Heading to Swanwick and cameragate

You can only have so much time in Gosport before you begin to behave like the locals. We knew it was time to go when the closed tattoo parlour looked tempting.  Actually we headed off because we had a date for our second Covid jabs and needed to be somewhere accessible to Hythe for those. Swanwick was a good place as we needed to be there for Paul, the nice Maricom man, to do a few bits for us a couple of days later anyway.

The short trip was the first one of the year sitting on the flybridge. However, that was only possible as we were well wrapped up, had woolly hats on and the bimini cover was not in place so we got some warmth from the sun. The Solent was very quiet, unlike Swanwick marina which was very full. Apparently we have to change berths whilst here, on a day with F7 gusts forecast. Hmm.

The little Webasto heater was returned by the rather excellent Butler Technik guys and we had the fun of refitting it. It fired up first time and treated us to a lovely aroma of hot coolant - when draining it for removal, the heat protective cladding on the exhaust got wet and it had to "steam off". All good again:

The poor boat was then treated to a wash off, the first proper wash since Cardiff. Removing the Haslar bird poo was amusing in the extreme and it felt like much harder work than normal too. 

Then the most exciting bit - jab no 2 was administered during a visit to Hythe. We are all Pfizered up now and happily so. Going there by public transport (train and bus) was most unpleasant. The train was nice and empty but the bus was too busy and the inmates included one guy who wore his mask around his chin and a woman who kept sneezing and came to sit in front of us. Our last bus trip was on the Isle of Bute last summer and felt way safer. Funny how life and our appetite for risk has changed thanks to Covid, despite the low infection rates now.

Back in Swanwick, Paul and Dave from Maricom started dismembering the boat again:

and adding even more wires:

that all needed tidying, terminating and cutting to length. Yes, lots of cat 6 cable being run to support the new IP cameras. Our old ones were beginning to die (2 had already passed away!) and the IP based versions would allow images to be shared on the Furuno equipment not just one screen. Importantly for helming into tight berths, it means that they could also be viewed from the flybridge plotter screen, great for backing into a finger berth for example.

One thing jarred though, on a boat that is almost (bar the autopilot and radios) a Furuno closed shop, the Maricom guys brought this to protect the flooring:

Apparently Raymarine produce giveaways for the dealers, Furuno do not.

As well as the camera replacements, there were some things to tidy up from the electronics refresh that was completed a couple of years ago. Covid stopped us from coming back last year to get them done. What was on the list? Well, since a battery replacement by Maricom, the Furuno satellite compass in rough weather could lose the heading and set off alarms from the navigation gear. In all fairness, the kit automatically switched to using the little weather station input and just pressed on until the sat compass worked again. There was also a strange glitch in the windows PC behaviour (OK, nothing is really strange with Windows behaviour, we should expect the worst) which caused the cursor to go AWOL and dance around the screen sometimes, caused by Windows seeing some navigation gear inputs and thinking that they were from another mouse..... Oh yes, Windows is so smart.

To give you an idea of the quantity of the wiring on the average Nordhavn boat, here is the trunking that goes down from the pilothouse into the cabins / engine room:

Rather a lot of copper in there. Some 240v AC, some 24v DC, some 12v DC, some cat 5, some cat 6, some coax, some twin, some B & O proprietary cables for the entertainment system and a few that are just a plain mystery. 

To escape the carnage, we rented a van and played removal men, taking a couple of unwanted recliner chairs from Hythe to Anne's where we were greeted most enthusiastically by Izzy. Looked like the goddog has forgiven us for the cut pad on her paw moment. Then we left her to take some other unwanted items to the tip for Anne. It felt rather strange to be driving a Transit van again. The last one was just as the captain finished working for Ford Motor Company and he had a run in a newly launched model in case he got called to assess one by a dealer. That was in 1986 and the radical new van looked like this:

How time flies.....

As Swanwick Marina was very very full, we were under strict instructions to leave before the weekend. They also wanted us to move for the last couple of days there and gave us a berth 1 metre wider than we are. Without our fenders. Backing into it was going to be fun so we picked a time when there was minimal tide and wind. Naturally that had to be 5am. Happy days. The most annoying bit was that the nice big berth we left stayed empty until we left.

Departing Swanwick, again at slack water, we had a chilly flybridge trip to Bucklers Hard which is a favourite old stomping ground of ours. On the way down the Hamble River, the autopilot decided to turn itself off and refused to fire up again. Er? Maricom had not touched that bar removing a panel for access which the pilothouse control head was fitted into. One step forward and all that. Still, we were joined in Bucklers by Andrew and Linda on Zephyros, their Nordhavn 43 so we had a mini rally going on. First time we'd seen them in ages too so a walk into Beaulieu and an outside coffee were in order.