Hi - Quick Disclaimer---I'm VERY new to boating and this Contessa ('83 JJT Kahu Kura) is my first boat. I'm an extreme newbie.
Due to the cold weather, I hadn't used the boat for awhile. Yesterday, I went down to find both batteries dead. (The boat has been repowered with the Yanmar 1GM10.) When I purchased the boat last spring, the seller replaced the #1 battery. The other one has a date stamp of 2005.
I bought a 6 amp automatic battery charger and went down to set it up today. As soon as I plugged it in to dock power, the automatic bilge pump kicked on and emptied water for perhaps 30 seconds. Then the water flow out the stern stopped but the bilge pump motor kept going. I went below and turned off the auto bilge switch to keep anything from burning out. It's been wired to bypass the panel---This might be standard practice?
I stuck my head as far as I could behind the companionway stairs with a flashlight to look down at where the bilge pump is located. It looks as if there might have been a foot or so of water in it before it kicked it originally---hard to tell. There's about 3-4" in there now. (The seller told me that the packing gland needs to be tightened and I plan to do that in a couple months when I haul the boat and do some bottom painting, etc., so I think that's the source of the water.)
So, what do I do about the pump? I believe that it's running is what drained the batteries----it kicked on occasionally when I was on the boat this summer. But I'd never heard it run continuously before. Could that be because it was damaged when the water was over the pump when it was without elect? Or maybe somehow it runs because it's wired directly to the batteries and the battery charger is directly running it when it was connected? The pump looks very difficult to access way down in the narrow bilge and frankly, I don't even know what I'm looking at other than tubes and wires down there. Thanks in advance for any suggestions and sorry for the wordiness!
Bill