We like Mariadz to look good as well as being in good working order. So she gets a regular clean from us but sometimes you feel it needs a little more. We’re not OCD (well mostly), but we think, since Mariadz looks after us, we should look after her and make sure she always looks pretty.

This blog is about some of the products which we have found really help us. Firstly, windows. Back when we had a house, it had a gym and we had mirrors fitted along one wall. The conpany that fitted them did a great job but the mirrors were filthy when they were first put up. We looked on and thought “that’s our first job”. However, the team from Kent Blaxill had different ideas and produced a cleaner in a white aerosol. A spray and a quick wipe and the mirrors were perfect. No elbow grease and no smudges or streaks. It was amazing and we have used their glass and mirror cleaner ever since. We use this on the windscreen and all hatches and we do think it comes up great. Well at least until the next spots of dirty rain! 

Next up, the antislip. This was getting black dots all over it and looked filthy. I generally clean the boat down with car shampoo, with added wax, and a soft brush. However, this wasn’t touching it and the black spots remained. Last year, I had addressed this problem with a nail brush in the direction of the grooves.  This was back breaking stuff but came up well. There had to be a better way though. Going onto the forums and speaking to our neighbours came up with a mild bleach that would help and so we used the same as we had on the cockpit tent, Mould and Mildew Remover. I did use the nail brush too but it didn’t take as much elbow grease.  I was also very careful to wash it off very quickly from the teak using a lot of water to dilute it as much as possible. We don’t want discoloured teak! This process is a lot easier to do but time will tell whether this the product has cleaned it or just changed the colour of the marks from black to white! Still the anti slip has come up gleaming and looks like new which I guess is the point of doing it!

Although, we refresh the teak using Wessex Teak Cleaner & Renovator every year or two, this is not something you do every week. We hose down the teak after a good trip out, especially if there has been sea water over the decks, and I will generally try to make sure the teak gets thoroughly cleaned using the hose. It is amazing how much dirt is just lying on top, although that may be because of where we are adjacent to docks. I use a soft brush across the grain so hopefully I am preserving my teak. She is a 16 year old boat though so I imagine at some stage in the future the teak will need to be replaced. Hopefully, we will be able to do that where teak is especially cheap as we tour the world.

Readers of the blog will be familiar with the stainless steel work we have had done. We have mast pulpits, solar panel frame, life raft holder, davits, pushpit, pulpit, main anchor, stanchions, dorades (or funnels), protection for dorades and a bbq holder! Now it’s payback time for all of these features – cleaning…. The stainless gets dull over time and water spots make this look even worse. We have tried a number of stainless cleaners and have generally found the clear liquid ones to be rubbish but the cream ones to be very good. So this weekend, Maria set about polishing the stainless and it looks excellent. We have yet to find the perfect product for this yet so any suggestions more than welcome.

Another trick which we discovered early in our boating career was how to remove black scuff marks from the hull. We discovered this when the day skipper candidate on the school boat we were on hammered the yacht into halfpenny pier at Harwich. We stopped and the skipper got out another cleaner, Cif Professional Cream Cleaner, this removes all those little pontoon scuffs to a reasonable state, at least until you can haul out and do the job properly! Of course the skipper didn’t let anyone else have a go, he decided that one accident was enough for that trip. This lack of opportunity pushed us to buy our own boat so it ended well.

We have also noticed from time to time blue marks on our top sides. These may have been from the hose, the electricity cable or a blue sheet for our sails.  Either way, these marks were incredibly difficult to get off.   Much scrubbing ensued with no real progress.  That was until we found Magic Sponges. These little white blocks remove the marks really well although they do waste away quite quickly – I guess we might use them a lot! They are also substantially cheaper than exactly the same product available in the chandlery!

So the only thing left to add to this blog in the future is how to clean up the exposed corner of main sail that pokes out when you have in-mast furling. This gets dirty over time.  Neat car shampoo did a reasonable job but I have a cunning plan for how to fix this. I will update the blog with progress….. but for now that is how we keep Mariadz so clean!

We like having redundancy and spares on board Mariadz. One of our fallback navigation and anchor watch options is the iPad but these are power hungry apps which will run down the batteries quite fast. So, in true Mariadz style, this has led us to get a charge capability in the cockpit which will work for phones and tablets.

