That one afternoon in Norfolk when the pump packed up and the tide was coming in fast

Last spring I was out on the Elizabeth River in Norfolk when my dredge pump started making this grinding noise like rocks in a blender. I shut it down quick, but the tide was already starting to come in and I was only halfway through the cut. Turns out a chunk of old anchor chain from the bottom got sucked into the impeller and bent three vanes. Took me and a buddy six hours in the boatyard to pull the pump and hammer everything back straight. Has anyone else dealt with random metal debris in their dredge area that just appears out of nowhere?

3 comments

3 Comments

simon_coleman1mo agoMost Upvoted

Used to think old anchor chains and cables just stayed put once they settled on the bottom. Had a similar situation where a buried cable wrapped around my cutter head and tore up the teeth, came out of nowhere. Now I always sweep the area with a magnetometer before starting a new cut, just to be safe.

victor_adams1mo ago

Yeah, that "just stayed put" part gets a lot of people, including me. The thing nobody talks about is how tides and currents can actually shift those buried cables over years. @simon_coleman I had a buddy lose a dredge pump impeller to a cable that migrated 40 feet from where the sonar showed it three months earlier. Now I run a magnetometer sweep every couple weeks on active cuts.

joelwells17d ago

Dredge that? I had a cutterhead stop dead on what we thought was a clear spot. Turned out a cable had wandered 20 feet sideways in six months. How often do you actually run those sweeps, like weekly or only when you're about to start a new cut? I'm trying to figure out if the time investment is worth it for us. We're on a tight schedule but I'd rather lose an hour to a sweep than a whole day to pulling up a mangled pump. You ever catch anything that wasn't a cable, like old anchors or chain?

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