It’s not something l have done before, have a shakedown cruise halfway through a sailing season. But after the fire and Elektra’s rewire the switchboard was a completely new set up to me, like sailing a new yacht! 18 switches, only 9 were labelled. Rupert our new marine electrician had fitted Elektra’s rewire before he disappeared on holiday, he had ordered new labels for the switches without them but they hadn’t arrived before he left. Not that l was worried about them at the time as we lucky to get Elektra back so quickly.
When l motored Elektra into St Anthony beach the morning before, l thought the new chart plotter was broken, but this turned out to be a switch l hadn’t turned on!
To add to this the set up was all new to us, new wiring, switchboard, Victron solar controller, charger and battery monitor. All of which l needed to learn how they worked, and understand what l was looking at.
So on the 9th of August, we set off for a few days aboard, a nice westerly force 4-5 to send Elektra on her way across Falmouth Bay in a north-northeast direction. I just unrolled the genoa for this, and Elektra logged between 3-5kts across the bay. And we motored up the Precuil River and dropped anchor 1.33hrs later, having logged 6.25nm. We did our usual jobs after arrival in an anchorage, and Vicki cooked dinner.
I started trying to work out which switch do what job, drawing a diagram but there was still 6 switches which l didn’t know and one of them had to be the anchor light, but which one? A few years ago l had replaced the lamp with a light sensitive lamp so it wouldn’t come on until dark in any case. Once dark came l switched on all the of the 6 switches and went out in the dinghy to see if any lights had come on but no was the answer 🤔 At which point l got my emergency/spare anchor light out and used it instead.
We turned in about 2300hrs and l went to sleep very quickly, this turned out to be the best nights sleep l had had since the fire almost 4 weeks before.
The following night, I found the stereo radio was hot after I had been charging my mobile phone (I thought possibly because we stow the tea cosy on top of the back part of it) Anyway later in the evening before bed after lissoning to the radio all evening, it had cooled down, but not wanting to risk anything, I turned it off on the main switchboard. It wasn’t until following morning that I found out the stereo switch also is the USB ports, so when I turned the strereo off before bed I also turned the anchor light off!
Love Sailing 