Trashing the boat - electronically

The time had come. Correction, the eye-wateringly expensive time had come. We mentioned before that although our Furuno Navnet gear was still working well, the spares situation was getting tighter and if something critical failed, we might need to hunt down a spare unit from eBay. The kit is now just over 12 years old - amazing that Furuno can still supply any parts really. The B and G equipment was OK bar one screen that was failing. The challenge was - do we wait for a failure or jump early while the existing kit has some value to someone?

We had talked to Paul, the Maricom man and considered Simrad equipment but somehow it felt and reacted more like "leisure" equipment. We liked the better parts availability and backup that Furuno seem to provide and the fact that some of our original equipment would stay in place. After much agonising over which route to go, we decided that it was perhaps a little too early to go pure PC and so opted for a Furuno TZT2 setup with our PC running Time Zero alongside it. As it would take ages to explain why and you would all be very bored, message us if you want to know more!

The time came so..... Paul started taking the boat to pieces:

and then he really went big:

Yup. lots of wire in there and a nice pile of equipment to put on eBay:
.

That is less than half of it!

The pilothouse became a work zone:

with boxes of new kit everywhere.

For the marginally interested:

We had Navnet 1 equipment (fitted at about the end of that range, before Navnet 2 came in) and will be replacing the two open scanner radars, the three plotter / radar units and screens, one GPS, the depth, speed, wind sensors, adding an NMEA 2000 network, interfacing that to the existing NMEA 0183 kit, fitting a FLIR (forward looking infra-red camera) and updating our Maxsea PC software to the latest Time Zero offering. We will keep our Furuno AIS, Furuno satellite compass, the Simrad autopilots and lovely Icom radios plus the peripheral bits like the CCTV camera system.

For more normal folks:

We will have new radars, one of which will be digital. They will give us better definition, some sexy new features like better automatic target tracking and collision warnings etc. The new plotter setup is way more advanced, better screens and much faster / smarter than our old kit. The PC package is also a leap forward in function and will allow us to show the FLIR picture of what is happening in the darkness, move the FLIR to look at a specific place on the chart or show where the FLIR is pointing on the chart to help identify things at night. Great for entering strange harbours. If you have not seen one, it is a bit like watching an old black and white TV image of the area even in pitch darkness. A wildly simplified comment but you get the general idea.

More importantly, the new stuff will be under warranty, be supportable and have a reasonable future lifespan (we hope!!)

Luckily the Maricom guys have fitted out many Nordhavn boats and kind of know what they are up against. We will report on progress - a couple of weeks work for them /us looms.

Even less exciting maintenance stuff:

The captain  put some more wrap on the Webasto boiler exhaust as the original stuff was starting to fray. Roland from Proteum came to give the crane some surgery. It was suffering from droop - an age not alcohol related thing we think. Probably a leaking valve or seals on the ram letting the fluid pressure slowly drop. He replaced the valve - still droopy. Droopy means that the crane drops a few mm overnight, not whilst moving the RIB around luckily, although that could be how things develop! Ram seals on order, a job for next winter now.

The Maricom team looked a bit like a synchronised swimming outfit (but in mid air) when fitting the new radars - almost balletic:

Things progress....