Afloat again at Hamble Point

After the re-launch, we motored down to the Hamble river and into Hamble Point marina. This is, apparently, the priciest place to berth outside of London. It is ludicrously expensive as a visitor but, the folks who know Nordhavn boats are here and so it made sense to smile and pay. Through gritted teeth of course.

On the run down, we tested out the stabilisers and found that they worked fine but that the flybridge control panel didn't activate them properly. Hum. An email to Golden Arrow got an instant call back and information on how to reset the system to tell it that the remote panel was installed. That didn't want to work so the technical support man said he would pop over to sort it out, which he duly did. Great service.

What was on our "to do" list? Well, knowing that it might be a long while before we were back in the area, we had several maintenance items and some upgrades planned.


Maintenance:

• A new vibration damper for the main engine. We mentioned this before and had sourced the part for the John Deere tractor dealer in Bridgend as it was about 40% cheaper than via the UK Lugger parts distributor. Madness as they simply provide the Deere part anyway. Here is the front of the engine stripped down, with lots of nice drive belt dust visible:

The fire extinguisher you can see at the bottom of the picture was a precaution as the old damper has to be heated using an oxy-acetylene torch to free it - lots of nice Loctite special goo is used to hold it in place.

This is the exciting looking old damper, again garnished with belt dust:

And finally the rebuilt front end of the engine. Doesn't look at all different, this job only has a visible impact on your bank balance:

• Fixing the oil weep that we noticed on the trip to Lymington from Fowey and had temporarily sorted out - new O rings fitted
• Fixing a diesel weep from the fuel supply valve on the port fuel tank - now that we have burned enough to be able to pump it all into the other tank! A job for some Wurth sealant - for the German readers, yes there should be an Umlaut over the u.
• Fixing the oil drain hose weep - a new piece of hose and fittings
• New backup battery for the Satellite compass

Upgrades:

A new navigation PC. Although the old one had behaved perfectly since the second Ethernet card (that runs the satellite telephone modem) was disabled, it was time for it to go to PC heaven. The new solid state device is a touch smaller so we are blessed with more locker space now.

Old:

New, cuddled up into a corner of the big locker:

Of course, it couldn't work first time. The Maxsea navigation software refused to work with the graphics card that came installed in the new PC so it had to be swapped over. Luckily Paul from Maricom is a patient man......

The boat has a huge isolation transformer which does a great job in protecting us against electrolytic corrosion when plugged in to the shore power in a marina. (For the non boating types, when you plug into shore power, you are in danger of becoming part of an electrical circuit with other boats that simply eats away your anodes and then propeller and anything else metal that the stray current can find. Not good at all. Most boats simply have some form of isolator, we have the big transformer which works much better at protecting us.)

However, when you plug into the marina electric supply, the transformer takes a spike of power to get started and this can trip out the shore power. We had a soft start device fitted to prevent this:

The soft start is a small Mastervolt unit, the white box hanging on the seat frame here. The transformer is the "all American" big ugly box beneath it. No comment, anything about Americans having to have it bigger and better would be a cheap shot.

Roland, the MDS marine man who did all the mechanical work also aligned the main and wing engine drive-trains for us. The wing was clearly in need of it - had probably not been touched since new....

The two tables on the boat had suffered a bit with the first owner and so we had them re-varnished. Happy crew time. Woe-betide anyone who scratches them, bashes rings or watches against them or spills hot drinks now. You have been warned...

A new silencer was fitted to the Webasto diesel heater. For some reason (cost?!) the original installer fitted a truck / coach unit. This isn't gas tight and when installed in the lazarette could let fumes into the boat. The new unit is a proper marine one. The captain then had to adjust the wooden screening around the heater as the new silencer was much bigger.

And finally, some nice custom made steps / handholds to allow the captain to climb up the fibreglass stack and clean / polish it. Oh goodie. The Nordhavn Europe guys had these fabricated and fitted for us - a good job done.

Yann (Nordhavn Europe), Roland (MDS Marine) and Paul (Maricom) are all really good guys if you need any boat maintenance. (And we don't get a  discount for mentioning them, just in case you thought so!)

So, once the work was completed we felt it was time to test everything with a little trip. Of course, as the bank holiday approached, finding a berth in the Solent area was not going to be easy....