Thursday, May 16, 2019

About boat projects

I guess this post should be the first one this year. And of course it should be posted way before now. It is probably too late to wish you all a happy New Year and happy Easter, but I can thank any one of you who are still reading this and haven't given up on us.

It is not that we haven't have enough topics to write about, but these couple of months just flew by so fast and our lives are so hectic, that we either don't have time or the energy to write. The thing is that we decided to sail off on another longer sailing adventure this year. We optimistically took on plenty of boat projects, some of them because they needed to be done - like repairing the watermaker, replacing all the through hulls, replacing the cooker, repairing the counter top in galley, replacing some of the sails and lines, and some of them because we wished to - like having an electric winch, and new anchor, and more powerful solar panels, new mattresses, a proper washing machine, new shroud with the furler for a new jib and the biggest project - building a new fridge with freezer. 

Captain's plan was to finish everything and sail off at the end of April. My plan was more like May, April weather can be cold and wet. As it looks now we'll be really happy if we finish most project by end of May. Some smaller things will have to be done under way.

Captain figured out new tracks are also needed for new jib. 


The holes drilled into deck needed to be filled with epoxy to seal off the soft core before the screws can be placed. We are quite inventive in creating the tools - sometimes a plastic bag and a little bit of duct tape and a nozzle of a standard sika tube can be adequate tool to do the job.


The installation of tracks of course didn't go without hitches - while drilling the holes through the deck we managed to drill through two 220V electric cables we didn't know were there. Would not happen if they were indicated in boat's electric diagram. But as we noticed a lot of things do not comply with the boat's documentation. It took us two days to repair the cables. We also did some mess on deck with epoxy resin and Bison glue that we will need to clean, or at least try to clean.

Working on a boat is always a struggle to free the space were you're working and put away things that are in the way. We put stuff into any place that is not full yet, including a bathroom, that can then look like this ...


... or all over the galley ....



Once some work is put into it, a bathroom can quickly go from this ...


... to this...

... and then, when the space is needed elsewhere, unfortunately, to this again.


But in the other bathroom the washing machine is already in the place. We plan to test run it before we depart. The washing machine can not use its internal heather, that would be too much load for our inverter, but we can switch the internal heather off with the button and feed the machine with the hot water from the water heather or even with the hot water we would warm up on the cooker. At least that's the plan.


One of the bigger projects was putting the new antifouling on the boat, since we decided to put a copper coat on. This requires stripping off all of previous anti-fouling paints...


... putting on several coats of primers, like this silver one on the keel...


... and bronze ones, all together four of them.


Then the copper coat can be painted over - four to five coats.



We had great luck with the weather, everything was drying perfectly. After a couple of days we arranged with the marina to get the Heron to the lift to shift her in her stands for half a meter, so we could do the whole procedure on spots that were not accessible before.



Another huge project is the fridge with freezer. Originally there were two fridges on our boat, both water cooled. The one that was colder opened from the top like some freezers and other, less cold, opened from the side like most fridges. Their insulation was not the best and the side-door was not very practical, especially when we were sailing and the boat was heeling, many times stuff just jumped out of the fridge when we opened the door - I still remember how we cleaned the chilly sauce from underneath the floorboards while on the Atlantic passage. And we really wished to have a proper freezer, it would make the life so much easier. All these reasons led us to decision to remove the old fridges and build new ones. It was not an easy decision, we knew it was going to be a huge undertaking and a completely new terrain for us.

We had to cut the old fridges out of the boat, piece by piece, we didn't want to disturb the countertop and the front wall. We cut a new opening into the countertop for the new door and started to build the fridges from outside in - we surrounded the whole space with a thick layer of insulating foam and tried to mould the shape to the shape of the boat and maximize the volume. We then glued the plastic sheets over it - here the interior is still one big space ...


... sealed the edges with a pliable plastic tape...


... put a division wall between two parts and installed the cooling elements. Then the certified fridge specialist connected the tubes and put the gas into the cooling elements. We were so happy when we tested it and it worked well. If you look closely you can see the slight frost still on the cooling plate on the right.


We still need to do the doors to close the fridges, build some internal shelfs and install the thermostats. And of course thoroughly test run it. So more photos will follow...

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