The winter projects were complete and we were keen to get back out on the water having got a bit stir crazy for not being able to take Mariadz out for a sail.  We also had a lot of new toys to play with (calibrate) and we were keen to do some of the basics prior to our commissioning trip with Olly from Seapower.

After the engine checks when I added some water to the fresh water expansion tank, we start the engine and had it running for about 30 minutes prior to leaving our berth because it was low tide and we had just missed a lock out.  We cast off and Maria eases Mariadz out of her berth.  The Allan Gardiner is also leaving at the same time and is in the lock first.  However, we are confused. The autopilot indicator seems to be showing the opposite on its rudder indicator. When we turn to port it shows the rudder as starboard! It is amazing how disconcerting that is, especially at low speeds when you may not have much steerage anyway. And we now have to line up against the pontoon in the lock with Allan Gardiner taking up half the lock….

Like most people we have a system on approach to berths and pontoons. I am at the gate amidships with three lines: bow, stern and mid lines. On approach I call out the distance from the pontoon in metres and suggest minor course alterations. Now Maria isn’t sure where the centre for the rudder is and is having to feel her way, and this is the first time we have been out for nearly nine months (the longest time we have ever gone without sailing somewhere). Of course, Maria brings Mariadz in like a boss! At just under 50cm from the pontoon, I step down and walk alongside with the mid line in hand. At an agreed point, Maria gives a burst of reverse gear and stops Mariadz, I tie off the mid line short and take the stern line to tie off.  Mariadz is now mine (“all mine”, cue evil laugh). Maria has control of the bow on the off chance something goes wrong, she can bring that back in but as I stroll to the bow and tie us off there is no drama. A couple of springs, the water at low tide comes into the lock fast when you are near the gates, and we are ready to go.

The lock gates open and we are ready to go. We are 100M out of the lock gates and all of th engine alarms start going. The engine is overheating. We assessed our options quite quickly and agreed to aim for the waiting pontoon and investigate further when we are safely tied off. The lines and fenders are moved appropriately and we glide onto the pontoon. I go to the engine room to check what is going on while we leave the engine running on tickover to hopefully get the temperature under control.  This is something I was always told to do with cars when they had been run hard. After a head gasket failure I was told how important it is to have a cool down period. Switching the engine off stops all of the cooling system flowing and the engine continues to heat up  because there is nothing to take the heat away from the engine. I check all of the stop cocks. The engine intake may be slightly off completely open, must have been knocked but it is a small amount off, so I adjust it.  I think that and the tickover is helping to take the heat down, very slowly and the alarm stops.

The next two hours are spent on the waiting pontoon getting the heat under control. It is still running warmer than usual but is back in the green. In this time we have calibrated the autopilot so it does show the correct rudder angle. We have dropped a lead line and checked the offset for the depth. This can also be checked against the new navigation. We also look at the fish finder, radar and the forward facing sonar. No fish 😦 the forward facing sonar is also not showing the depth correctly. Finally the changes to the AIS are checked, we can see everyone else but we don’t seem to be transmitting. I also notice that the main battery bank doesn’t seem to be charging although that may be because of the very low revs.

We don’t seem to be getting back to normal operating temperature and Maria and I agree to abort the trip and return to our home berth. We are obviously being very careful, minimum possible speed and lowest revs. We get into our home berth and as I tie us off the engine alarm sounds again but we are back now and safe.

Unfortunately, it is two weeks later before Lindsay at Seapower is available (bad timing and he is at the start of a major engine project with limited time). In the interim, with assistance from friends we start the diagnosis. The expansion tank still has water in it so we focus on the raw water system. We can see water going through the raw water filter but trying to get the lid off seems impossible, it felt like there was a vacuum holding it fast. Trying to get it off we break the lid, that will be ordering a bright shiny new one from foxes then!

We get the impeller cover off and it looks fine, only 100 hours since it has last been changed. We check the through hulls for the engine intake and the under water exhaust (after it has gone through the water separator), both through hulls are fine and water is passing through them fine.  So we have water coming in, going through the filter and the impeller looks fine. We now can’t do any more testing until the filter cover is replaced. It is almost certain that air is being sucked in through the cap even though we have taped it and put plastic in it to try and secure the seal. I now have a copy of the service manual for the engine high has the best advice I have seen on the fresh water pump…. How to disassemble the water pump….Don’t, it’s too difficult! Within a week we have the new filter lid.  We decide we have probably exhausted our knowledge and should wait for the expert.

