsightly rust. Particularly after upwind passages the hardware on deck is covered with a fine layer of salt spray and salt water which soon turns into a thick goo of salt - which in turn starts to work on the stainless. One solution is to wait for rain showers to pass through and then use a brush or cloth to dilute the solution and try to remove as much salt as possible. I've done this more than a few times but it seems that I never get showers or rain of any type after wet upwind passages, so the solution I've opted for on Zanshin is to get an optional washdown system for the boat. This consists of an additional pump forward in the skipper cabin with a valve letting me choose between salt or fresh water as the source, then an attachment and switch in the anchor locker and a hose attachment to spray the decks. The original blue hose succumbed to the anchor windlass, but the garden hose and nozzle that I'm now using is much nicer and doesn't need to be stored in the anchor locker (so it cannot get entangled in the anchor chain and windlass as it's predecessor did). Since Zanshin has a watermaker aboard, using this extra freshwater for deck and hardware cleaning isn't really a waste of a precious resource and the savings in rust cleaning are well worth the extra energy required to make the water.

One of the components of the washdown system to clean the decks and hardware with freshwater. (2014-02-16 09:30:07 NIKON D7100 with a "18.0-250.0 mm f/3.5-6.3" lens. [f/5.6, 1/60s] ISO 100)

One of the components of the washdown system to clean the decks and hardware with freshwater. (2014-02-16 09:29:14 NIKON D7100 with a "18.0-250.0 mm f/3.5-6.3" lens. [f/5.6, 1/80s] ISO 100)

One of the components of the washdown system to clean the decks and hardware with freshwater. (2014-02-16 09:27:47 NIKON D7100 with a "18.0-250.0 mm f/3.5-6.3" lens. [f/11.0, 1/40s] ISO 100)

The anchor hose had gotten caught in the chain and anchor windlass and this is all that remained of the system after I cut it away. (2013-03-29 17:12:00 NIKON D7000 with a "18.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6" lens. [f/9.0, 1/30s] ISO 100 Focus 1.68m)