The Trinidad Refit (part II)

As Alec explained in his previous post, we did a LOT in our c.6 weeks in Trinidad refitting Serenity First for our Pacific year. Frankly there were times I thought we’d lost our marbles with the amount we set out to achieve. But, somehow we managed most of it and didn’t kill each other in the process. Here, I answer the same four questions Alec posed to himself in the last post and offer a few more musings and stories about the refit experience.

How did we do?

This refit is the hardest I think I have ever worked on anything. Even my time at MIT pales in comparison to the intensity of our six weeks in Trinidad. We typically started work by 7am, if not earlier, and worked hard straight through the day. But, this approach allowed us to complete the vast majority of our project list in the minimum time so we could get back in the water and out of the yard as quickly as possible, meaning more time for the fun part of cruising (that is, if things would stop breaking – more on that in a future post).

But, no, we didn’t actually quite finish everything; we left Trinidad with something on the order of 13 out of 167 jobs un-ticked. Several of the sewing / fabric related projects (dodger, hatch rain covers, new mossie nets, etc.) still remain, as well as a few internal beautification projects (repainting light fittings, fixing nav station LEDs, tidying up / improving various installations) and other minor bits. But these are non-essentials that are easy to do while we cruise. And even so I am still astounded by how much we achieved. Serenity feels like a whole new boat!

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With that, here are my highlights and low lights from the refit, following on from Alec’s:

Proudest project: New Bimini

I am most proud of the new bimini that I made for Serenity. This is the big canvas awning over the cockpit that provides shade and protection from the elements on deck. I am so pleased with how well it came out and with the quality of workmanship I was able to pull off (kudos to my wonderful Sailrite sewing machine for making all this possible) – the new bimini is robust, fits the frame very well and looks so pretty (especially when compared to the old one!). I hadn’t fully appreciated just how dead our old one was until we put this new one up. The new version’s shade is excellent and it is also 100% waterproof; by contrast, our old one was practically see-through it was so threadbare and provided only a brief reprieve from rain before it would begin to leak like a sieve. The new bimini majorly upgrades the experience of sitting on deck, and makes Serenity look extra classy!

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Toughest moment: Plumbing macerator bypass

There were several extra-hard parts of the refit (antifouling the bottom of the boat, re-sealing the huge deck window, etc.), but I think the macerator bypass work has to take the cake as the toughest of my projects.

The macerator pump is what allows us to empty our holding tank (which holds toilet waste until it can be disposed of). Without going into too much gory detail, we needed to install some new piping in the system to improve our ability to flush said tank clean. Reasons why this was hard: 1. there were active waste pipes involved, 2. the space for the additional piping was extremely tight with relatively poor access, 3. new pipe is very inflexible and so convincing it to go around corners in tight spaces was a battle of wills. I initially scoped this project as a simple, 2 hour-long task (how hard could it be to plug in a couple of new pipes? LOL). When after a full day I had not even half of the new parts in, I was feeling pretty low.

I had to call in Alec’s help because I was simply not strong enough to get some of the pipes in, meaning now there were two of us in this little hole muttering and occasionally shouting four-letter words at the pipes and also sometimes each other. We finally got all the plumbing sorted on day 2, only to shortly discover that a blockage was preventing it working. So, all the pipes and the pump had to come back out and be taken apart to find the offending crud, get cleaned up, and then be wedged back in again. This little project caused all sorts of pain and left us feeling the opposite of serene. Fingers crossed it proves a worthwhile improvement!

Aside: actually we spent a lot of time trying desperately to fit into tiny spaces during this refit…

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Lowest hanging fruit: new aft toilet

A cherished handful of our projects required very low effort for massive gain, and, in my humble opinion as Head of Sanitation, few can rival the brand new toilet we installed in the aft head. Ah, sure – you chuckle, but I invite you to come down to the yacht to do maintenance on an old one and I suspect you’ll come to agree with me.

I spent the better part of last season fighting with that aft head. Despite the mountain of spares we carry (some say I have started to develop hoarder tendencies), no amount of replacing parts seemed to make a difference for more than a couple of weeks. By the end of the season, I was having to grease and rebuild the pump every 2-3 days. This was not fun.

Originally, I had planned to gut the existing toilet in Trinidad and replace every possible seal and gasket as well as any plastic parts I could get spares for in hopes of improving the situation. This was going to be a long, unpleasant project with no guarantee of success. But, over the summer, I discovered that it was actually cheaper to buy a fully assembled, brand new toilet from Jabsco than to buy even half the replacement parts on their own. I could scarcely have been happier at this news!! Better yet, the entire toilet assembly is installed in the boat with just four big screws. So all it took to swap out was a few minutes with a Phillips head screw driver. Even including reconnecting the pipework it was less than an hour of work. The new one works like a dream and as an added bonus looks nicer than the old one. Guys, sometimes the seeming little things really do make all the difference!

Game changer: Folding propeller

The award here has to go to our new Flexofold propeller, which is special because the blades fold down when not in use. Wow does this thing revolutionise my experience on board!