After some investigation I was able to find a water proof charger that ran off 12v or 24v.  This fitted in perfectly with the 24v power supply we had available in our steering console.

Fitting was really easy, especially when your next door neighbour has a selection of fifteen hole cutters – you know you will find the right size! The charger is fitted next to the 24v socket and is paralleled off the power supply.

I have to be honest here. I didn’t check the back of the unit properly and made an assumption on which was positive and which was negative. As always that assumption was wrong and the device didn’t work. On checking with my multimeter we definitely had power at the socket and at the base of the unit. Therefore the new part must be faulty, I start looking for a number for the supplier to make a complaint. That is until Maria pipes up to check whether I have the positive and negative the right way round. Just check it….. Oh really, Maria, don’t be ridiculous, of course I have checked… oops. Swapped over and it charges fine, who would have guessed? 🙂

So, hole cut, I have to unscrew the top of the steering column so that the locking nut can be fitted.  One last test and we now have a Twin USB Charger and with two three metre cables we are able to charge our devices even with the cover on. I rechecked the anchor, swim platform and ignition! I never trust anything to stay working when I “haven’t done anything that should affect that”. I’m pleased that everything is still working.

Dahling, one can’t have a sundowner without ice!

And so it began. The hunt for a portable ice maker that could make ice quickly and didn’t use much power. Our cruising friends have always said that ice is very unusual on cruising boats and potentially a commodity. I can see the ice maker being on permanently! Very reasonable rates, or you bring the alcohol and we will supply the ice.

When we had the house we had a top loading ice maker that worked a treat but the location we wanted the ice maker was tucked in next to the washing machine in the centre of Mariadz. A top loader would have been awkward so we needed a front loader.

The one we selected was the Hostess Ice Maker which makes ice within fifteen minutes and can produce half a kilo of ice an hour. A little faster than Maria normally uses it for her drinks:)

The best thing is that with the inverter running, it doesn’t use much power at all so perfectly reasonable to run it off batteries, as you would a fridge, and let the solar pump the power back in.

We had a lot of electrical work done a few years ago and as part of this we had some extra 240v sockets added in useful places with usb sockets included. The vast amount of devices that are now chargeable by usb seemed to make this a sensible change.

Unfortunately this year one of the usb units had failed and of course it is the one we use the most. The double socket is a standard model from screwfix but while I wait to source a suitable replacement, it seemed sensible to swap the broken socket for a functional one that we don’t use. This was done on a Sunday and flush with the success of having fixed the windlass remote I switched off the sockets on the board and set about unscrewing the ten screws to swap them over. Half way through this Maria has dished dinner and rather than letting it go cold, I stopped what I was doing. We thought we would watch something on the tv that we had recorded on sky… better switch the sockets on to do that!

No prizes for guessing the idiot next step. Having eaten my gorgeous dinner, I picked up the screwdriver and went to finish the job without remembering to switch off the sockets again. Earth and neutral were fine but as I touched the live there was a loud bang and lots of sparks. Fortunately, the screwdriver was insulated and so I didn’t personally try to conduct the electricity but it was a stupid mistake. Of course all of the trips have gone so I need to reset the power which includes a breaker next to the inverter charger, two shorepower breakers in the lazarette and the shore power itself on the pontoon. It takes some time to remember all the potential breakers that may have gone but eventually the power comes back on. I leave the sockets off so that I can finish the job, hoping that I haven’t damaged anything. After screwing everything together, I can safely switch the sockets back on. I test the two sockets I have swapped and the original faulty one is working but the one I was working on that banged has no power. Maria then notices that another one in the same area is also not working. This is also true for the sockets in the aft cabin but the ones in the galley are working fine. Hmm, that is weird. We seem to have only one 240v circuit so how come half of the sockets no longer work? I spoke to a friend of ours, James on Valentine, who suggested that the short circuit caused by my screwdriver may have caused a problem with one of the sockets and any that are “downstream” of it.  Apparently, this is common in older houses where one of the wires downstream effectively acts as a fuse and breaks but how do you find the break? Hopefully it would be into one of the sockets that isn’t working. I decide to start where the problem first occurred, by undoing and reseating the live wire (having switched off the sockets first of course). This had been blackened and I wondered if this was causing a poor connection so I set about cleaning it up and reseating it. By luck rather than good judgement this resolved the problem and all of the sockets were then working. I still have to do the job properly, which will include stripping the wire back a little but that needs to wait for the replacement sockets.  Next time, of course, I won’t forget lesson number one: double check that the power is off!

