Why Are They Called Seacocks?

Our deepest fears confirmed

TL;DR : Yes ultimately, they are called seacocks because someone had a dirty mind. Male poultry strut around in an erect fashion, and they are called cocks, and that’s probably why old English faucets were called cocks, because they stood erect, and that’s why some joker started referring to penises as such, so yes, sadly, there is a clear etymological linkage, here. Thanks, English language; I am now condemned to suppress homoerotic thoughts every time I have anything do with these guys. Maybe the antidote is to sprinkle my conversation with liberal use of the feminine pronoun when I refer to Sea Nymph.

But I digress. The ball I am hiding here is a profound anxiety about disturbing my physical surroundings in a negative way: that by trying to fix something, I actually make it worse.

But “je n’avais pas le choix”, I must attempt to interact with these seacocks, and set them right. My very survival may depend on it.

One of the last things the marine surveyor, back on the shores of Lake Champlain, said to me, before he drove away, was that I must unfreeze the seacocks, and leave them in the open position, before Winter comes. Because if I didn’t, any trapped water could freeze, and so expand, and bust apart my seacocks, setting off painful mini-explosions, like small hand grenades affixed to Sea Nymph’s hull.

So here I was, sitting in the cabin of Sea Nymph, next to my friend Martin’s barn in a field in Dover, New Hampshire, and I had no choice but to do battle with six of these suckers. So I resorted to what I know best: the Internet.

I was a nervous wreck. How could I unfreeze the seacocks? What if I manhandled them, and broke them? What if I stripped the threads, broke the handles? I haunted the Cape Dory Facebook forum, asked provocative questions, and got a range of opinions: heat them, don’t heat them, hit them with a hammer, don’t hit them with a hammer, and on and on.

So I crawled around the hull, and struggled to bring my space cadet brain down to the physical world, and for openers, begin to understand the unique function of each seacock. One was for admitting water to flush the “head”, and one was for diverting the flushed grey matter, over the side. Now that latter one was stuck closed, and I soon reached the rationalization that I would never need that one, so let sleeping cocks lie.

I took a picture of another, stuck in the closed position, right next to the cockpit [Editors Note: Check etymology of “cockpit”.], deep in a storage locker. Several old salts on the Cape Dory mailing list immediately declared, “That’s your cockpit drain. Next season, you definitely want to leave that in the open position.” But then I watched a YouTube video, where Owen Sutton and his son proved mathematically that no, that one was for when you want to pump the poop from the holding tank overboard. And I reasoned, well, that’s another thing that I will never do, so I moved on to the next cockfight.

Which turned out to be two big seacocks astraddle the engine, that this time really were to drain the cockpit. And just my luck, they were already in the open position, so I didn’t have to lie awake long Winter nights imagining the mini-grenades going off.

Not so fast. Because lo, though you want to seacocks open in the Winter, and verily, you want these cockpit drains open nearly all the time, so your cockpit can truly drain, behold, when you steal away for a day or two, leaving Sea Nymph to fend for herself on some distant midcoast Maine mooring, so you can check in with say, you wife, back in New Hampshire, you’re gonna want to SHUT those seacocks.

The reason being, these seacocks are connected to hoses, and if for any reason those hoses should fail, you will have gallons and gallons of the Gulf of Maine flooding into your beloved Sea Nymph. So, if don’t want to be permanently tethered to her, with no shore leave possible, those seacocks must be able to close.

Back to the Internet I went. And just my luck, though these Spartan seacocks are perhaps 40 years old, the actual one Spartan distributor, in the form of an extremely affable fellow named John, is a mere 2 hours up the coast, in a quaint little Maine village called Georgetown.

Because, pardon my French, I felt I needed to hold a shiny new seacock in my hands, and see how it comes apart, and goes back together, and all the rest. In preparation, I actually talked to John on the phone for about 1/2 hour, but also asked if I could stop by in a week or two.

John couldn’t be a nicer guy. I believe he just hangs around in this old tin warehouse, in a crammed shop, by the shore, and just waits for nervous Cape Dory owners like me to come along. The rest of the time he spends on the phone, talking down hopeless romantics who live more far afield.

Deep down, all I want to do is unfreeze my seacocks, but in deference to John, this is the chicken’s way out. I need to take each seacock apart, and “service” it. A a minimum, these means I should slather them with grease, and really, if they are scoured or pitted in such and such a way, I should put lapping compound, which is like an abrasive sandpaper, in there, and then spin those seacocks round and round, until a good mating surface is achieved.

I feel like I should take a shower, after all these double entendres, but just a word or two more. And this is the heart of the matter. What I am starting to see is that for my dreams to become realized, I must confront the physical world, at nearly the molecular level. I need to stare at cracks in open seacocks, and feel, on a visceral level, whether they need to be ground down to prevent leaks. I also need to crawl around my deck, and peer at swaged fittings, through a magnifying glass, and force myself to answer honestly, “Do I see hairline cracks?”. If I do, I need to replace those fittings.

I must confront the physical world on it’s own terms, and interact with it, being fully present, because if I don’t, I will have to suffer the consequences. And if I look into my heart, and need to admit, in a given situation, that I simply don’t have the wisdom and skills, I need to seek out those who do.

Who knew that owning a small sailboat could be a tortured path towards enlightenment? Thank God. for guides like John, along the way.