A couple of weeks ago, we noticed that the bilge pump was cycling more often than it should, so we looked in all of the usual places. Since we’ve had a lot of rain recently, we found several deck fittings that had been poorly bedded and that, combined with a few leaks we already knew about, seemed to be the culprit. That said, we still looked just about everywhere we could access and did not find anything else of a leaky nature.
The bilge pump is still cycling which called for a more thorough search. Finally after a couple days on investigating, we found a tiny trickle coming from the rudder shaft tube. I expect it is the actual culprit but we’ll have to fix it and see if it is or not. No big deal to do a temporary fix and I’d already planned to reinforce the rudder post as soon as we could get hauled out.
That being the case, I needed to get some JB WaterWeld to sort out the trickle so went to the usual suspects to see who’d get it to me the quickest.
Now, as it happens, this morning I read an interesting tidbit about a new word being added to Dictionary.com and that word was greedflation and you might be surprised but it seems to have a lot to do with the going cost of JB WaterWeld.
A quick look at Walmart (who ships to the USVI quickly for free) had WaterWeld for $6.54 which seemed like a reasonable deal. Since I was curious, I checked West Marine who had it for $10.49 which seemed OK but the cost of shipping was crazy for something that only weighed two-ounces. Looking around the web I also saw the same two-ounce package selling for between $17-$25 which is highway robbery but I’m sure a lot of folks wind up buying it at the extorted rate because it’s more of an impulse buy rather than something you research.
The point being, always check the price because there are greedy folks about and far too many of them are in the marine trades.