To be honest I didn’t even know what a scupper was before we bought a boat. And fair warning, this post has quite a few “boaty” terms.
Scupper – a hole in a ship’s side to carry water overboard from the deck
We have scuppers along the bulwarks for draining water from the decks, but the cockpit suppers are different – they’re plumbed to thru-hulls via hoses. Without the scupper drains in the cockpit, it would fill up with water and probably sink the boat.
In the floor of the cockpit are four drains. We have teak grates over them so they’re not easy to see. These drains are plumbed with hoses located in the engine room which drain out the side of the boat (the topsides) through a thru-hull on each side of the boat. We had never exercised these thru-hulls and they were very difficult to turn.
Our scupper drains were looking a little worse for wear, so why not change them? Plus, one of the drains had a bit of a sag in it and it would hold standing water. We replaced the old hose with a type of hose called Bilgeflex. It’s a spiral-wound hose that’s good for these types of applications where the hose needs to bend. But it specifies it’s not to be connected to thru-hulls below the waterline.
The drains definitely work better now, but we did notice that one of the aft hoses was getting a little chafed by the cable end on the steering quadrant. To fix this, Rich cut the little tail off the extra steering cable and now it seems all good.