When Lindsay comes on board, I am unfortunately away in a meeting in Surrey.  When I get out of the meeting, I hear the results. Lindsay rechecked the fresh water cooling and although there was water in the expansion tank there was little coolant in the engine itself.  He adds six litres of coolant. There are multiple belts on our engine and the one driving the water pump looks a little loose although we knew the impeller was moving although maybe not as fast as it should! The belt is tightened. Maria and Lindsay run the engine under load for 45 minutes and there is no overheating issue. However, Lindsay is concerned that some of the older pipes should be replaced.  The engine now needs to cool down so that we can understand whether we have lost any more water which could indicate problems with a pipe or the cooling system internals.

The next day Lindsay returns when I can be around to discuss next steps.  We check the water, the fresh water system seems to have lost a litre of water. 😦 we discuss what could have happened.  We have recently had our hot water system changed and a new tank fitted, this attaches to the engine cooling system to provide hot water while the engine is running. This change may have caused the water level to be down a little if it hadn’t been refilled but would it explain six litres? We decide to refill the fresh water. The next test should be isolated from the hot water system. I switch off the valves that isolate this part and Maria and I top up the oil to the mid point. Later we run the engine under load for 30 minutes.  The engine at the end of the run, there is more water in the expansion tank, clearly that has worked as expected. The next day when Maria and I check the levels we find water although it may be a very small amount down, but it was filled to the top. The expansion tank has also returned to the level it was at the start.

It sounds like the next step is to test the engine some more and also checking the link to the hot water tank, maybe there is a leak there…. We also want to get the engine serviced and as you can see from the picture, the lighting in there is terrible so we would like to do that too. As you will have seen from previously, it has been a while since we spent thousands on the engine….so we must be due again 😦 the good news is though that once done the engine room will be immaculate and like our engine room on the Dufour.  This will help us in the future and also the experience of working on the engine will help us when we go on our long journey.

watch this space.

Unfortunately, the saloon table had also been damaged and poorly repaired as part of the fire that had happened on the boat a number of years ago.  We tried a couple of fixes but nothing really looked very good. We were really looking for the wow factor that made you think it was something special as soon as you came into the saloon. Now some people would have just said that was enough and lived with it…….but every time we would have come down into the saloon it would have been there and we would have seen it.  Maria was keen to have a wow when you came into the saloon rather than a “nice boat, shame the table is a wreck!”. We looked at a number of options over a long period of time.  Removing the poor veneer on the table showed more fire damage and the original wood was blackened from fire.  We had success previously with the walls of the saloon being re-veneered and so we tried that, although the main part of the table was fine, there was a problem where the veneer got to the edges where the fiddle (grab rail on the edge of the table) was. We looked at whether we could put a fill in the corner so that the edge of the veneer would not show  but everything we tried couldn’t deal with the very tight curves on the corners of the table.

The overall design of the table is very good and the workings were still ok too.  In the end we were starting to think that we would need to have a new table built.  Our berth in Ipswich Haven Marina was adjacent to the Spirit Yachts area – the yacht made famous in the James Bond film Casino Royale.  This unfortunately meant that Maria wanted something that wouldn’t look out of place on one of these. We spoke to a few people and Kevin was recommended to us. Kevin discussed options and he agreed that he could do something special with the existing workings of the table that would be a centre point of the saloon and would give Maria the table that she really wanted. Kevin spent a lot of time on the table and designed it with two compass roses when the table is extended with the fold out insert in place. When the table is smaller it has a single compass rose. Kevin quoted for the work and we were happy. We subsequently found out that he is a bit of a perfectionist, hence why Maria likes him so much 🙂 and he took the time to do a really good job even though it coincided with the birth of his child.  He cant thank him enough.  While the job was being done, Kevin had left us with a plywood top to our table base so that we could still use it while the work was being done.  In March, the work was complete and despite having to delay the install for a week because we were away, the install was ready to happen on the 19th March. Kevin had offered to send photos through but Maria was unequivocal in her desire to see the table for the first time when it was in place.

