As you might remember, we had to fix our fresh water pump a while ago. I managed to rebuild one with spare parts on board. Well… it lasted until this week.

The water pump was pressurized, but then tripping the breaker. I changed the breaker hoping to get lucky, but no. It was the pump.

The old pump is a Jabsco 36900-1000. It’s an old model but still available if you want tho shell out $700 or so and wait two weeks. Yeesh.

I looked online and thought I knew a good replacement, but wasn’t sure. So I picked up the phone and called Jabsco. The customer service lady gave me the phone number and email address of a tech and said that he was faster responding to email. Sure enough, I emailed him and he sent me the model number and product sheet for the appropriate replacement within a couple of hours.

I could find the pump online for $250 (much cheaper!), but it was expensive to overnight. We only had a couple of days left in Shalimar and were planning to anchor, so we needed it fixed.

At Wendy’s suggestion, I called the local West Marine and they had two in stock. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a car. Wendy was up for a walk and walked the 6 mile round trip to get the pump while I was working. That’s love, folks. It might be love for looping and anchoring, but love nonetheless. And thanks to a sale, the pump was only $200!

No project is without its hiccups. When I got the new pump in place, the hoses wouldn’t work. I needed to reroute them and didn’t have enough length. The folks at Two Georges were also out, so it required another trip to West Marine. Thankfully, a friend of our was in town for dinner and was nice enough to stop by West Marine on the way to dinner.

After a bit of wrangling, the new pump is in and works like a dream.

Oh, and I also changed the transmission fluid. That was a chore, but a $30 pump I bought on a whim sure made that task manageable.

Boat maintenance never ends.