Finishing off, getting culture and heading to Lymington

After all the fun of the relaunch (we still cannot see it as fun by the way) we opted to spend a few extra days in Swanwick. That was to allow the Maricom folks to finish off testing / setting up the Zeus alternator regulator and to calm down a little. It also allowed us to book tickets to the Mayflower theatre in Southampton to hear Martin (of Ann and Martin fame) sing in a mass choir event. We might be biased but his choir were way the best and he looked rather dapper in an orange bow tie. For those folks who know him, here is a "spot the star" game:

The other Anne (yes, it is confusing, a plethora of Ann(e)s in our lives) delivered the brown furry doglet for a little holiday with us. Anne was off for yet more surgery. We had a good day with Anne, Izzy and Richard an ex work colleague of the captain. It involved lunch at the pub then coffee and cake after a little walk down to Universal marina. Tough tough day. Izzy managed it rather well:

At Universal we saw another Nordhavn 47 out of the water, only this one had quite a bimini support structure going on:

We are not sure it will catch on, or appear on the Nordhavn options list.

It felt good to finally escape the rather up market and expensive Swanwick. Paul, the Maricom man had real fun getting the Zeus alternator regulator to talk to the Victron Cerbo box which kind of controls all the battery functions and the inverters. It would connect, run OK and then the link would drop for no obvious reason at all. As the Zeus box was suddenly disconnected from the domestic batteries it was trying to charge them "blind" and so to protect everything goes into limp mode:

It decided to do this on the way to Lymington. To be fair, limp mode is far from a problem. You can change the alternator output by tweaking the "field" current so it would be easy to balance the load from the navigation gear, fans etc. Even if you used the Zeus app to kill the alternator, the new batteries would allow a good 36 hour run using only 50% of their capacity. Then there is always the genset. 

Our trip to Lymington was not fun. Firstly because the Zeus to Cerbo link decided to die and secondly because it was rough. A strong wind over tide in the Solent, causing the typical unpleasant short sharp waves right on the nose. We were happy to tie up on the Dan Bran pontoon, take the doglet for a walk and then open a gin bottle. Washing the salt off the boat could wait until the morning.