We are really, really pleased with the results.
The table looks magnificent and we are glad we decided to go for the contrast with the rest of the wood in the saloon because it makes it even more of a centrepiece.  We have yet to see whether Kevin will decide to do some other projects for people, it isn’t his day job, but we can safely say that his attention to detail, eye and workmanship are fantastic and if he does choose to do more of this we are sure he will be a huge success.

During our ownership of Mariadz we have had intermittent problems with the aft grey waste box which is fed from the stateroom heads (shower and sink) and also the galley sink. These have usually been as a result of a stuck float switch in the grey water box that gathers it all together before it is pumped away. The result of this has been a bilge full of water, or water stuck in the sink/shower. In the past we have cleaned the grey water box regularly (more precisely Stevie from Watercraft UK has cleaned this out for us and cleaned up the float switch). Basically the scum from the shower and the sink waste after washing up were causing us problems. During the last winter, we decided that we would look at this setup and also upgrade the Whale Gulper pump. The upgrade was to use the toilet version of this pump.  This is equivalent to the more powerful of the two grey water pumps but has a much wider pipe, let’s not linger on why that is required for a toilet pump…..

However, we have started to have problems with the pumping out of grey water again. This started in the last couple of weeks and we noticed that the pump was staying on for a long time and not pumping much water out.  On investigation we found two of the non return valves, to sop the water going back into the pump and grey water box, supplied with the brand new pump by Whale had failed. One of them had turned inside and the other had a split in it. The first problem effectively reversed the non-return valve and so the pump was pushing against a valve trying to stop water going past.  A service kit with replacement valves fixed this problem, I will follow up with Whale though. For the next few days, the pump seemed to work ok, well pretty much as it did before. Then, we noticed the pump performance deteriorating again. We had never previously had problems with the pump part of the grey water system so this was particularly frustrating.

Olly from Seapower had fitted the pump and diagnosed the initial problem as I eagerly watched on. So at least I now knew how to strip the pump down and check for problems – and although the pump has been moved to be more accessible it is still a horrible job of fiddling with pipes and pumps under the floor in the bilge in difficult to get to places. I did this adding a little extra water to our bilge as I went :(. The good news was that I couldn’t find a problem with the non return valves. I decided to swap the top of the Whale pump with our old, working, Whale pump to see if there was a problem with the pump caused by our valve problems previously.  It did exactly the same. I put everything back together so I could show Olly, who was arriving imminently, what was happening. I retested…..now no water was going out, surely I couldn’t have reversed the valves accidentally when I put it back together? Thankfully I hadn’t. Olly and I worked together to try and diagnose the problem. Pump seemed fine, valves were fine (thankfully, that could have been quite embarrassing) but the outlet pipe seemed to be blocked. Now previously when we had the initial problem, Maria and I had put a hose through the this pipe to make sure it was clear but it now appear to be blocked.  When we repeated the technique, the hose water was bouncing back off something.  We went to the other end of the pipe at the  through-hull to see if we could see the blockage.  The pipe itself seemed fine.  However the through-hull seemed to have a problem. There was a ninety degree bend immediately prior to the through-hull so we took this off and found that there was a huge blockage in this. I then set about clearing this out. I found two plastic screw covers (the ones that disguise screws and make them look like the headlining or woodwork. These had jammed across the pipe together, which was little wider than these at the bend. This stopped all flow, especially as they had been packed in with hair and assorted other gunk.  On cleaning this out we put the whole system back together and tested.

Previously, it has taken 30 seconds to clear the grey water box and at bad times up to two minutes. The pump started and I went up to the deck to check for the flow coming out. I peered over the side to see a dribble coming out, deflated I returned to the galley to talk through with Olly our next steps. He seemed happy and said that the pump had finished before I got there! In fact the pump had emptied the box in seven seconds! Even more amazing was that the pump emptied the box so fast that an emptying sink could not fill it quickly enough and so the pump ran and shut down and waited for more water before finishing the job.

So success. And Maria is happy to keep the boat because she can shower!

