Thumbs to twiddle

Nothing much has happened sailing wise, well nothing really.

We are sitting in our metal cage waiting for the Turkish version of Eid to be over and work can recommence.

In the meantime we have had the opportunity to get on with a range of boat jobs that might otherwise never get done. M has always been keen to get our varnish sorted out. 

There is a known issue with our boat and its varnish. For a couple of years of production the varnishing was outsourced by Beneteau and there was a quality control problem. This has resulted in blistering of the varnish when exposed to water and sun damage, and we have got it.

It has primarily affected the companionway which has been exposed to the sun and areas around the sink which has had regular water splashing.

The problem is that it is not varnish but a two pack paint. It therefore does not sand as does varnish. Some of it comes off in sheets when sticky tape is applied and ripped off (great fun), but much of it is very tenacious. So a hybrid approach has been needed including wood colouring touch up pens, sanding, scraping and varnishing. 

Before

After

She has done a wonderful job and hugely improved the appearance of the interior. It has become a little bit of an obsession though and from a sedentary position she will suddenly leap into action with brush and can in hand to deal with a just spotted blemish. 

Epifanes Rapidcoat semi gloss with a tint of teak has been the weapon of choice, and very effective it has been.

Before

Afteri

Meanwhile I have been a busy chap as well. Our “sugar scoop” at the back of the boat has had a doing, mostly by us when we had a wooden gang plank which banged and dropped onto it on a regular basis. 

We have subsequently sorted out our articulated passarelle and got rid of the wooden plank, but quite a lot of damage has been done to the gel coat. 

So I had fun mixing up gel coat paste and balancing in pigments to try to match the colour of our hull. Very therapeutic, a bit of occupational therapy to avoid over thinking the problems that the keel and the hull represents.

I have had along standing plan to integrate all the boat electronics into a system run by the on board Raspberry Pi single board computer.

I had already got the chart plotter operational. I have added in AIS, which stands for Automatic Identification System for Shipping. 

This is a set up whereby boats of a certain size are required to transmit data on there position, course, speed, identity etc, through a system that allows receiving boats to see them visually on the chart plotter. This is a huge asset in terms of preventing collision.

The boat has an existing electronics system from Raymarine from the early 2000s. While this is fully functional and works fine, it is no longer supported, and at some point will fail and not be repairable. I already have a problem with the wind instrument that I am trying to work through. 

This early Raymarine setup works on an in house data link system called Seatalk 1. This is a simple system but works very well. 

The question is whether I could connect the Seatalk 1 data into the Raspberry Pi setup. Amazingly the most recent iteration of the Raspberry Pi software, Openplotter, comes with this ability. So off I went.

The meat in the Pi

It was really all remarkably straight forward. 

I managed to hack into the Seatalk cable as it goes into the radar display at the chart table. 

All that is required is then to connect that to a device called an Optocoupler through a resistor that in combination protect the Pi from the higher operating voltage of the Seatalk system. It is then just a question of working out what connections go to what pins on the Pi, and amazingly it all worked.

I have also set up a multi-sensor device that gives data on atmospheric pressure, magnetic compass, attitude data to measure heel and pitch, an accelerometer and temperature sensor.

Chartplotter with AIS, rudder position, atmospheric pressure, heel, pitch, depth and wind, if I had mast and was afloat.

So the Pi now acts as the wireless access point and all the navigational data from the chartplotter and everything else is available on any mobile phone or tablet anywhere on the boat. 

So I have mounted a waterproof Samsung tablet at the steering position. The question of whether this will all be reliable enough to replace a bespoke system is still to be determined, but if we ever get to go sailing again, I can now try it out in the real world

The next phase is to get the Autopilot integrated into the system, which can be done, but that will mean learning to programme an Arduino micro-controller, which is beyond me at the moment.

Other jobs we have done include waterproofing the Bimini. We did this once before with concrete sealant. This only really lasted one season so we tried a different approach this time. I had come across the notion that clear Silicone sealant is dis-solvable in white spirit and you can then paint the mixture onto fabric, the spirit evaporates leaving behind a waterproof layer of Silicone.

Of course, they don’t have white spirit in Turkey, so we had to find something that looked and smelled similar. The closest product we could find was something that they call synthetic solvent, but I was not totally sure it was the same stuff. 

So a pilot project was performed first with a small amount. The mixture did not instantly combust, but did seem to fizz a bit, but yes the silicone did eventually dissolve with a lot of agitation.

In a well ventilated area

So one still morning I dissolved about half a big tube of clear silicone in 1500mls of the solvent, and we painted it on the Bimini. Preliminary testing seems to be very satisfactory with water forming immediately into globules that bounce happily off the surface. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts.

There are a few other projects in the pipeline, but they will need to wait until our keel problem is resolved. We seem to vacillate between gloom and despair at what lies ahead and sunny optimism, probably depending on the temporal relationship to beer consumption.

Not helped by various opinions from bar room experts and owners of competitor enginering firms, that what we are doing is necessary/unecessary, wise/bonkers.

The Insurers have written to say they have appointed a surveyor who we will hear from in due course, but without time scales. At least this means they have not dismissed our claim out of hand, but perhaps feel the need to invest some money in dismissing it!

In the mean time the longer we delay the more the Marina costs rise so we cannot sit about waiting, the work will need to go ahead.

So we went into Marmaris and found a shop selling Webasto air duct. It comes in either 90mm or 60mm and costs £25 per meter, and I need 3 meters.

I had measured ours at 80mm but I was assured that I had made a small error. So we returned with the 90mm version.

Not the same at all!

 I had not erred. The new hose would not go through the hole in the bulkhead, nor fit on the various junctions and connectors. There was not going to be much chance of taking it back for a refund, So I set about a making a repair.

I managed to extend the original hose through the hole in the bulkhead. One problem was that the damaged section was in poor shape with the inner cardboard lining delaminating from the outer aluminim layer. There was a danger that the airflow would lift up this inner lining and cause a blockage. 

So I deployed what my previous colleagues would recognise as a stent, in reality a baked bean can, inside the duct to prevent this.

 I managed to use the new 90mm duct and some advanced cable tie technology to replace the damaged section. Surprisingly it is pretty much leak free and seems to work well.

Then out of the blue I received an email from a name I recognised. This was from the chap who did our original boat survey when we bought her back in Croatia in 2017. Why on earth was he getting in touch? Just to sympathise? Or have a chuckle?

He has been appointed by our Insurance Company to be the surveyor for our claim! We are not yet sure if this is accidental coincidence or whether there is some design and purpose here.

 Is this just a strange juxtaposition of the forces of chance and serendipity, or is there a clandestine register of previous yacht surveys that the insurers have referred to and there is purpose here? Is there really a deity at work or is this the design of man?

Perhaps we will find out. However this could be in our favour with our insurance claim, or potentially a bear trap.

We await his arrival from Croatia, via Istanbul in a few days time.