Last week I drove over to Maryland to see how the boat faired during the winter months. It seems to have made it though ok (so far). I'll know for sure once we put it in the water start the engines then start turning on the various water pumps and systems. But for now I can say that our batteries were not fully discharged. One of the house banks were down to 72% and the other was at 80%. The folks at Mastervolt told me to expect about a 2% decline per month which would mean they should have been around 90%. To me this confirms what I already knew my batteries are older have a fair amount of cycles on them and I would guess are at about 75-80% of what new ones might be. Hopefully we will get a better feel for that this summer as I've considered changing them out before we leave on the big trip. I believe two are seven years old and the other two are 5-6yrs old. Most the manufactures suggest they have a ten year life span. Unfortunately everything on this boat flows through these and the inverters one way or another so we are 100% reliant on our batteries to provide power for everything from the TV to the autopilot when away from the dock. If these were like normal tractor batteries that most older boats like our tug used I would just replace them but this boat came with the fancy lithium ones (which we wanted) and are supper expensive. Ours are Mastervolt as is rest of our system and then of course that integrates in to CZone which pretty much controls everything on the boat. I'll have to look into the ramifications of getting an alternative battery brand as I suspect I can save about 50% over another set of Mastervolts.
Over the winter I had taken all the sails and the lazy jack system off the boat so I could drop them off at the sail loft for maintenance. They were able to fix up the stack pack which I was a bit concerned about. It turned out the sun cover on our self tacking jib was not on correctly which allowed the UV to damage some of the threads which had caused our problems with the battens falling out of it the one night it flopped around a bit. They added some chafe protection to the main sail then of course there is the genoa that had to be replaced. Other than that we were in good shape. Now that the sails were all nicely folded they were also much easier to manage. It only took two of us to carry the mainsail now and it fit in the truck much better :).
Once at the boat I was able to get the shrink wrap and the frame supporting it off. Seems shrink wrapping it was a good call.. I'm told they got a fair about of snow and ice in the area this year and as a bonus the boat still looked pretty clean. I did ask the yard to wax it and for the first time ever also enlisted their help to do the bottom paint. This was a job I probably should have done but I'm guessing it would have taken me two days minimum. Frankly I won't miss the sore muscles or being covered in that sticky stuff for the 3-5 days after. Maybe it will be worth it? I was hoping to get the yard guys to come over and help get the sails on the boat with their craine but after several requests they seemed to prefer to forget about it and head home vs helping me. Of course spring is a busy season for them and they were quite distracted getting other boats ready and launching all day so I can't blame them for not remembering to give their time to me when they actually had real paying work to do. I was able to roll the sails over with quite a bit of effort then got some rope on them which allowed me to hoist them both up using the spinnaker halliard. This worked out pretty well but frankly would have been much easier had I enlisted additional help. Unfortunately I could not get the jib on as I lost the halliard for that sail last fall when I took the sail off. This will require a trip up the mast and then rerunning the line back though the mast which means I'll have to find someone willing to support this effort. With any luck I can drag Max along with me as he likes going up the mast. So with that project on hold I decided to focus on getting the main sail back on. I started with the stack pack and after about six hours finally had it on. I should note when taking it off I noticed that a few of the lines involved with it had broken and been patched together by the previous owner so this involved a couple trips to West Marine to purchase new line to make the system work as designed again.
My next project required a trip to the hardware store for an angle grinder. Last year when using the anchor we found the anchor was just a bit too wide for the anchor locker opening. To fix this issue I sanded back about a 1/4 inch of the aluminum support where it got hung up on in the anchor locker. After a bit of testing it looked like this simple solution should fix the problem.. Hopefully it does not return when it's really hot out again causing things to expand? The other project I wanted to address was our anchor chain. When we had the boat surveyed it was suggested the chain had seen better days and was due for replacement. After letting about 100ft of chain out it seemed that really only the first 30-40ft of chain was severally rusted so I cut it off at the 50ft mark with my shinny new angle grinder. I think we started with 250ft of chain so this now puts us down to about 200ft which should still be plenty. Additionally there is another 200-250ft of rope rode attached to that. I will take another look at the chain next fall or spring before we leave to ensure it's still in acceptable shape to hopefully serve two more years of almost full time duty. On the upside I suspect I eliminated about 75-100lbs of weight from the boat :). Lastly I replaced a bunch of anode's and added a line cutter to one of the props. When we bought the boat the previous owner had to replace the prop that was lost during the sea trial. Unfortunately it seems he just replaced the prop and chose not to purchase the line cutter that was attached to the lost prop. Needless to say I ordered a new one that matched the one on the starboard side ensuring maybe some level of protection from jumping in the water should we take out someone's crab pot along our journey. The anode's on the boat were not a big deal to replace but it seems the ones on the props had to come from Gory. This just means they are German and expensive. Somehow I was able to get those shipped in and replaced before I left. I had planned on doing an oil change & impeller change on the outboard but after looking at it decided the oil appeared clean and should be fine for the limited use it will see this season.
After three days of work I think I managed to get the list down to just two things left to do before launching. I still need to replace a though haul for the underwater exhaust for our generator which is broken in the off position (This has been broken since we purchased the boat). Finally the yard needs to get the bottom painted. The remaining items on the punch list can be done once it's in the water. I hope to make it back to the boat in a week or so as I left the main sail sitting on the top deck waiting to go on and will hopefully have the new through haul fitting for replacement. Lots to do but first I need to head out to take some prom pictures of the boy and his girl friend. See you next week.
Last week I drove over to Maryland to see how the boat faired during the winter months. It seems to have made it though ok (so far). I'll know for sure once we put it in the water start the engines then start turning on the various water pumps and systems. But for now I can say that our batteries were not fully discharged. One of the house banks were down to 72% and the other was at 80%. The folks at Mastervolt told me to expect about a 2% decline per month which would mean they should have been around 90%. To me this confirms what I already knew my batteries are older have a fair amount of cycles on them and I would guess are at about 75-80% of what new ones might be. Hopefully we will get a better feel for that this summer as I've considered changing them out before we leave on the big trip. I believe two are seven years old and the other two are 5-6yrs old. Most the manufactures suggest they have a ten year life span. Unfortunately everything on this boat flows through these and the inverters one way or another so we are 100% reliant on our batteries to provide power for everything from the TV to the autopilot when away from the dock. If these were like normal tractor batteries that most older boats like our tug used I would just replace them but this boat came with the fancy lithium ones (which we wanted) and are supper expensive. Ours are Mastervolt as is rest of our system and then of course that integrates in to CZone which pretty much controls everything on the boat. I'll have to look into the ramifications of getting an alternative battery brand as I suspect I can save about 50% over another set of Mastervolts.
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