However, how could we stop these problems recurring. Some time ago we had bought a filter for the shower to stop too much hair getting through and this had worked well catching a lot of hair and needing cleaning regularly. I decided I wanted the same in the galley sinks.

£1.49 at Dunelm Mill gets you one of these stainless steel little puppies that fits the plug hole perfectly, has a very fine mesh that catches rice grains etc and looks like it is standard fit. So all those problems could have been averted for less than two pounds….

We have discussed how we changed the Mariadz navigation to update it and added in Forward Facing Sonar.  With Maria at the helm when we come into bays and marinas, the use of the FFS may be limited by Maria’s ability to see anything 😉 So we have added a small plotter on the helm which will display this output so that Maria has a complete view of what is going on in front of Mariadz.

This of course presented problems with space since the steering column was quite full already and also had a radio stand right next to the compass which of course throws the compass off 😦 . we looked at the design of the standard steering column and were a little confused. Engine hours is important to keep an eye on but does this really need to be on the helm? We decided to move it down below. There were also some redundant switches.  By carefully rearranging the steering column, with Olly from Seapower’s help, we were able to come up with a better design that also fitted in the chartplotter and the control panel for the Forward Facing Sonar.  The radio bracket has been moved away from the compass and the new remote control for the autopilot has also been mounted on the pedestal. Another change was removing the standard key to start and replacing with two buttons.  At the end of the day the keys are all standard and so add no security but can handily (?) break off in the ignition at times.  We just need to make sure that the ignition is switched off from the master control down below to avoid someone taking Mariadz away.  Finally we added LED lights to light up the table when needed.

We are very happy with the results – now to take her down the river and try out the new toys 🙂

Please also note the hand-stitched leather steering wheel cover that Maria and I did with our own fair hands – we don’t make other people do ALL the work 🙂

You don’t need to be on Mariadz very long to know that there is very little compromise if something isn’t working quite right.  We have a theory that the last thing we want to be doing is to be fixing something in the middle of the Pacific or on a remote island if there is any chance of avoiding it.  Other items just don’t look how we want them to.

A perfect example of this later case were the reading lights in all the cabins.  These were original fit and so 15 years old, tarnished, held together with tape and just not what we wanted.  I had already swapped these to replacement LED bulbs but they were still not what we wanted for the place that will be our home for ten years.

But we couldn’t find what we wanted. None of the standard chandleries had the combination of quality and features that we wanted.  We stumbled upon Calibra Marine Equipment at the 2013 Southampton Boat Show.  The first time we looked we loved their selection but they are not cheap.  The lights we liked were LED, touch control (so no prominent switches), adjustable for brightness and looked very nice and modern.  However, we decided to keep looking and couldn’t justify the cost. A year went by with no luck in our search, we returned to the Southampton Boat Show the following year and met the charming South African lady we’d met the year before.  Once again, these were the only lights that we liked.  This time, we decided to bite the bullet and buy a couple for our bedroom. We would have to find a cheaper solution for the other cabins.

The following year we returned to the boat show and bought two more for the fore-peak, but showing lip-service to the concept of a budget bought cheaper units for the bunk room. We are really pleased with the results, although anyone who has been on the boat will also know that the above picture has a glaring omission….where’s Bonnie! One other thing about these pictures, we have to say a big thank you to Anna Chatburn for our gorgeous Mariadz pillow.  As you can see it always has pride of place on the bed. The blue pillows get a pirate and RNLI teddy, Anna’s one gets a cat!

Maria has the full standalone karaoke setup but of course needs all of the lighting too…not quite. This was us trying to be sensible about the likelihood of having to work in darkness at the mast.  The Moody comes with a forward facing deck light which works quite well on the foredeck.  But for working at the mast or the boom we wanted to add some lighting.

