On return from Alaska to Anacortes, we started the second part of the upgrades to the boat. This involved a three week stint at the dock. The first job was to replace there packing gland on the wing engine., We had attempted this in Juneau but it seemed a bit risky to remove the last round of packing as it was quite badly burnt and so we left it in place. Once at the dock, the packing gland experts also had reservations about pulling the last round and eventually we were forced to haul the boat out in order to remove the entire shaft. The shaft got cleaned and replaced, we had a new cutlass bearing put in at the same time, then the new packing gland was installed. Oh and let’s not forget, with the boat out of the water, we saw the starboard stabilizer fin was damaged probably from bumping an iceberg. We had to get a refurbished fin in a hurry. And finally, four days later, we were back to where we started.

Once in the water, we could get back to the planned maintenance. A new belt was put on the wing engine. This was also not a simple task. What boat jobs are ever simple? In order to remove the old belt, the PTO had to be removed but this was also way more involved than simply loosening a few bolt. All the hydraulic hoses and electrical cabling that was running behind the wing had to be jacked up as much as possible to get it out of the way. That took a good few hours. And of course, while everything was in pieces, might as well replace the dampner.

We also installed a backup hydraulics cooling pump.

One of the major jobs was to install new 2 new 5000 Victron Inverters, and upgrade the alternator to one that could charge the house batteries while underway. The new alternator came with a new Balmar regulator and a new DC to DC converter for charging the main engines start batteries. This specific item failed on first startup and had to be replaced.

On the main engine, we had a new sump cock installed because he existing one was leaking.

We had to put a new brake on the windlas.

We replaced all the lights in the salon.

New navigation computers which could run Windows 11. This rendered our touch screen monitors inoperable so we had to get 3 new 19 inch touch screens.

New Furuno computer for the flybridge.

New Nobeltec 5.0 software and charts.

Oh and lets not forget the 12 new 8D house batteries.

Phew I feel exhausted just writing this all out and I am sure I have forgotten or overstated SOMEthing.

After all was said and done, we left the dock and headed straight out Juan de Fuca straits into the North Pacific Ocean. It was a pretty rough 415 miles to Coos Bay. And the exciting part of this journey was that the new Balmar failed and so did the DC to DC converter which had already been replaced. This just meant we could not run the generator and so had to manage the power usage to ensure the fancy new alternator could charge the house batteries.

To be continued…