Yar and good evening.

Ahoy me bilge rats!

Wait, what’s a bilge?  Why the lowest space on a ship.  It collects all the sloughed off water in different areas of the boat.  Like on my more modern vessel we had three types.  Black water is sewage, gray water has oil and water that had been used in the sinks, and normal drinking water which is kept fresh and potable in it’s own tank.  It was possible for us to get into all of these compartments.  Lots of boats use water as ballast, but every boat has to pump that stuff out eventually, nowadays we pump black water out safely using harbor resources, but there was a reason they called the head the head back in the day, and not everyone complies with this fairly standard marine law, including but not limited too drunken sailors.

Once the first mate and the engineer had to fish out a pair of underwear someone had pumped down a head.  To this day they accuse me, and to this day I deny it.  I’m not the only girl known to wear Hanes Her Way, all right!  They had heavy duty breathing masks on, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  I was known as a bilge monkey, since I’m long and skinny I could fish things out of the bilge other sailors couldn’t reach.  We had a long magnetic pole I would stick down into the gray water.  On one occasion I fished out 7 wrenches.  (I was a good bilge monkey, couldn’t sweat a line to save my life, but was a good bilge monkey.

Bonus trivia question! Why is it called the poop deck?

(prize for whoever gets the most questions correct will NOT be bilge water in an old captain morgan bottle, promise!!)