When we bought Mariadz, the anchor windlass had only just been replaced and we laughingly have suggested that this was the only thing that actually worked properly when we got her. So it was with some dismay, that on our first weekend of the 2018 season, we tried to deploy the anchor and got nothing.  Fortunately this was immediately traced to the remote as we were able to control the windlass from the now working button on the steering console in the cockpit. However, this would need to be sorted.

Having checked the remote control unit it was clear that one of the pins had broken within the connector, having corroded badly. It wasn’t repairable and actually the buttons on the old controller had started to fail as well as the labelling. Time for a replacement then.

Originally we had a Quick remote control and this seems to have done well so we decided to implement a like for like replacement. The new one has a slightly updated design, and also had the option of a torch, but the rest looked very similar. We decided on the two button control with lamp But as you can see they sent us the six button instead.

I decided I wanted to resolve this issue without the help of my friends, whether fellow boat owners or professionals. At least until I had messed it up, anyway!

The first stage was understanding how the old control unit, itself an eight button, was wired in. Only two buttons worked and on investigation there were three wires required to make this happen.  Thankfully, on checking the manual, it appears that the colour of the wires hasn’t changed since this had been fitted so that would make it easier. I decided to do the same, with the slight added complexity of adding in the two extra wires required to support the torch functionality. In retrospect I am thinking that it would be good to connect all of the buttons to the windlass so that if there is a problem within the remote, I have an alternative. I may go back and do that!

The female end of the connector for the remote is mounted on a stainless steel bracket (top right of the picture) and of course the design of this has changed which meant I needed to redrill holes into the plate for the new female connector. The wire then goes around the aft part of the anchor locker to the control box. Having crimped each of the wires and having learnt my lesson from the recent stereo replacement, we were soon ready to go. I am connected up and so go back into the boat to switch on the power. Silence so at least I haven’t done anything stupid! I go to the steering console, let’s make sure that I haven’t broken anything, it works. That’s a good start, at the very least it isn’t worse than when I began. I plug in the remote and go for the buttons. The windlass springs into life and works as expected. I have wired the power for the light to the incoming live but wasn’t sure which negative to use so I test it and that works. I am now feeling very smug as I replace the cover for the box, cable tie the wire for the remote and finally fit the cradle for the remote to the wall of the anchor locker.

One more test…..of course it still works! How many times have you put everything back together after it has been tested and it suddenly stops working. Final test at the steering console and no problems there either.  We have a fix.

However, my smugness is short lived after I start the next simple job.

Those that are familiar with our journey will know that music is important to us. One of the first things we did when we got both of our boats was install new stereo systems with Bluetooth, to access music on phones, and a remote control to allow us to control the stereo from anywhere on the boat. Having installed the same head unit, a Sony, on both boats we have been happy with what we have – Music.

So it was disappointing to find that after four years intermittent use, the stereo was resetting itself every five minutes or so.

That has to be sorted. So off to Halfords and look at the stereos…. we’re looking for one with Bluetooth and a remote control, preferably a Sony, a good name and the same as we had. “Nah, none of those sony’s come with a remote control”. Ah, back to the drawing board.

Maria and I go back to the internet, what stereos come with a remote control and the answer is……none of the quality makes but a number of random makes you have never heard of have them.  There has to be a reason. And there is. You don’t need a remote anymore because remotes are so last year, this year is the year of the app. Sony, and other manufacturers, do an app that controls the stereo. Now in a car setting that sounds even worse, i can imagine the random passenger in the back that now has complete control of my stereo, including the volume, without my knowledge! Can you imagine the horror of Amanda Jane Furber having access to this technology!!! Dancing Queen from ABBA at top volume, and nothing you can do! 🙂 obviously one thing you can do, “I’m sorry officer, I had to drive off the cliff to stop the music…..thank you for saving me.” And you know, the stereo would have moved on to Waterloo!

