Scary Moment

[Phan000]

Went dolphin phishin out of Boynton (FL) last friday, sat and sunday with my wife and a friend. On Sunday it was like a lake as we left in the middle of the afternoon (we were feelin lazy). We fished for about 4 or five hours, mostky trolling, but came in to bottom fish for a while. The waves had increased and there was a decent chop brewing.
After we packed up and headed back in through the inlet I noticed that the boat was not getting over the waves easily and that we were surfing down the front sides more clumsily than normal. After we had entered the inlet I had my friend hold the wheel and checked the bildge while we were still on a plane.
To my horror the water was above the batteries. I instructed my friend to turn on the manual bildge pump and prayed. I had him stay on a plane so that we could run the boat onto a sandbar in case we had a genuine hole in the boat. Luckily the manual bildge pump did the job quickly and things retuned to normal. The auto bildge had not kicked on the entire trip and the light wave action over the stern throughout the day had very slowly filled the bildge. In retrospect, I guess I should have payed more attention to the auto bildge. Thank god for redundancy.