Leaky and inaccessible emergency bilge pump hose

[Michigan_Eric]

This is related to "stupid things boat builders do" thread.

Tartan thoughtfully provided a Whaler emergency bilge pump next to the helm. The problem is that the intake hose is about 22 feet long (on a boat that's only 31 ft overall) and winds its way through multiple bulkheads and under the hull liner before emerging in the bilge. The pump works great (after I rebuilt it) but all it does is suck air through a leak in the hose that I can't get to which is near where it goes under the battery box. So when the batteries were out over the winter I thought I could remove the battery box but... guess what... it's glassed in.

Why Tartan, why? Why does the battery box need to be glassed in? It's not a structural element, you could have just used four good stainless steel bolts so we could take it out to, oh, I don't know, repair the emergency bilge pump hose running underneath it.

I also have an electric bilge pump of course that works... most of the time. It's one of those Rule all-in-ones with an internal float switch that inevitably gets stuck either up or down if it happens to suck in as much as a stray hair that might happen to be floating in the bilge. I'm thinking about replacing it with a pump that has an external float switch, with just the float switch in the bilge and the pump back under the quarter berth with all the other Rube Goldberg pumbing. But this would Rube Goldbergify my already too-complicated pumbing and require extra wiring as well.

I'm considering a workaround where I just have the intake hose coiled in the lazaret that I can take out and fling down the companionway into the open bilge to pump it out, but this has a number of potential problems that I likely don't need to enumerate here, besides just being messy and taking up space in my already small lazaret.

Has anyone else found a way to deal with such a problem? Thanks in advance.