Busy weekend

Well, the weather stayed quite excreble over the weekend, but we still managed to be productive(!). Saturday night jlm asked, just before we went to bed, whether it might rain, because she wanted to leave some hatches open for ventilation. I said that I thought it would likely rain, so we closed up, which was a good thing, because it poured all night. Buckets and buckets. With lightning and thunder to beat the badn. We unplugged computers and hoped that the big Catalina 470 next door with its taller mast would protect us. Luckily we all made it thru the night with no strikes. The catamaran two boats away was struck before we arrived in Stuart, and he is gradually working on replacing damaged equipment.



Lightning is funny stuff. I was talking to the owner of the C470, and he said that he was surprised when he found out that his big boat did not have all of the thru-hulls bonded, and Catalina told him that it was NOT protected from lightning. I told him that I thought that lightning protection on a boat was a real black art. Lightning is a very large mix of different electrical signals, at very high frequencies, which follows its own path to ground, and that path is very hard to predict on a boat. The current does not want to change directions, but you never know when it is going to decide that a sideways path to the water is preferable to a slightly tortuous path down your ground wire. Some people clamp welding cables to the shrouds and hang them in the water, while others run very expensive large diameter wire from chainplates to keelbolts to try to encourage the bolts to go out the keel. I think the high frequency cmponent in the bolt is what makes it so difficult to predict. Stranded wire is best to handle the high frequency, and flat conductors like the ones used for SSB grounding would probably be best, but I am not sure that flat foil could even handle the current. In any case, we all came thru OK.



I also helped the 470 owner track down a problem with his 110 outlets. It turns out that he had an additional GFCI installed in the chain of outlets on the starboard side or his boat, and it tripped. However, we did discover that the GFCI in his aft head was not tripping at all, which is NOT A GOOD THING. He plans a trip to the hardware store to buy a new one, and he will likely remove the one that was added, because the computer that used to use that outlet is no longer installed.



I tried to hook up the GPS to the two radios yesterday, but it does not look like the Raymarine system is putting out an NMEA signal. At least I found out that the boat was wired with this eventuality in mind, so I don't have to run more wire. I also found out that Jeanneau very thoughtfully pre-wired a number of other switches to terminal blocks, so that the additional of new electrical components would be easier. The more I discover about this boat, the more I am impressed with the forethought of the builder. Who says the French don't know how to build things correctly?



I also found the instruction manual for the anchor windlass, and in reading it(!) I discovered that I can calibrate the windlass so that it reads out the correct length of chain deployed. This is something that has also bugged some of the other Jeanneau owners, and I will report on my success with this project. It also looks like I will have to do some maintenance on winches and the windlass this week.



The biggest success of the weekend, however, and getting Vonage to work. We have been waiting for the WiFi access point to arrive, and I wondered whether other options might work.

More in the next post.