Anyway, having established that a remote is no longer required, we return to Halfords to choose a suitable stereo. Stereo selected, a Sony MEX-N6002BD Stereo, we are off home and my job is to fit it.

That is a five minute job…….

Of course the first task is to remove the old stereo which is obviously made very easy by the two metal keys that are apparentlyinserted in either side to pull the old one out. Simple. Remove the plastic surround by pulling hard, with. Little inward pressure and the access slots are revealed. Insert one of the keys and then the other, pull them out together and hey presto.

You have two keys in your hands and a stereo looking at you saying “what?”.

Ok, carefully ease the left key in, hear a click. Same with the right. Ah, now I know what I did wrong. Most importantly pull very gently and together. Easy…. Easy….. you have two keys in your hands and a stereo sit sat in place looking at you saying “what?”. Repeat for at least twenty minutes.

My new stereo is not even out of the box yet, I’m not having that! In these situations the internet is your friend. So let’s spend half an hour watching random videos of Eastern Europeans with broken English, explaining how you can also do this using two large chopping knives before you lose patience.

The problem is that the chassis that holds the stereo, has some side panels that spring in and hold the stereo in place by catching it. This stops it coming out in normal use. So let’s get in there with a flat had screwdriver and lever the smug {expletive deleted} out! That works perfectly 🙂 time for a victory dance!

Then we can pull out the aerial plug and the plug for the power and speakers so we can get the old one out. Get the new one, plug in and job’s a goodun! The aerial connection is fine but even though the functions of power and speakers are exactly the same from the same manufacturer, it’s a different plug! Thank you, sony.

Now the plug has two sets of cables with big black plugs on the end, one for the power and one for the speaker system. I imagine, in a car, these plug into the stereo harness – if you are lucky. On a boat, no chance. However, the advantage of buying the same manufacturer is surely they haven’t changed the colours of the speaker cables over time……. Writing this has made me realise that I haven’t checked that the speakers are connected to the right cables, but surely not..please….. that may be a later blog!

I recall that when we fitted this stereo, we had the same problem and removed the blocks and replaced them with spade connectors for each wire ensuring that there was a good connection with each cable. So I need to do the same for the new setup. Cue 24 hour delay as I go to my toolbox and find all I appear to have left are the female end of these connectors!

The next day, I have acquired more than enough spade connectors, I have been here before. I have my useless crimping tool from the toolbox and I get to work. Firstly, the wire stripper on my tool doesn’t work so I will be doing this the old fashioned away. Fourteen wires later, I have a harness with spade connectors and I’m ready to go.

I decide to swap the harnesses one wire at a time by disconnecting one wire from the old and plugging the same colour in from the new.  This looks like spaghetti junction in no time and I am sure I inadvertently do it the wrong way round a couple of times as I get confused. But it is all done soon enough and the old harness drops to the chart table as I disconnect the last wire. What could be simpler, plug it all in, leave the stereo half in the hole just in case and off we go! So plug it all in, power on – excellent, tune the radio and I have stations so the aerial is working ok – excellent :). I also have sound, excellent 🙂 🙂 …..from one speaker, not so excellent! 😦 pull everything out and disconnect. One of the speaker wires has come out of its spade connector. Surely that wouldn’t cause such a big problem but repaired I try again – no difference. Take another look, push in the spade connectors a bit more, put it together again and……nothing at all. Not even power. The power lead has come out of the connector but pushing it back in solves that problem, but still sound is an issue.

At this stage, your mind plays tricks on you. Clearly there could be nothing wrong with my work so maybe as I have pulled the wires to connect them, I have pulled something out further behind the stereo. Better check the old one stick works. Go through the one wire at a time swap to the old harness and plug in the old stereo. Of course the sound is crystal clear on all speakers! Guilty as charged 😦 So let’s take a look at my harness. I decide that I haven’t stripped back the wires enough and so redo them all with new spade connectors. I am particularly careful to make sure that none of these puppies are getting disconnected!  The painstaking swap of the harnesses is working fine and we have a successful retest 🙂

Now we all know what happens next. You put the stereo back in the hole properly, fit the fascia surround, switch on the stereo and nothing!

