Electrical spaghetti

This last weekend has been a long bank holiday weekend in the UK, and for once there was not going to be rain! We decided to spend the long weekend on Jorvik Rose and packed the car and cat up for the journey down on Friday morning. Our intention was to carry on with the cleaning and polishing of the woodwork and maybe a few other tasks, as well as catching up with some local friends on Monday.

Well, we did spend some time cleaning and polishing the woodwork, until we ran out of wood restoring polish... As the weather was nice, we also spent some time relaxing on deck and having an evening tipple while watching the sun going down.

Tiggy spent most of the weekend sleeping and eating, although we did try to get her up on deck in her harness, but she insisted on being a drama queen and kept flopping over. Her new favourite spot is the window ledge in the aft heads, from where she can have a great view of the coming and going in the yard.

She is also comfortable climbing up and down the companionway steps and exploring the cockpit.

Anyway, one evening we were sat on deck enjoying a drink and suddenly she jumped up on deck through the open deck hatch. We were both surprised, but at least she was up on deck. Shortly after her appearance on deck, a pair of wagtails suddenly appeared and were hovering and landing on the guardrails - they were obviously very upset that Tiggy was on deck and looked like they were trying to tempt her off the edge...not a great idea as we are quite high off the ground while on hard standing. A bit later on we managed to catch Tiggy on video making her less that graceful appearance on deck.

One of our other many projects, besides relaxing on Jorvik Rose in the English sunshine is to replace the navigation system as our current B&G system is old and unreliable. We have decided to replace this with the latest Raymarine instruments, starting with the log /speed / depth and wind instruments. Our plan is to carefully remove the old instrumentation as parts of it are still serviceable and can be sold on eBay.

This was something I started on Monday, to try to remove each instrument and pull the cables out. This meant that I had to take down some of the headlining that we had only just put up, but I guess that is the nature of owning a boat. I'm also working in the electrical panel by the chart table and my first job was to install lighting in the inverter cabinet so I had a chance to see what I was doing. This meant we had to trace and identify the lights fed from all the lighting breakers on the panel, so I could see which circuit I could use as a new feed. Working in the electrical panel is a bit tricky as there is a nice muddled mix of 240v ac, 12DC and instrumentation cables to untangle. It is a slow process but I have made a little headway, removing one display unit and one heating controller.

My plan is to focus on tidying up the electrical cabinet (the first picture above) as I go through removing the old navigation equipment, so that it is a bit more organised and divided into 12v DC, 240v DC and instruments. Time will tell if I am successful, but for now tracing and removing cables feels like dealing with a big bowl of tangled spaghetti. It is amazing how much wiring there is on a sail boat!

Until the next time, en guete mitenand!