Day two in the fen, as we have come to know the lagoon. It is always nice to be in a totally protected anchorage but this lagoon is a little too protected. I would suggest anyone falling into this water take a full course of penicillin.

I spent most of the day doing recon on the two chandleries ashore, Island Water World and Budget Marine. Both are pretty good sized and together they probably have a better selection of stuff than your average West Marine. Things turn south if you have to order something however. Shipping can take a week or more and everything is air freight pricing (even if it takes forever to get here). I needed a Yanmar part that runs about $20 and by the time I checked out it was about $50 with shipping. Saint Martin is duty free though so that is a help. You would really get worked over in many other Caribbean ports.

I bought a few things that I was sure we needed and that were cheap enough to not require comparison shopping. When I got back to the boat Hideko and I put together a complete list of all of the spares that we needed. We had to replace the fluids and parts used for the 250 hour service work in Provo and we also wanted to get some more pump spares.

I'm not sold on the pumps installed in our boat at this point. We have four RuleMate 500 sump pumps. These are principally for pumping grey water from the shower drain overboard. I have the aircon condensation run offs directed to the aft sumps and the forward sumps also handle the sinks in the forward heads. "Shower sump" may not fit into the RuleMate function sweep spot. Our dealer replaced one sump pump at the time of delivery and I have had to swap out another.

The port and starboard bilge sumps and the engine room sumps use RuleMate 1100s and one of those has gone up. This is concerning because you don't want to find out that your bilge pump doesn't work on a day that you need it. We test ours buy dumping a bucket of fresh water into the bilge sump on a maintenance schedule but you can't replace reliability with maintenance.

Our port water pressure pump failed also. It was treated badly for a bit (long but entertaining story that I will not post here so as to avoid being beat about the head and shoulders by my spouse). However, given the robust claims on the box one would expect to have no problems.

All of these pumps are made by the same folks, ITT Industries (aka. Jabsco, aka RuleMate, aka Shurflo). If you go to a standard chandlery (i.e. West Marine) you are not likely to find much else. Four (or was it five, hard to keep track) pump failures in the first eight months of ownership seems a bit excessive to me. It is just the two of us. I know many folks who go to exotic maintenance extremes to protect these delicate resources. At several hundred dollars a pump I don't really see why you should have to, they're only being asked to do what they're advertised to do and less. I have a spare for everything at the moment but I am carefully considering a more robust solution than ITT.