But not today.

This stereo has dual Bluetooth connections which allows you to have one as a source for music and another as a remote control using the songpal, or Sony music centre, app.  Installing this and you have full control of the stereo from anywhere on the boat, and off it. Absolutely perfect for a marine setting. Now to get somewhere where we can play our music loud!

A final thought, there are people out there who wonder why I don’t do everything myself! When something this simple takes this long, maybe there is justification…. nah, I enjoyed it and every day is a school day, I have learned some useful things through the experience.

Mariadz had the same cockpit cushions for seventeen years and if we are honest they were a little “tired” and not as comfortable as they could be. We knew before we left on our big trip we would need to sort these out and Maria has also been keen to remove any semblance of the old, dated dark blue from the boat so she would be changing the colour at the same time.

Having reviewed a number of other people’s designs and after four years of our own use, we had a fair idea of what we wanted. A friend, James, has been doing canvas and cushion work around Ipswich and offered to help us. It was never going to be a simple job! Hopefully he doesn’t have too many regrets.

Looking at other centre cockpits, a number of people have seat cushions with a back that goes around the combing of the cockpit. This does look good but we felt although great as a seating area, it restricted us when using the cockpit as an entrance. It would be difficult to lift out the seat if it was covered by a back.  This would mean that the cushions get stood on by outside dirty shoes.  So we decided to mix it up.

The design exercise was quite complex since we knew how the area was likely to be used. Just looking at the access areas for the cockpit made that clear. We have two side entrances and also access at the aft end of the cockpit. During the winter, most people come in via the aft entrance.  We were keen to make sure that people didn’t stand on the seating, irrespective of the entrance and so a number of folding sections were incorporated so that these could be lifted to provide a step and to stop the cushions being spoilt. These folds were two at the aft area of the cockpit and one on each side. James incorporated a nice way of fixing these with Velcro underneath the seat and a flap which meant that the join was very strong and invisible when the seat was setup – much better than two cushions butted up to each other with Velcro on the edges. This works for all four entrances into the cockpit.

When we are sailing, our normal position is under the spray hood. When I say “our”, I do mean Maria, Bonnie, Clyde and myself, since the cats like to be on deck when we sail.  This area has full backs to make it comfortable but these were a real headache to get right with the curve of the cockpit and the shape of the back that cushions need to rest against. All other areas have a selection of loose cushions, in a couple of contrasting colours, that can be used for the backs.  This gives flexibility and also means that when Maria sits behind the wheel steering with her feet, she is surrounded by comfy cushions.

So the design is finalised but colour is also important with cushions since a dark colour absorbs too much heat meaning you can’t sit on them comfortably and too light a colour attracts a lot of dirt and always looks mucky.  Hopefully we have struck a nice balance with a shade of tan that matches the colour themes on the boat but hopefully won’t be too hot.  If we ever get some decent weather in the UK, we will know for sure. Our final aesthetic feature was to have all of the cushions piped in a different colour to provide detailing and a contrast.  This worked really well. These two colours reversed gave us our contrast cushions.

As always with a boat, there were a few niggly things that we need to get done before the start of the season. The first of these is the throttle on Mariadz.  This is located on the steering binnacle next to the forward facing radar control but Maria has always struggled when the engine is in gear. Out of gear, the throttle is smooth and works a treat, having changed the throttle cable some years ago, but in gear it is incredibly stiff and you find yourself using excessive force, going too high on the revs and then having to pull back to where you wanted to be. This is something we wanted to have fixed before starting a new season.

We had spoken to Lindsay at Seapower about this some time ago and there was concern that we may need to replace the entire throttle control with a completely new and very different unit. The first job though was to check that we didn’t have issues with the throttle cable and particularly the gear cable that allows you to select between forward, neutral and astern. This was one of the jobs arranged for while we were away skiing in Austria. On our return from holiday, Maria was planning to turn the boat around so she was bows-to the pontoon. This is our preferred wat round and gives her a nice view over the stern to Ipswich Centre. It provided us an opportunity to test the new setup. After the work was done, there was a complete lack of swearing when Maria was turning the boat around so I think we have a result!

