Refit #4. Net New Holes <= 0!

After taking a bit of time off on Sunday to enjoy Split, it was back to the project first thing Monday. Laura and I were both starting to get worried about the lack of tangible progress we were making in the project, so we decided to take a more tactical day by day approach that would hopefully allow us to shift some things permanently off our ever growing todo-list. At least, that was the plan…

Objective number one was therefore to identify all the areas on the deck where we we thought there were leaks, remove the offending items and then rebed them with waterproof sealant. After spending close to two hours in the local hardware store trying to choose an appropriate sealant from the hundreds available, we had all the tools we needed for the job. I had already cut some inspection hatches from inside the yacht, which thankfully only revealed one suspect pulley fitting that appeared to have a leak; however, the two sets of deck clutches (jammers for gripping ropes) were not moving freely so we decided to take these out for maintenance at the same time. Finally, we knew that there was a leak under the engine commands on the starboard side, and in the process of taking that out we decided that there might also be issues with the autopilot, bow thruster command, compass, chart plotter…once we added them all up we realised we had managed to create eleven new openings in the deck. With the end of the day approaching and rain forecast overnight, we taped up all the openings with duck tape and retreated with our tails between our legs.

After spending an evening cleaning out the gunk from the clutches and old sealant from the various pieces of kit, we started the next day keen to close up all the holes we had made the day before. The duck tape had done a reasonable job at keeping the rain out, but it wasn’t perfect so the sooner we could get everything back to being watertight the better. Sealing hardware into the deck is one of the rare areas where not only did we have multiple detailed online guides, but they were consistent! The process bears quite a lot of similarities to icing a cake, and after a slight misfire on the first attempt (it turns out there is such a thing as too much sealant), we got the technique down and finished the day feeling pretty proud of our efforts.

A second night of heavy rain was the perfect test for our work, and when we discovered that Serenity First was bone dry the next morning, we were elated. Unfortunately that feeling quickly dissipated after ten minutes when I discovered that in the process of fixing the leaks around the navigation instruments, we had somehow managed to introduce a whole range of errors in the Raymarine system (the system that lets the instruments “talk” to each other). The strength of this system is that Raymarine has made it very easy to connect all the different instruments together (e.g. compass, wind, depth, speed, GPS, autopilot) and the information is then shared between them all. But in the process of trying to work out what our problem was, I discovered this was also a weakness, as identifying where the problem was required mapping a tricky spiderweb of wires that went all over the boat.

Three hours later I had successfully deployed our multimeter for the first time to find the presumed culprit – a broken fuse in the autopilot driver. But my new found pride in previously untested engineering skills was smothered when this turned out to be an unrelated fault, so it was back to the drawing board. Eventually I found that the faults disappeared when three of the display units were taken out of the daisy chain – two of which were ones we had resealed in the day before! Laura commented that since my expletive ratio was well above 0.25, we should probably stop and go for a beer and leave this problem to tomorrow.

Taking the units back out a second time was pretty demoralising, especially since our excellent sealing efforts had now made the job twice as difficult. I resolved from this point on I would aim keep the net number of new holes in the boat each day closer to zero! When we were able to get them free, we opened the units up to find the insides on all of them were damp (and the autopilot controller had at least a cup full of water in it). Our budget was strained enough without having to absorb replacing all of the nav displays, so we resorted to the tried and tested bag of rice trick. First taught to me by my mum, covering wet electricals with rice has had a greater than 50% success rate over the years (including an iPhone that had fallen into a toilet…) and we prayed that the Croatian basmati would be up to the job. Two days later, the displays were removed to find the rice had actually baked itself onto the circuit board in a number of places. We trusted our gut instinct that rice wasn’t a good conductor (despite looking a bit like a resistor) and it was better to leave the bits we couldn’t get off in place rather than risk damaging the board.

Connecting each display in turn (with an appropriate testing drumroll) revealed the autopilot and depth display had been revived. Only the wind display remained unresponsive, but luckily this was by far the cheapest of the three units to replace. It felt like a good place to end the week, and whilst we had certainly taken some steps backward along the way, the fact that we now had a dry boat and a (mostly) functioning navigation system meant that we felt we had just about taken more steps forward. The only clouds on the horizon were literal, as the weather forecast looked awful for the next week, and for the time being we celebrated by cranking the latest Ke$ha album, and raising many glasses to Sarah Marshall’s grain based approach to electrical maintenance over our weekly Friday pizza.

PS – As a heads up we are in the process of catching up to the present day and so will be posting a bit more frequently than once a week for the next few weeks