Back to the Boatyard

We are here in Sidney, BC waiting to meet with our project manager for our final visit to Philbrooks before heading South down the Pacific Coast. We planned this visit earlier in the year, knowing that we could not get all of the work done before taking the boat down to Seattle for Opening Day in May. Therefore, we prioritized the work we thought needed to be done before Alaska and that which could be done afterwards. And, of course, we knew that unexpected items would turn up on our Alaska trip…. and man,were we right about that.

The work list contains a mix of preventive maintenance items, repair or replace items, and a number of upgrades. Here are some of the things we wanted to do specifically related to cruising in Mexico:

• Solar panels. We are adding about 1000W of solar on the pilot house roof. We had originally hoped to have these in place before heading to Alaska, but they got bumped to this visit.
• Flopper Stopper setup for at anchor stabilization. We have heard that many of the anchorages in Mexico are exposed to swell and thus quite rolly. The flopper stopper is a rig consisting of a pole that swings out from the port side of the boat with a line that goes down to a plate deployed into the water. The plate has slats in it that allows it to sink easily, but not rise, thus minimizing side to side rolling. Many Nordhavns have this setup.
• Interior DC fans. We do have four zones of Air Conditioning on the boat (which is one of the preventive service items) but we want to minimize our use of it, because it requires either running the generator or being connected to shore power. Therefore, we are going to place 8 fans in the salon, pilot house and staterooms with the goal of maximizing air circulation.
• Sun Shade for the boat deck. When we put the dinghy down, there is a large amount of usable space on the boat deck. We will rig a sun shade to maximize the use of the space.
• A second autopilot system. We already have redundant GPS, Chart plotters, and radar. We think it is also important to have a back up for the autopilot.
• Replace galley refrigerator and convection/microwave oven. We planned to replace the refrigerator, which is a 20 year old domestic refrigerator and a real energy hog. We did not anticipate replacing the convection/microwave until the beginning of this trip, when the touch panel of the existing unit failed. It mysteriously started working again, but just to be sure, we will replaced it while we can.
• Upgrade the engine room cooling system. Engine room cooling has been an issue with many Nordhavns. With a dry stack exhaust system, there is a lot of heat that needs to be removed via air circulation, and without proper circulation, the engine room can get quite hot… sometimes hot enough to impact the reliability of some components. The typical specification is that the engine room temperature does not exceed the outside air temperature by more than 20 degrees. We don’t meet that goal even operating up here in the Pacific Northwest, with very cool seawater for the keel cooler and low ambient temperatures. So, we are going to follow the lead of other Nordhavn owners who have installed extraction fans up in the stack to pull the hot air out of the engine room. We will also replace one of the existing blowers that failed on our Alaska trip.
• Haul the boat out of the water and look at our propeller and bottom paint and do any service required. We didn’t hit any ice or logs of significance so we believe the propeller is in good shape but want to be sure.
• Maybe… figure out a stern anchor solution. We have heard that a stern anchor is somtimes helpful in open anchorages in order to keep the bow pointing into the prevailing swells. We have a spare main anchor (a Fortress SX-55) that we have used once as a stern anchor, but the time taken to assemble it and drag the rode from the foredeck storage box makes it very inconvenient to use as a stern anchor. It would be nice to figure out a way to have a smaller anchor that is easy to deploy from the back of the boat.

I think that does it for the “planned” work. Some of the repair or replace items that came up on our trip North include:

• Patch the tube on the dinghy. We were in Prideaux Haven going to our favorite swimming hole and preparing to anchor the dinghy next to a large rock. The rock had numerous oyster shells that were exposed at low tide, and we drifted into one that made a two inch gash in the tubing.
• Replace the motor on the diesel heater. We rarely use the diesel hydronic heating system in the summer, but needed it on one 40-something degreee morning in Alaska. Of course, it didn’t start. Some great support from Sure Marine Service in Seattle helped dignose the problem, which was the motor. The diagnostic tool? A rubber mallet. “Start the system, and rap the motor with a rubber mallet. If it starts up, you know you have a bad winding and the motor needs to be replaced.” Yup.
• Replace the Furuno GPS. We have three separate GPS sources on the boat including this older Furuno GPS, which connects directly to a Furuno RD-30 display unit to show speed over ground, position, wind data, etc. When we were crossing Cape Caution on the way up to Alaska, the GPS stopped transmitting data… of course when the seas were up and the boat was moving around quite a bit. No big deal to switch to another source for the NAV equipment, but time to replace the old unit. I elected to replace the receiver only and still have it connect to the RD-30, and from there the NMEA bus.
• Replace the generator injector pump. I mentioned this in an earlier blog post and actually got a replacement pump sent into Petersburg. However, the fuel leakage had decreased to an acceptable level, and seeing that a miscue in removing or replacing a connecting clip would have serious consequences, I wimped out and elected to have Philbrooks do this.
• Add delay switches to the windshield wipers. This one sounds odd, I know. The boat has four wipers, one across each piece of the pilot house windshield. The wipers are needed for rain, obviously, but also for clearing salt spray in boisterous sea conditions. Each of the wipers has a separate 3 way switch for off, low, and high speed. In all but hard rain (which we had plenty of in Alaska), the low setting is still too high. Thus, one will be constantly switching the wipers on and off. Trivial, but annoying when running in crummy weather. We should have done this before going to Alaska, but it was only when we got up there that I realized just how much of an annoyance this was, and how easy it is to fix. Just add $$.

After a full day of meeting with the various departments at Philbrooks, everyone has a good idea of what needs to be done, enough so that we have established a tentative pick up date… September 13th. If all goes well we will take the boat back to Anacortes, load it up and start heading South on September 20th.