So so as part of the electrical refit and moving of various aerials up the mast, we decided to add LED spreader lights (HELLA LED Black Sea Hawk).  These are unbelievably bright and I guess may even work as a security deterrent too 🙂

As we go round the world we want to be self sufficient for power and that means understanding what power is coming in and going out of the batteries. The main type of battery monitor available is an amp hour counter which counts the amps going in and the amps going out.  We went with the e-xpert lite based on Olly’s recommendation.  Over time, these type of monitors become less accurate though and need to be reset but they do provide useful data about what is happening right now such as amps in or out. However, anyone with an understanding of our approach to the refit will not be surprised that we would not be happy with a single way of measuring these things which could become inaccurate. There is another type of battery monitor which has a very complex algorithm within it and measures the battery itself to calculate a percentage of charge in the battery bank. This system actually gets more accurate over time as the algorithm helps it to tune it’s settings to “learn” about the batteries it is monitoring. The combination of these two monitors gives us a powerful way of understanding our power use and state of charge. This will allow us to manage our power use much more effectively.  We can monitor and adjust our power use and it will also help us to understand the effectiveness of our charging mechanisms: engine, shore power, generator and solar power. We will report on how well this works in practice in future posts.

Of course the decision making process was difficult and involved a lot of research and expert impartial advice from Oliver at Seapower who also installed all the equipment for us.

As part of the original fit of the Moody, it had come with an inverter, long since removed by a previous owner, and an HFL generator, which had been scrapped soon after our purchase because it didn’t work and was uneconomical to repair. The entire cooling system had corroded on the original 10.5 KVa generator and although it had a little over 700 hours, it had clearly always been problematic. It was also very noisy with ill fitting sound proof panels and we knew that we would have the same level of problems as the previous owners.

So the generator was removed and we considered our options.  The generator had been sized to allow for all three air conditioning units to be on at the same time without causing an issue. We don’t expect to be running these very often at all and certainly not all three! We suspect what had happened to the generator apart from inadequate maintenance was that it had always been run at a low load hence causing problems with the engine that forms the core of the generator.  Now despite the fact that we still have all three aircon units, a large microwave, watermaker and several other potentially high energy use items, we didn’t think this justified over-specifying the generator. But of course, we would need to cope with higher loads at times…..

A quality inverter charger was a good solution since it would seamlessly top up the power output from the batteries.  This works fine when the high load is for a short period but needs to be watched if this lasts a long time.  No-one wants to drain the entire battery bank in an hour!  This allows the generator to be specified as a little lower power output which means it will more often be used at a reasonable load for the generator. I also means that you need to have good battery monitoring in place and more on that on another post.

Looking at a ten year timescale, we knew we needed to buy a quality product and two in particular stuck out for us: the studer, which had been bought by some good friends of ours ( Clare and Vic on Njord) and the Victron. The victron had some good features but the Studer seemed to have a better reputation for quality.  The clincher for us was the global support network.  They are both good but there are several times more dealers and repair centres for Victron, so in the unlikely eventuality that we had a problem, it would be easier to repair.

Then we started looking at the generator.  We did a lot of research on line and came down to a short list of Northern Lights, Kohler and Onan. There was little to choose between these but the supplier of our electrical systems were also Onan dealers and this helped to sway our minds.  The fact that the generator was a difficult install which required it to be taken apart and taken in pieces to the engine room before being rebuilt was an added complication. By choosing Lindsay at Seapower who works closely with Ollie, meant that this could be done without invalidating the warranty on the generator.

The install is incredibly neat with a remote digital panel on the flight deck that Maria considers our new electrical panel to resemble.  Having spent some time with Lindsay, I have to say we are happy both with our choice of generator and supplier.  Lindsay has taken care making sure that our install will be trouble free for as long as we have the boat. One additional feature we added was to have the hot water from the cooling system feed the hot water boiler.  The generator creates a lot of heat and it seems a shame to throw that away into the sea when it could be used o provide a useful source of hot water for us.  It also means that we have redundancy in the hot water if the heating element breaks.

Sorry the pictures are all a bit boring, the key here is that everything is done under the surface so that the boat is powered well at anchor, at sea or in a marina with limited power.

Actually, an advantage we have found straight away in the Marina is that we no longer need to worry about switching off the electric fire when we want to boil the kettle.  Previously this always tripped the switches but now the boat can support this for a short time from the batteries and then recharges the batteries later.  We think this will be quite useful when we are away for small intense loads like the kettle or microwave although we need to be careful about the rate that we deplete the batteries as well as the amount of power we take out.