The second job that had been outstanding for a while were the calorifier pipes for the generator. These move the heat from the generator cooling system into the hot water tank, thereby heating up the hot water and also cooling the engine coolant. We have this setup from the main engine but there were a couple of reasons for getting the more complex setup that supported twin coolant inputs to the hot water tank. Firstly, we have a source of heat in the generator coolant which we would be wasting, I don’t like that. Secondly, we like to have redundancy in our systems so there is no single point of failure. We can now heat water electrically on the shorepower (or generator), electrically using the inverter charger and the batteries (very sparingly), from the engine coolant and now from the generator coolant. Surely one of those must work at any given point in time? If not I have a solar bag, that heats water from the sun, on deck!

There was one consideration regarding this which related to the use of the generator. It is important to work the generator when it is turned on. The last generator was 11.5kW and had been continually used at very low loads which killed it. It was scrap after 700 hours. Although in retrospect we could have rebuilt it, the advice at the time was not to and hopefully we will have none of the issues that the last owners had with a flaky generator. To avoid this problem, we took the decision to buy a generator with a lower power output (7kW) so that we were always using a high proportion of its capacity. In the few instances where we need more than this for a very short period, the inverter charger could pull from the batteries but this was likely to be for seconds and so wouldn’t impact the batteries too much.

The electrical part of the hot water system requires 1kW which is a good start load for the generator, especially when you add battery chargers and aircon units. So by using the pipes and removing that element of the load, I may make my job of loading the generator harder. I guess I can always switch off the heated water element if I want!

Lindsay had to do some design work with the Onan generator to get this setup to work well but it is now a very neat installation. Unfortunately as part of the testing of the new setup, Lindsay discovered that five vanes from the impeller, that drives the cold water around the engine, had broken.   This has been in place exactly two years and had around 70 hours of use so a little worrying. Of course a broken impeller is not good news and we are grateful that the generator hadn’t overheated because of the lack of water flowing through the system. We are now investigating what has happened but I understand that we may need to be more careful at checking the generator when it hasn’t been used for a little while. I suspect more frequent changes of impeller will be required too.

We were just about to go on holiday at the end of January when we suddenly started to have issues with the shore power. It seemed like there was a loose connection somewhere and so we had to trace it back from the pontoon power supply.  It became clear that there was an overheating problem in the plug that goes into the boat. This had caused the plug to partially melt! This was a replacement plug that had been fitted by an electrical engineer in our early months of ownership.  He no longer works for us on Mariadz.  When I eventually got into the melted plug we found that the live had been stripped of all insulation inside the plug and some of the wires were broken. This looked like they had been cut when fitting the plug, since the break was quite sharp and clean. We think with up to 16A going through this wire, it got hot especially with a little water ingress to add some corrosion to the mix. Clearly we couldn’t use this anymore and we were grateful to have found it before something more serious happened, you hear of boat fires caused by this kind of thing.

Still the whole premise of Mariadz is that there should be redundancy in all systems For instance we have seven different electronic means of navigation, as well as paper charts.  So we have a plan and will use the batteries during the day, topped up with a little solar.  If the batteries get too low and definitely in the evening, we would run our generator to provide 240v for the heater, aircon etc and recharge the batteries for the next cycle. That sorts it out while we get a new plug ordered and the cable checked.

Not a bad plan, we have 880Ah of domestic batteries and some energy saving especially around the lighting which is all LED. O think we are in good shape to run this setup for as long as we need with limited additional charging.  That evening, we have the batteries coming back up by running the generator and the boat is warm since we have been running the reverse cycle air conditioning. It gets to bed time and so everything off, remembering to switch off the hot water, because the immersion heater really takes power when run from the batteries. So our overnight load is not great, even with the fridges and everything else running we shouldn’t take more than 10% of the total capacity or 20% of the available capacity running throughout the night.  I get up in the morning to find our battery monitoring reporting 0% capacity! Have I inadvertently left something on? I check everything and there are no problems. Running the generator during the day gets the batteries back up but it seems very strange.

In the evening, after running the generator the batteries are not fully up but they seem to be most of the way there.  We go through the same bedtime routine, and I double check the power usage, it looks fine. The next morning we have the same result. So now we have no shore power and our batteries are failing!

