Refit #3. Battery Tests & Tight Spaces

This week was our first true introduction to the realities of working on a boat in a foreign country, as now that the boat was in her final resting place in the yard and we had mapped out the key projects that we needed to focus on first, there was nothing more to do than roll up our sleeves and get stuck in. I was really excited to get into the details around the upgrades to the power supply systems on the boat having spent the last few months working through the relevant sections in Nigel Calder’s ‘Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual’. This book is is an absolute gold mine of practical information and is quickly becoming our sacred text – I’m sure “Nige” will be referenced many times in future posts! Laura’s key areas of focus were on finding a good company to help us service the engine and tracking down all the potential leaks on the boat so they could be sealed up. As such, we each embarked on our own mini rollercoaster of discovery and finished the week with more than our fair share of physical and mental scars.

My week started with a paper-based exercise to fully define our electrical system in a way that would best leverage the existing equipment on the boat. This turned out to be a lot more complex than I had originally anticipated, as whilst I already had a fairly good understanding on the different components that we needed, I had previously skipped over the chapters on how to connect them together based on an assessment that this was essentially GCSE Physics and Design Technology. So it was only when I did get round to reading this material this week that I realised my mistake – apparently the cause of the majority of electrical fires is due to wiring issues, and it is therefore crucial to go through a fairly detailed analysis of the operating conditions for each wire. Around two days later my dubious masterpiece of engineering was complete and I could start the process of trying to find the various parts that Nige had guided me to.

It was at this point that I discovered that, whilst Croatia is fairly well developed as a yacht charter destination, the stores that serve the marine industry are not as well established as in the UK and USA. The net result of this was that items described by Nige as ‘commonly available’ were very difficult to find, even once you had managed to identify the correct words in Croatian to describe them. I initially tried getting input from some of the Croatians at the yard, but this only revealed my weakness in electrical charades. A combination of Google Translate with trial and error ended up being the most effective approach, but we still ended up deciding to buy much of the equipment in the UK given the local scarcity and often astronomical prices. Quite how we manage to fit this in our checked luggage will test our packing ingenuity, but as we like to say “that is a problem for future Alec & Laura”.

This then led me to the battery problem. The current batteries we had were grossly undersized for the boat’s electrical load and were not the right type for long term cruising. However finding a Croatian supplier of high quality marine batteries was a real challenge, which was further compounded by my realisation that our battery compartment was too small for the most common sizes of these batteries without major structural modifications. Eventually I found myself limited to a single model of Trojan battery, and Laura and I then spent an afternoon driving to different stores to see if anyone could source them. Thankfully we found an incredibly helpful friend in Nenad at Ciak Auto, who spent an afternoon cajoling his European distribution network to uncover five of these batteries – the exact number that we required. We smiled at our good fortune and waited for them to be delivered.

In the meantime, Nenad had offered us a discount on the Trojans at Ciak if we could exchange old batteries in return, and of the five that we already had we only needed to keep three. It therefore seemed logical to return the two in the worst condition and hold onto the three best ones. My experience with multi-meters at this point was pretty limited and it’s also fair to say that I didn’t start off giving the batteries the respect they deserved. And thus, in the course of my amateur testing efforts I managed to short one of the batteries (twice) – for those that haven’t done this with a car battery before, you get a really loud bang and a nice shower of sparks. I later remembered that Nige referenced this very issue as a near universal learning experience for new boat owners – I haven’t yet decided if this makes my mistake excusable or just further underlines my idiocy in ignoring his advice the first time… thankfully I emerged from the incident unscathed, although I’m not sure the same can be said for Laura’s heart rate. Even more incredibly, the battery I semi-destroyed was the worst one of the five and Nenad was still happy to accept it in its slightly charred state. And so, I ended the week with five new batteries that fit our compartment perfectly, as well a new found understanding of the power of electricity.

Switching to Laura’s week, she made short work of identifying and contacting all the Volvo Penta mechanics in the Split area and asking them for quotes to service our engine. It turns out this was one of the few areas where our cost guestimate was above what we needed; however, our chosen provider then upsold us on a couple of other services that we hadn’t even considered but were clearly also needed, and with that our first chance to save some cash was fully eroded.

She then set about assessing the waterproofness of Serenity First, which as you have correctly guessed is one of the more important criteria of a boat. The first items on the list were the seacocks (a word I had never found amusing until I typed it just now), which is sailing jargon for fancy taps that connect to pipes that go through the hull so that you can block them off if needed. Nige had warned us to pay close attention to any corrosion in these crucial pieces of kit, and therefore the entirely green copper colour that greeted Laura caused some initial consternation. An evening’s Googling revealed that if this corrosion was limited to the surface then it wasn’t an issue (a point that we later verified with a marine surveyor), and after some happy Dremelling the next day Laura confirmed that this was the case for all our seacocks – crisis averted!

Laura spent her remaining time looking for leaks in the upper half of the boat. Thankfully these were few and far between and all but one had previously been identified in the survey. The one that was new to us was only revealed after Laura spent some time crawling around the deeper recesses in the back of the boat, where she found some tell tale rust weeps from one of the bolts holding the bumper bar on at the back. With her confidence high from the seacock success, she proposed that we take off the bumper and reseal these nuts as an easy project for the afternoon. Unfortunately, getting the nuts off these bolts in the limited crawl space of this part of the boat was a test of strength, patience and flexibility. And then we discovered that the thread had been crossed on the final bolt and could not be removed. We decided that a hacksaw was our only recourse, but again were impeded by the space restrictions such that a total of over two hours sawing were needed (and four hacksaw blades!) before the offending bolt could be cut free.

All in all, the experiences of the week were are real lesson in how much longer stuff takes to do when you don’t speak the local language and are relying on book and internet expertise to guide you. Thankfully, we’ve discovered a great craft beer bar about five minutes from our apartment called Leopold’s, which offers a range of remedies for those needing to rebuild their self-confidence. I’m sure by Monday morning we’ll be raring to go once more, but this timed armed with a more realistic set of expectations.