Adrift at Sea —Dan’s blog on dankim.com

Here’s a quick update on most of the 2008 boat projects.

Main Hull and Cockpit

The ama retraction lines and Spinlock PX Powercleats have been installed port and starboard. I’ve actually tested the system on the port side at least, and it works as planned.

The new cockpit locker still needs a partition made for it so that the contents don’t slide into the rudder quadrant area. I hope to make that done this week and install it for this weekend.

The new opening port/instrument panel works quite well at night to help keep the boat cool. I am a bit amazed at how much a 5″ x 12″ port helps. If I had known this, I would have done this two years ago.

Rigging

The halyards led aft project is almost done. The new mast step with the halyard block mounting plates appears to be working as planned. All that is remaining for this project are getting the new halyards, mounting the winch, one more double line clutch, and the deck organizers. I’ll be using two stacked four-sheave organizers, which will leave me two spare sheaves for future expansion.

The system seems to be working as expected. The reason a fifth double line clutch is necessary is that I am adding a third reefing point to the mainsail, and need another clutch to handle the two additional lines for the third reef.

The lines led aft are the topping lift and boom vang to the port-side winch, the six reefing lines to the central winch, and the mainsail halyard and outhaul to the starboard-side winch. Even with all the lines led aft, I still have space for at least two more halyard blocks on the plates. The rest of the halyards are supposed to be ready on Wednesday, so, I hope to have them all installed on Thursday. I’l be re-using the old halyards to make the reefing lines.

I still have to install clutches for the two furling lines. I’ve since decided to install a Lewmar double line clutch instead of two Spinlock PX Powercleats. The main reason for this is the extra control and security the Lewmar line clutches will provide over the Spinlocks.

The new lazy jacks are installed and designed so they can be led forward to the mast to get them out of the way when sailing the boat. The new integrated mainsail furling system looks like it should work, but I’ll be testing it later this week, once the mainsail comes back from the sail loft. Malcolm, over at Harding Sails, has promised it will be ready Thursday afternoon/early evening.

The new mainsheet was picked up yesterday, and I installed it on the boat last night. I’m keeping the old mainsheet to use as an MOB billy and backup.

Electrical

The inverter has been added to the boat’s electrical system and is operating. The inverter has a breaker panel controlling its output, and there is a 30-amp breaker on the main shorepower AC panel for the inverter/charger. The only thing left to do on this project is to epoxy the mounting rails for the starting batteries and the inverter in place.

The AC and DC panels were basically completely re-wired as part of this project. While re-wiring the AC panels to accommodate the new inverter/charger, I realized that the outlet that Peter Kennedy Yacht Services installed was upstream of the GFCI outlet—which meant the outlet was not GFCI protected. In my opinion, this is stupid and negligent of them, but not surprising, considering the quality of his company’s work.

The reason I re-wired the DC circuit breaker panel is that PKYS had attached multiple devices to individual breakers without using a proper fuse panel or switch panel between. This is rather stupid and means that a small, low amperage device, like a GPS, was being protected by a 15 amp circuit breaker. The device would fry long before the circuit breaker would ever trip. I disconnected the multiple devices on each of the breakers and ran a single wire to either a fuse block or fused switch block and then from there ran connections to the various instruments or devices.

The “Electronics” circuit breaker now goes to a six-position fused switch panel. The GPS, autopilot, VHF, and instruments all have separate switches and fuses, two or three amp in the case of the GPS and instruments, larger for the autopilot and VHF. I also wired up the fifth and sixth positions for future expansion.

The navigation lights breaker now goes to a six-position fused switch panel. The six positions are: LED Anchor light, LED Tricolor, Foredeck LIght, Steaming light, Bow Bi-color, Stern light. The reason I have the stern light hooked up on its own switch is that the COLREGs allow a boat the size of mine to use an all-around white light in place of the steaming and stern light, so I can turn off the steaming and stern light and use the anchor light in their place.

The cabin lights breaker goes to a fuse panel and has one circuit for the head, one for the nav console and one for the galley light fixtures. The forward bulkhead mounted fan is connected to the head circuit, as is the central cabin overhead fixture. However, they’re now protected by a three-amp fuse, rather than a 15-amp circuit breaker, and shouldn’t be a fire danger.

I have a third six-position fused switch panel which will be installed for the “12 VDC Outlet” circuit breaker. This will become a miscellaneous use panel and will include the power to the cockpit solar panel sockets, as well as some other equipment I plan on adding in the future.

I’ve also standardized all of the “in-line” and panel fuses to ATC-type blade fuses. This reduces the types of fuses I need to carry aboard the Pretty Gee to ATC, MaxiFuse and MegaFuses. The MaxiFuse is for the main DC panel feed. The MegaFuse is for the inverter-to-house battery feed.

I also removed the carpeting from the area under the cockpit, since I only use this area for equipment storage, and switched the Trojan T105 batteries into a battery box—one of two identical boxes purchased at West Marine on clearance—that doesn’t require me to remove the inspection port for the starboard aft buoyancy compartment to inspect/check the batteries—again another of Peter Kennedy’s fine handiwork—just how much intelligence does it take to measure a battery box to see if it fits? The second box is reserved for when I increase the house battery bank size. I’m using the battery box Peter supplied as a storage locker.

I still need to run the rest of the wire for the masthead steaming/foredeck light. I’ve just ordered some 16 AWG/four-conductor cable to finish this job off.

I still haven’t done anything with the solar panels. They’re currently sitting in my friend’s storage shed. I need to get them working before I leave on any extended cruises. When I get to working on them, I will be upgrading the power connectors for them so that they can be used as either solar panel feeds to the solar panel charge controller, or as power plugs for 12 VDC accessories in the cockpit. The trolling motor connectors have three pins, so I could use them fairly easily to handle both functions.

Electronics

The new VHF unit is installed, and both the NMEA input and output signal lines are connected, unlike how PKYS connected my old VHF unit, which only had the NMEA input connect, not the output. I still haven’t connected or installed the hailer horn. I hope to have that installed in the next two weeks. I’m still trying to figure out where the best mounting point for it would be.

As part of the new VHF installation, I re-did the entire NMEA 0183 wiring setup on the boat. PKYS didn’t see fit to connect both the inputs and outputs of either my Garmin chartplotter or the VHF. This means that I would not have been able to see the position of a vessel in distress show up on my chart plotter in an emergency situation.

All in all, things are shaping up nicely.