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Starting to come together

Now we have the boat at home in Royal Quays I can start to make some progress in the installation and upgrades.

I have fitted 2 new batteries to replace the ones we lost. I will be fitting another 2 later when we have finished the rest of the electrical work. The Shorepower installation is to shift to make room for the conversion of the stern cabin and at the same time I am going to install a split charging system and a charge controller.

I have installed the new fresh water system using flexible tanks under the floors. I had some problems with the piping. I bought 38 mm pipe from 2 different suppiers. One supplier's pipe was too big for the fittings, the other supplier's was too small.
So had leak problems.

After the horrible foggy trip from Amble I have bought a JRC 1500 radar so that will be to fit soon as well. Its going on the mizzen mast and the control box will sit above the helm position.

Lots of other stuff to do including fitting the helmsman's seat but things are coming together.

FOG!

Picked Olive up from ABC, despite the delay they have done a really good job for us, so happy at last.

The down side was that the power had been left on so all the batteries were knackered, four of them, and not a volt between them.

Somehow in going flat they had taken out the ignition fuse - which we found when we tried to start the engine to drive off the boat lift.

The end game was we spend an extra day at Amble marina (worth a visit if you are coming this way)

Forecast for coming back to the Tyne was for patchy fog. We left a 20.00hrs in a patch that went all the way to Tynemouth! Unfortunately I'd forgotten to pack the power unit for my laptop and didn't have a working chart plotter so we had to go into the Tyne on a GPS bearing of the latitude of the North Pier. The fog horn was going and certainly helped put us in the right place. The sea reach was very thick in fog and we couldn't see from one buoy to the next. Afrain we wandered around a bit between the two greens we wanted to take us into the river proper. But it all turned out all right in the end.

Todays job is to order a radar!