We do have a further fall back position though, we have bought a long extension lead with the right plug for the pontoon power supply so that we have power on board without running the generator. This acts as a sensible short term solution but obviously doesn’t give us hot water, microwave or the aircon units.

I have ordered a replacement Marinco plug from Fox’s chandlery but when this comes it is the wrong one, a simple mistake to make despite our checking and the chandlery checking the order before we placed it! Ollie from Seapower usually does our electrical work and unfortunately with me and Maria working hard at the moment, we can’t afford the delays while we sort this out ourselves. We just need it done and can’t wait for me to get back late from work, reorder, wait and then fit.  Ollie comes on board and wires us a temporary solution while the plug is being delivered and also checks the batteries.

When we got Mariadz, the AGM batteries had been fitted in 2010 and we don’t know how well they had been treated. Ollie asked me to review our replacement options particularly around AGM or Gel batteries. We had discounted Lithium because it remains four times more expensive than the other two, however it looks great for the future when the price comes down and I suspect in another 7-10 years when we are looking at our options, lithium will be the choice. So we have discounted the expensive option for the moment and that leaves us with a like-for-like swap of the AGM batteries or a swap to Gel.  One of the main advantages of AGM is its ability to handle a high current drain but this is a large domestic (880Ah) bank and so it is unlikely that we will have drains of this type. The Gel batteries on the other hand are suited to slower discharge rates and warmer temperatures, now you are talking Maria’s language. We decided that the Gel better suited our likely use in the future and went with these. In the end we got a good price for Victron batteries which hopefully will be well suited to our inverter/charger and solar MPPT controller, both of which are Victron.

While we are on holiday, Ollie is able to source the batteries and also get a new plug lost asked for a second plug wired to a 32A plug, the boat can handle both 16A and 32A input and so we should be able to handle either size of supply on the pontoon.  It will hopefully stop issues where they run out of 16A power and we have to share a reduced capacity.

So quite an exciting, and unfortunately, expensive time! One consideration though is that the batteries must have been near their end of life. I don’t think seven years is too bad a lifespan especially when we don’t know if they were treated well in the early years.  We knew we would have to replace the batteries before we left on our trip but had hoped it would be nearer to our departure date. The other thought is that we could have discovered the issue with the batteries at the start of the season when we anchored overnight. Then the delays getting the problems fixed could have stopped us sailing for a few weeks. That would have been frustrating so maybe we should be grateful. Finally, due to Ollie’s swift action we were able to keep the fridge and freezer running and so didn’t lose a lot of food, this was a concern especially going on holiday.

When we bought Mariadz, she had a mattress in the aft stateroom that was good quality but had seen better days. It did not fit the platform well and the two halves of the mattress separated during the night leaving a moat to catch the unwary “traveller” in the morning.  Clearly, this was more of a problem for Maria than I since she often sleeps like a starfish with all of the covers in the winter and none in the summer (only joking darling….?).

Our first, temporary, solution for this was to buy a memory foam topper for a king sized bed which went over the top of the mattress.  This worked well and stopped us being eaten by the gap in the bed. It also meant that we slept on something new rather than on someone else’s bed. I know you do it all the time in hotels but somehow it feels wrong when it is your own bed.

The long term solution was to replace the mattress completely and make sure that it was made to the right size.  After much investigation, discussion and consultation, we decided to go for what we felt was the best: a Visprung mattress from Passmore. It’s good enough for the Queen so surely her ladyship should be fine with it.

This wasn’t the cheapest option but we were keen to have a long term solution. Julie-Ann at Passmore was really helpful since we were keen to have a joined up mattress with two different halves. The split is needed to allow access to the storage and machinery (aircon) under the bed. Despite the knowledge that they would be a perfect size we were still keen to have a zip joining the two mattresses together and since nobody wants to sleep on a zip, a cloth cover over the zip to make sure the bed was comfortable. The visprung beds are quite firm and there was an option to go extra firm which Maria toyed with, in the end we are grateful that we went with “only” the firm mattress.

As you’d expect from a quality company, the workmanship and fit are perfect and so now there are no excuses for not crossing the border to the other side of the bed…..poor Maria! This may entail a strip search.