Re-Sealing Your Pool with the sap of the Chucum Tree
by Yours Truly - April-May, 2007
If you are the owner of a home and want to install a swimming pool, one of the ways you can reduce the probability of it leaking, is to seal it. Along with the many commercially available sealant products available on the market, some of which are actually available in Merida, you can use a traditional product unique to the Yucatan - the sap of the 'chucum' tree.
Indigenous to the Yucatan, the 'chucum' is a hardwood tree with a very oily sap. In fact, if you burn its branches, you will find that it burns fast and hot compared to other wood available, thanks to the oil content of this tree. The bark also has interesting properties, in that you can strip some bark and boil it in water to obtain an oily syrup that can be used - in combination with a few other ingredients - as a sealant for anything that is supposed to hold water.
I had heard about this product but had no idea where to go to get some. Recently, I called my albaņil de confianza to have him repair my pool, which, thanks to the recent explosions from the construction of Yucatan's Country Club in nearby Chicxulub Pueblo, had formed some cracks and was leaking. Lo and behold, he showed up with a container of chucum! An added bonus!
He told me a little about the preparation of the mixture with which he would finish my cenote-like pool. Stripping an appropriate amount of the bark of the tree, this is boiled in water until it is reduced (less liquid) and concentrated. Once the liquid has been obtained, it is mixed in equal parts with the ingredients in the photo below: a sealing product that goes by the name of Festerbond and regular white cement.
Previous to this, the surface must be check for visible cracks, cemented over in the normal albaņil way and the surface refinished in cement.
Once dry and clean, the next step is to prepare the mixture in, say, a five gallon bucket and paint it on with a thick brush. While painstaking, this process ensures a face to face encounter with the pool walls and floor, thereby ensuring that no spots are missed. The initial color will be a uniform brown, but as it dries it will get darker and splotchier, which in the case of my cenote-like pool, is exactly the natural looking effect that I wanted.
In the following photos, the application process in which you can see the color as it dries.
Since these photos were taken, the word is still out on whether or not the job actually worked as planned. It looks nice, but there is still a little leakage; about an inch a day, which, for the moment is something I can live with. Just 10-15 minutes of pump time in the morning and the water is back to filterable levels.
Another interesting and very local tidbit of information to those of us new to the Yucatan. Hope it helps!
