Chores are nearly complete

Post winter work on BV so that she is ready to set off on Monday is going very well. The engine fires up and runs smoothly, the fridge has been serviced (to ensure that it continues to provide a steady supply of cool wine and beer), even the outboard has had some love and starts easily. Everything which runs on batteries has been recharged and checked, and similarly the anchor windlass, fixed radios and lights have been looked at. Irritatingly the only problem we have found is with the tricolour and anchor light. It's an expensive LED unit fitted by the previous owners and should have been good for 1000s of hours of use, however, the green sector of the tricolour and the forward half of the anchor light have stopped working. It could be due to a loose connection inside which may be accessible and easy to fix but, on my first attempt, the bolts holding the light unit to the top of the mast refused to turn so, at the moment, we can’t get it off. We also can’t get an identical replacement locally (or one ordered at a sensible price!) and we don’t have enough time to have one shipped from the UK before we plan to leave. So, we have bought an old style tricolour and anchor light and, during the next few days, I will make a few more excursions up the mast to see if we can repair the one in situ or replace it with the bulky old style unit. An awkward job with the seized bolts but it won’t stop us leaving because we can use the normal navigation lights and hang up an anchor light should we need to.

Much more satisfying was fitting a new chart plotter display to the steering position. The old one showed the radar display in black and white which was, at times, useful but it was of little use as a moving map display because getting chart data cards for what is now old technology is disproportionately expensive and the picture is poor. The new display matches the one at the chart table and we were able to fit it into the cockpit binnacle in an afternoon. What took much longer was running the NMEA2000 and Ethernet network cables because the plugs on the ends of the cables don’t fit through the ductings which are already full of other cables; a standard problem with retrofitting kit. We cut the new cables, used the old network cables as mousing lines to pull the new ones through the maze of ductings and then did some careful soldering and heatshrinking to reconnect the plugs. Now that they are all linked up, the two chart plotters talk to the other instruments onboard, the AIS, and (most importantly) share chart and waypoint information. They don’t display the radar picture from our old radar but they do show the AIS information. Ships therefore show up as a black triangle with, if it is moving, a dotted line representing its heading and where it will be in 10 minutes (assuming that it doesn’t change course). That is much more useful to us than a raw radar display for most of what we intend to do. But, if the fog comes down one of us will man the chart table radar display and that will become the main device to stop us from bumping into things. At some stage in the future, when the existing radar packs up, we will fit a new radar scanner which is compatible with the 2 chart plotter displays.

In some ways the work we are doing feels very similar to the preparation work we did back in Gosport before we left last year… except it is significantly warmer here and the water is much clearer, so when you get sea creatures like this swimming past you can actually see them.

Gibraltar