At least on the Nordhavn most things are easily accessible unlike in many boats where the engines, pumps etc are buried away under floorboards. The walk in and full standing height engine room is just wonderful.
Of course, that doesn't help when you have jobs like removing the liferaft from it's cradle for a service. The cradle is designed to allow the raft to fall free from the boat into the water once it is opened. Hum - not ideal when you want to lift the heavy raft out and down into a trolley...
Luckily we have a crane that is used to launch the RIB so we made up some straps to hold the raft using lifelines and cable ties - very professional. Then we managed to lift it down using the crane (the raft is about 35KG and so leaning over the rail and trying to lift the slippery canister out and up would have been a mission impossible task. Working out how to do that and setting up the cats cradle arrangement burned about 3 hours in total - see how time goes by when you have a boat! Luckily the service is only needed every 3 years.
You might have read in an earlier post about the exorbitant cost of this work. Well, refitting the raft was even more fun. The same straps and cable tie arrangement hoisted it up very nicely. But then we found that the repacked canister was fatter then before and it wouldn't snug into the stainless steel cradle properly. More time spend modifying the senhouse slip arrangement (see below) that holds the raft in place and changing the locking arrangement too. Another 2 hours of fun outside in the cold
It is amazing just how long silly jobs like this take - and no, it is not because we keep stopping for tea, gin, whatever.
Another example is the reprogramming of the satellite TV dish to find the new Astra satellites when the services were moved around late last year. We mentioned the problem in a post but you folks failed us dismally - no one said that they had an old Windows XP laptop with a serial port so we ended up buying a cheap secondhand one from an internet supplier and then a serial cable. Getting a serial (modem) cable isn't easy now either. The fun of maintaining old technology stuff (old = 2007) these days! However, with the great help of Kevin the technical man in the UK importers, we reprogrammed the Tracvision TV antenna so it found the new Astra satellites. The various TVs on board have worked fine since this - is that good or bad one wonders....
These two examples are just to show how what should be a simple job often turns into hours of entertainment. Basic maintenance like oil changes, fuel filter changes etc are very simple and relatively quick because of the great engine room access and simple "designed for easy maintenance" filter fittings. As an example, the fuel filter on the main engine can be physically swapped in about 30 seconds. However, no matter how well the boat is constructed and no matter how good the equipment, things like the satellite changes catch you out. Trying to fix them in parallel to a full time job used to be tough. At least now we have the time to investigate, diagnose things and work out the repair methods.
One fringe benefit - the old Dell Windows XP laptop we bought is brilliant. It reminds me of how good XP was and what a pile of junk Windows 8 is. Our nice new laptop fell over yet again this morning after installing a Microsoft urgent update. Thanks for this rubbish Microsoft! I have spent more hours fixing one silly little HP laptop in 2013 than I needed for all the oil, oil filter and fuel filter changes for the 3 motors on board. Must be progress....
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Thanks for your ideas / cheek / corrections / whatever! They should hit the blog shortly after the system checks them to make sure they will not put us or you in jail.....