A maintenance (half) day

Why spend a day locked away in the engine room? Well, firstly because outside was horrid:

For the non boating folks, "very high" sea state means waves 9 to 14 metres high. Not much fun in a 15 metre long boat.

Instead, the captain had one of those virtuous days, doing a few things that have been on "the list" for a while.

For the tekkies / people who want to gloat:

The first job was to replace the genset fuel fittings that the captain had a rant about earlier on - see  Holy Loch maintenance 

We had some new fuel line fittings sent to us in Penarth and of course fitting them also means draining down the fuel system a little - an ideal time to replace both the filters too. Somehow having push on fittings for the hoses in a fuel system with no hose clips as insurance seems wrong but as they have built lots of generators using them, I guess it is OK. The captain still fitted some "insurance" though.

The planned genset valve clearance check got parked when time and interest ran out. Also because Steve (the trip boat man, keep up please!) kindly took the Captain by car, in the rain, to a paint supplier in Barry to get some etch primer. Wild wild life we liveaboards have...

For the tekkie folks again - the winter / spring work list looks like:

• Normal fuel filter changes
• Oil change for the wing engine
• Valve clearance adjustment for the main engine and genset
• Replace the exhaust elbow on the genset (not leaking but they tend to coke up after several hours use and they can also corrode though over time - hot metal with hot salt water being sprayed inside it....) The plan is to replace it with a stainless steel version that is reported to last a little longer. Very happy that our main engine has a keel cooler and hence no need to suck in vast amounts of corrosive salt water! See below:

There are also a couple of things that we will "get done" for us. The rear engine mounts take a lot of weight and torque and over time they split. One shows signs of this and so rather than wait for it to get worse, we will have them both replaced when we have our annual lift out. We don't have the kit to jack up the back of the engine / gearbox to replace them!

The other thing is a service for the heating boiler - a big Webasto unit that sees a lot of use during the winter and we like to have it working just in case we have a typical UK summer this year..... Why didn't we go south for the winter???