…the pump ate something it really didn’t like—or the motor began to die. We don’t know. Norus Shinmaywa pumps are nearly indestructible…but it was more and more unhappy.

BUT your friendly writer-folk are not the sort to sit and wait for St. Murphy to strike. WE got a second pond pump two years ago, just because pumps have been known to croak…

There it sat in its box, waiting the call to duty—and this evening, under a light spit of rain, we pulled the ailing pump and put in the new one——-glitch—-

Seems the plumbing part that fits the Shinmaywa to American plumbing—by some micro degree only known to the metric system didn’t fit the new pump’s little adapter collar.

BUT your friendly writer-folk are not stupid, either: there is another nearly identical blue collar bolted to the old pump that DOES fit the American pipe. We get the bolts undone and, yes, the OLD Shinmaywa collar fits smoothly onto the new pump and accepts the old American plumbing-cobbled-together-adapter for the Gator Bite connector: a nifty little clip-down attachment that mates hose to pump and saves you having to draw off 2000 gallons of your pond and work upside down with a screw driver and hose clamp in an 18″ wide pit trying to attach a 3″ hose to the bottom of an 8″ wide pump body.

We plug it in. Gunk pours from the waterfall—apparently the other pump has been kind of tired. This one is not. We are now going to have to find somebody who repairs Shinmaywa pumps, or we could—a brilliant notion has just hit me—use this tired pump for the occasional job of drawing off 1000 gallons for a little water change…water changes keep minerals from building up in the pond. THis is worth some thought—the water pressure would be extreme, but we could water plants with it.

Jane, BTW, was the one having to kneel on rock and work upside down up to the elbows in cold gunky water to attach the Gator Bite by feel, being rained upon, and in twilight. But we got it done.