More tinkering thanks to the forecasts

Another update for the technically minded or very bored:

One last little pre-departure thing was to check out our fire control stuff. The boat is fitted with a Seafire system which automatically shuts down the engine room fans and the main engine and genset if the fire extinguisher bottles are triggered by a rise in temperature. Has to be done or the fire suppressant that the extinguishers put out would get dragged out of the engine room by the fans / eaten by the main engine rather than sit there to put the fire itself out. Not too good for the engine either, breathing all that stuff in and trying to burn it.

Some Nordhavn owners have reported that the unit has failed and will not reset thanks to component failures in the Seafire control box meaning no main engine..... Not nice if underway. We had considered this ages ago and got a few diagrams showing what to do if it failed but we probably hadn't taken it seriously enough. So, we did some checking of our control box. Luckily it is of the older type which doesn't have the same "prone to failure" problem as the later boxes.  All the same we looked at the wiring to ours:

which of course did not tie in exactly to the wiring diagram provided with the boat. Luckily the "normally open / normally closed" logic for the relays was the same and to get the main engine going again if the box failed is simple enough - one wire to remove and isolate. Getting the engine room fans going needs some wires to be bridged. Our wing engine is not part of the system and so could be used whilst the main is being restarted.

The nice Nordhavn technical folks in the USA are looking at the problems reported and said they will come back with a suggestion after escalating the failures with Seafire. We think that will mean simply wiring a couple of bypass switches around some of the relays in the unit.  In the meanwhile and until a definitive suggestion has come from them we've just made up a simple kit of parts that is taped next to the unit with instructions on which wires to isolate and which to bridge:

We sincerely hope not to need to use it of course.

Finally the weather suggests that there will be a window with waves around Land's End lower than the recent 6 metres. We plan to take advantage of it to move to the south coast somewhere.