The relaunch day from hell

We had the boat all ready for the rather early 7:30 am relaunch. We even got ourselves there nice and early to pop into the office to ask about where they wanted us to berth. Only that was a waste of time as the berthing master on duty said that there were no spaces free yet, thanks to the Motor Yacht show that had finished the day before. We reminded him that we were booked in by Maricom, a commercial tenant and he looked a bit sheepish.....

Meanwhile, the boat was hanging in slings ready to drop into the water, half an hour early.  So the pressure was on - he told us to just stop on the fuel pontoon, which is the one that runs up to the lift bay and that they would call us when they had a space. OK. We rushed to the lift bay, climbed on board and were dropped into the water.

Getting the boat ready to move involved removing the pins from the stabiliser fins to set them free, checking for any water ingress and then firing up the main engine. When the stabiliser control panel was fired up, it made a tortured beeping sound. That was not good. Rebooted, it did the same, with a screen display that looked more like a fish finder than anything to control the stabiliser settings. A third reboot and it did the same, finally coming up with a comms error. Wonderful. The Golden Arrow guys had to plug a sensor into the control box to realign the fin sensors after the bearings were replaced but this made no sense. As there was nothing to do, we had to leave the fins floating free which makes boat manoeuvring highly amusing as you have two big rudder like things that just move in the water flow past the hull and can turn you, act as brakes etc, Wonderful. 

The captain headed to the flybridge for the best view and saw a RIB astern of us that we would have to shimmy round. We gently reversed out of the bay and the idea was a little squirt on the stern thruster to kick the stern out so we could back past the moored RIB. Hitting the thruster control the crew who was in the aft cockpit heard a tortured squeal. There was no thrust....  So, a kick ahead to push the stern out with the rudder hard over and a little bit of bow thrust to stop the bow from swinging into the walls of the hoist dock. Then a very slow reverse past the RIB and onto the pontoon.

Tied up we took stock. Stabilisers that would not work and a dead stern thruster. Bad words were said. But why? Surely we cannot have picked up some debris in the hoist bay after relaunch that jammed the thruster? That would be so unlucky. The stabiliser issue was well above our pay grade so a depressed captain and crew pinged a note to the TRAC engineer that had reset the fin sensor position for us. Meanwhile, the captain had a good look at the thruster controls and power supply. This is the cut off button:

A big thing fitted in the lazarette. The Maricom guys had removed the cover to change the wiring around for the new battery to battery charger that would look after the thruster batteries. It seemed that when the cover was refitted it managed to hold the button in a half on, half off position. Wonderful. A couple of on/off movements and the thruster was back to being happy again. One problem down.

The Golden Arrow guys were excellent, arriving promptly and working around the Maricom team who could finally commission the new alternator controller now the engine could be run. Worryingly, the well experienced Stabiliser man said that he'd never seen a control panel failure like ours. It booted perfectly and worked OK until the engine was started and hydraulic pressure was applied, then it went crazy. The European main man duly arrived too and after much debate, decided that the panel must be at fault, not the control box itself. The only challenge is that the new panels will not work with the (now very) old control box that we have. So, they fitted a replacement panel and a new boot chip in the control box, reset the over 200 parameters and control was finally restored. Even better, as the system was working fine before their work, they said that they could not charge us for the panel. A new panel alone is around £3,500 so that made us very happy indeed. The panels are known to fail as they age but normally not in that way. All the earlier pain and frustration seemed worthwhile somehow. The new one seemed happy enough:

The day slowly improved as the configuration of the stabiliser system was set and checked and after some tinkering with a connector, proper control was regained and we could centre the things. For info, here are the newly fitted test port and pressure switch that we mentioned in an earlier post:

The day was slowly improving and the marina folks gave us a berth to use so we moved the boat, happy that we had the ability to unpin the stabiliser and centre them properly and that we had a stern thruster again as we needed it. After we tied up and the captain went into the engine room to put the pins in the stabilisers, things went downhill again:

Grubby oil leaking out is not ideal. Massive understatement, We cleaned it up, felt around the hydraulic connections to the ram and the end of the ram itself - no evidence of any hydraulic fluid leaks there. It turned out that the Golden Arrow man had used some oil when splitting a bearing and the residue was just washing out the graphite grease used to refit the bolts, The mood lightened again briefly until challenges getting the new alternator regulator to talk to the new Victron Cerbo box brought more gloom.

We had a much needed gin before dinner. It had been one of those days, only more so.