First up, welded a piece of stainless rod onto the anchor. Our anchor catches the bowsprit cable every time we haul it in so the new piece of stainless should help the anchor slide along it and settle into it's holder ok. Hopefully.
Next, our plan was to keep the two kayaks on the swim platform while underway. I managed to squeak one on there, but the second is going to need to live on the aft deck.
The aft morse controls needed fitting and Chandlery Rob has been on my case to pay him for the cables, so I spent a day crouched in the engine bay fitting everything. Well, as it turns out the gearbox selectors work fine but one smashed morse cable later, the throttle cables just do not work.
Update! I got them working this morning (Monday). I woke up with a Eureka moment at 06:00 (sorry Lauren) - basically, rather than having a nut on either side of the bit that connects to the throttle, I changed it to a nut on only the pulling side. What this means is that when you pull the throttle, it slides along the throttle that isn't being pulled (rather than moving the cable). Make sense? Well, if not, rest assured it just works.
I pulled apart the the morse controls and changed it from push to pull, but still no luck. Anyway, here's what I spent my Saturday night doing....
The throttle selectors will be going back to the supplier and we'll see what they come up with.
Things ordered:
- 15hp outboard. I found a good condition outboard in Wales that should be arriving on a pallet tomorrow. As good as the 8hp has been, a 15hp will get us on a plane a lot easier fully loaded and move us around the anchorage a lot easier.
- Two sheaves. Our aft steering is still not right and the cables are attached to the rudder stock at the wrong angle so I did some hunting, and found two sheaves in Idaho for $29. The guy's happy to ship them to me but curious as to why I'd be happy to pay $59 for shipping..... given that comes to £60 all up, and two sheaves in the UK would cost £400, it's a proper bargain.
- Rutland 914i wind turbine. Those of you who've followed the blog for a while will know all the problems I've had with the Istabreeze wind turbines.... well, I swore off that design and decided I'd get a local 6 blade version. They have a great reputation and are absolutely silent. Anyways, this one came up 20 miles away and it's brand spankers but the guy's had it for 2 years and never installed it (still in the box) so the 2 year warranty is null and void. That'd normally be a problem but ebay give a 3 month warranty and since we're leaving in 5 months, a 2 year warranty wouldn't be any good anyway (it's not like I'm going to send a wind turbine back from the Caribbean). Anyways, I paid 3/4 of the brand new price and picked it up this morning.
So that's about it for today. More work to be done in the lead up to Christmas, three days off, then hitting it for another week and a half before it's time to head back to work.
Have a great Christmas everyone.
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