Freedom - sort of anyway

Well, after the weeks of lockdown and being "requested" not to use even the bay area, some light appeared. Amazingly quickly for the rather feeble harbour authority, this appeared on the day that the Welsh assembly announced some easing in the Covid restrictions:

Amazingly they didn't play the "we only allow locking out to sea once a hour" game as they did after the first lockdown. A reason to celebrate? Well, day 1 of no restrictions coincided with this:

So we decided to stay tied up (as long as the mooring lines and cleats on the pontoon remained secure that is).

Instead of a sea trip,  there was the annual fun of changing all the fuel filters. Not that bad a job really, the hardest bit is pumping the fuel into the fresh secondary filters for the wing and genset and then bleeding them. The main engine is much easier - thank you Mr John Deere for simple twist lock filters and a high capacity pump that soon bleeds the system. The wing / genset need way more thumb action on their little pumps.  You do end up with lots of filters to dispose of:

and there are two missing from this picture!

After the gales cleared through, we had the monster excitement of a run around the bay to make sure that all was well with the engines after the captain had been dismembering them and doing some maintenance stuff. Oh yes, the usual demented snail track around the bay ensued:

You can spot where the deeper water is from this rather boring trip.... 

The main engine pulled pretty much the full 2400 rpm that is expected at wide open throttle. You can tell that we are getting short of diesel. When we add around 3.5 tons of fuel, she is less energetic. Even the little 40HP wing engine pushed us around at 5 knots when given a workout. Coming back into the marina, another bertholder kindly captured our return:

Even better - Andy took the side that didn't have the fenders hanging down so things look smarter. You can see the nice green stripe left on the domes though. Another session of standing underneath and getting soaked using the window cleaning poles is needed. Building up the enthusiasm for that is not easy.

After the exciting bay trip, the wing engine had an oil and filter change, so it did not feel left out or unimportant. 104 hours of use to date must make it feel undervalued somehow although we do give it a regular run to check all is well and warm up the innards. At least the nappy rash period is over and it is no longer on baby food (aka break-in oil). Now it gets grown up sump oil like the other machinery on board. 

Maintenance news:

We've mentioned before how the electrical panel gauges fail over time with a smoothing capacitor that gives up in a big way. Well, the inverter voltage output gauge suddenly started reading about 10v lower than expected. Hoping that it was the gauge and not the newish inverters that were at fault, we checked the voltage to the gauge and sure enough, it was a rock steady 230v not the 214 / 213 / 209 being displayed. The meter was removed and was very hot - the sign of one that is about to fail big time. Folks have reported smoke and other nasty things from them so the offending gauge was removed and opened up.

The rogue capacitor is the tall black guy in this picture (and that is NOT a racist comment!):

and they typically  fail after many years of hard use causing wild fluctuating readings. However, our problem was  different one, the capacitor did not look to be "blown" and inspection revealed some overheating elsewhere on a PCB:

 

Spot the dark bit - and it did not smell too good either. So, this time it has to be a new gauge rather than a simple capacitor swap which the ever organised Sandie from Nordhavn Europe has ordered for us. In the meanwhile, we have a small gap in the power distribution panel:

You can see how the local shorepower struggles in the evening to deliver 10 amps (kettle on) and maintain a sensible voltage. 

We mentioned the replacement of the wing engine fuel filter assembly before - well, here is the new picture showing the freshly installed Racor turbine filter with a new fuel hose and a relocated anti siphon loop with a new fixing bracket:

Very happy to have a better filter fitted, the same as the genset and one that makes filter element changes way simpler too.