even down below pumping a hand pump, IMHO, is a waste of valuable time. If you had a crew of 4 where you could change off every 15 minutes it might be worth doing but failing a crew of 4, you're killing your self. A crew of two would be bone tired in couple of hours and all that time would have been wasted. It would be better, once again IMHO, to use that time to get the electric pumps functioning again. I test my pumps once a year by filling the bilge to just under the engine pan and timing them with a stop watch as the bilge is pumped clear. I'm always with in a few seconds of the original set up number. A few years ago I decided to see if it made much difference in time if I added the manual pump to the test. I pumped like hell for a just a few minutes until the bilge ran dry. It did cut the time down but I was wasted after only a few minutes of pumping. That was sitting at my dock under perfect conditions. I can't even imagine what I would have felt like if I had been in bad weather for a day or so without much sleep and tired at the beginning of pumping. Secondly, one Christmas several years ago I was sitting on the back of my boat watching the boat parade. I noticed that the power boat behind me was sinking. Several people who were on board to watch the parade started jumping off the boat onto the dock. The owner had the mechanic down to the boat to work on the engine and he had removed the exhaust hoses from the engine. When people got on board for the party it drove the boat down low enough for water to come in through the exhaust hoses. When the water was noticed the boat was almost a goner. Two guys with buckets started bailing and tried to keep the boat up but they were worn out after only a few minutes. The harbor patrol arrived and started to get the pump on board so the two guys stopped because they were so shot. I could see the boat settling and yelled over that they had better start with the buckets again and they hoped to it just in time. By the time the Harbor Patrol got the pumps going the two guys could hardly stand up. All I can say after witnessing that is that a bucket isn't really an option for short handed crews. No one here has to agree with me and everyone makes his own decisions as to how he's going to set up his boat but I believe in lots of electric pumps and a second power source to power them.