After buying a new boat (my first), I invited my elderly parents along to go fishing on one of my first boating excursions. My dad is not comfortable even being around water ("it looks kind of windy"), and it took some persuading to get him to even go out fishing. <br /><br />We eventually got going and did some fishing and had a good time, especially after my dad realized he wasn't about to have a near-death experience. We were fishing with minnows, and I had a 5 gallon bucket with an aerator (battery operated) pumping air into the bucket. The fishing was pretty good, and we had the live well going with quite a few fish in there. <br /><br />Anyway, to make a short story long, the noise of the aerator masked the sound of the livewell pump and made me forget to turn off the pump. This resulted in the livewell overflowing into the bilge. No one noticed, until we tried moving to another area to fish and the boat would only plow water and not plane out. We then noticed that the boat was pretty much full of water. We had a few interesting moments until the bilge pump blew about 200+ gallons of water out of the bottom of the boat. <br /><br />My dad actually took this experience as comforting, as the boat didn't sink even with scads of water in it. Right after we got to shore, I sawed about 3 inches off the live well tube and turned the live well intake nozzle down to where it couldn't overwhelm the live well drain. <br /><br />I still haven't heard the end of this. LOL.
