There’s something special about going to pump out on the Colonial Belle. A lot of the crew dread it, because, well, it is a shitty job, but there’s a certain sense of freedom. There are horror stories, about turbo pumps being left on, and deckhands getting doused with gallons of human waste, but if you follow protocol, it’s actually quick, clean and fairly easy duty.
There are no passengers, only crew, so you can let your hair down, so to speak. There's no audience. It's just us folks. It takes about an hour, so deckhands can perform needed tasks while we’re underway, or parked at the pump out dock.
Also, the short ride includes a lot of tight maneuvering, and I can tell the Captain enjoys showing off her close-quarters skills. We turn the boat twice during this brief journey, and not for nothing, turning a 60 foot boat with a 30 foot beam in a canal that is only 100 feet wide is something to watch, especially when that vessel only has one prop and no bow thruster.
The Captain always seems in high-spirits when we go to pump out, and her attitude is infectious.
We use two breast lines, and even those are rigged in a way that is loosey-goosey compared to normal rigging for passenger cruises; two eye-spliced ends are run down the side of the boat on either side of the sliding cargo door, and then extra slack is pulled and the looped ends are tossed into the doorway willy nilly, ready for the jumper to gather them and jump from the doorway onto the tiny wooden pump out dock.
Once the jumper has placed the eye-splices over the cleats and the boat is snuggled up against the dock you hook the long yellow hose to the fitting on the boats flank. The Banjo fitting is a little tricky, but once it’s in place and you hit the green button, you can watch through a tiny plexiglass window on the hose as all that effluvia is pumped out of our tanks and down into the city’s sewer. The joke is to play “count the tampons” but I’ve never actually seen one.
I like to go to pump out. It’s satisfactory in a way. A cleansing. Like taking a really well-deserved shit.