Fixed-blade propellers create significant drag because the wide faces of the blades are being pulled through the water as you sail. This can be reduced a bit by allowing the propeller to free-spin (which we usually did), but that turns the transmission and increases the speed at which it wears, not to mention makes a really annoying whirring noise ALL the time.

In a folding prop, each of the blades is free to rotate front to back. When using the engine, the spinning of the shaft throws the blades open into a normal shape and it works like any other propeller. But, when the engine is off, the force of the water flowing over the blades folds them down into a tidy, streamline shape. This reduces the drag of the prop by about 95%! The prop doesn’t need to free spin like described above for a fixed version, so no whirring noise. Finally, because the blades are folded away, you are less likely to catch something on them (fishing net, rope, whatever random crud you might come across).

All these facets of the new prop help me sleep so much better at night. It is perfectly silent and I know how much wear and tear it is saving our fairly delicate transmission (which is not in great shape after catching a fishing net on the old prop in 2018–see our posts from Lanzarote last autumn). AND we go much faster. The reduction in drag gives us something in the neighbourhood of 0.5-1 knot of additional boat speed while sailing. Win, win and more win!

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I’d also like to make a quick shout out to the watermaker here, because that is an epic upgrade too. We can MAKE fresh water. I mean, how incredible is that?? Suddenly we are unchained from the need to go into marinas/docks to top up the tanks, and the quality of what we make is night and day better than what comes out of a municipal tap. The freedom this gives us, and the luxury (particularly regarding showering), is truly game-changing.

It was also an extremely difficult project and Alec deserves the highest praise for it. Not only does it work very well, but he found ways to hide the components in otherwise unusable parts of the bilges, meaning we have lost zero storage space (excellent news for our ability to carry maximum food to the Pacific). Amazing work my love!!!

MUSINGS FROM THE REFIT

Wow, we have learned a lot!
I think if you showed the list of our planned jobs for the Trinidad refit to the Alec and Laura about to start the first refit in Croatia we would have laughed you out of the room. It is somewhat unbelievable what we set out to do, and did, in just six weeks in Trinidad. Watermaker, alternator, plumbing overhaul, major wiring runs were only the beginning. Just about every item on the list was one we would have been overwhelmed by in Croatia. But, now, most of these things feel eminently achievable and undaunting. I’m not saying our Trini projects weren’t hard, because they really were, but we were capable of SO much more than I could have imagined two years ago. It makes me extremely proud of us – we have come so far and really have developed a significant amount of skill. And, interestingly, this makes the upcoming big Pacific passage feel less huge. I have so much more confidence now in our ability to both deal with things when they break and also to come up with and implement good solutions. So it doesn’t seem (quite) as crazy going out to sea for a month.

The difference between being in a good yard and a bad yard is astronomical.
Peake’s yard in Trinidad was the ‘brand new Mercedes’ to the ‘old beater that will barely start’ of MCI in Croatia. The yard workers both genuinely knew what they were doing and also wanted to help, vs how the staff in Croatia often made you feel bad for interrupting their day. The Croatians typically treated any work as if they were doing you a favour even though you were paying them to do the job. Peake had a fully stocked chandlery right on site (in fact, about 30 feet from Serenity), as well as an electronics stockist, two riggers, wordworking shop, etc. In Croatia, we had to drive all over Split (and sometimes further afield) to find bits, and even then often came up dry. This is a big lesson for us – trying to do a refit at a bad yard makes life so much harder than it needs to be. And, by contrast, doing a refit in a good yard helps you get through problems quicker and with less anguish.

A bit of thoughtful planning makes a real difference to staying sane and keeping the peace during a tough stretch.
A refit is a lot of work, full stop. On top of this, we were under added time pressure in Trinidad since we needed to get to Panama as quickly as possible to ensure we could transit the canal before the price increase. This meant we really worked our butts off, but we developed a few rules / rituals that I think were crucial in keeping us sane and helping us make a success of our time there.

We often started working as soon as we were up (sometimes as early as 6am), but always called it quits by around 5pm and celebrated the day’s wins over a cold Carib. This gave us time to destress and ensured a helpful mental pause from the hard work. When we finished working for the day, we also always took 5-10 minutes to tidy up the boat, so it felt “liveable” for the evening and not so much like a worksite. All the tools went back in their cases and any ongoing projects were tidied out of the way. Plus, we’d often vaccuum and wipe down the surfaces to get rid of all the dust. We also made time to take long, luxurious showers to refresh. And, with the remainder of our evening, we tried to do something fun together like watch TV series (The Capture was excellent – recommended! The final season of Goliath we were more mixed on), go out for a meal (the restaurant at the yard did a great deal on burgers on Mondays), or cook together. We made sure we always had good, healthy dinners (well, apart maybe from Burger Mondays), and religiously went to bed early to ensure we both got 8+ hours of sleep every night. These relatively small things meant we didn’t burn out and helped to keep us positive even when work wasn’t going so well.

Final thoughts

I’m so proud of what we’ve done and am excited to live the benefits as we set sail again! Which, at this point was what it was frankly time to do. Boats are meant to float! It was such a relief when we launched Serenity at the end of October and could finally plan the route ahead and look towards the open water. Little did we know what awaited us on the seemingly straight forward passage up to Grenada… all the drama to be detailed in next week’s post!

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