Next, I decided to unveil the new electronic gadget and give it a whirl. Pretty boring there as well. All I had to do was screw it to the barely there wooden piece that was on the cabin bulkhead, conveniently screwing into the wood where it was over a previous open cutout for a gauge of some sort. This was to eliminate any more holes than needed to be there, even though the plan is to glass that over again later this summer anyway. But for now, it mounted there, I ran the wire for it alongside the old gauge that's still there, and - you know, now that I think of it, I should've run power to that gauge to see if it worked. Wouldn't that be something? The transducer was the only uncertain aspect of this deal, but as with most, I decided that if I used a nice big seal of toilet-bowl wax between it and the solid glass hull, it should act as a shoot-through-the-hull fixture. My biggest issue then became where to put it. Eventually I decided upon underneath the starboard seating area, as close to the centerline as I could, and as far forward as it would let me, which should put it just about at the leading edge of the keel. By some rudimentary math, it should stay below the waterline unless I'm on a starboard tack with about 30 degrees heel, which I likely won't be doing when I'm that close to shore where depth is an issue. You can see it in this picture from the next day.
The problem with going up early on a day you know you won't be sailing, is that you rapidly run out of things to do! Ok, lifeline next? Since I'm still one stanchion short, and since I don't have gate hooks or anything yet, I simply lashed the existing eye thimble to one side of the stern rail, ran it up through three stanchions on the starboard side, across the bow fittings, back through two on the port, and tied it off. Better than nothing (barely, if I'm honest). But until I get the final stanchion ordered, and the proper hardware, there's no point in splicing into it. Well since I'm on deck, let's replace the navigation fixtures. Three tiny screws each side, and then the wires pull right out of the old bases, and feed the new wire in, screw back down, and done. Quite literally a ten minute job for both sides, and other than the port fixture using flat headed screws and the starboard using Phillips, there were no issues there.
At this point, I was getting a little bored of things going so easily, so I decided to challenge myself with wiring my inverter to the starboard side 110v outlets. The boat originally had shore power set up, and that would feed four household outlets - one on the starboard main bulkhead in the cabin, one starboard in the V-berth, one in the bathroom, and one on port side by the galley sink. I've since removed all the shore power connections, and disconnected the wire where it had branched off, but the wiring for the outlets is still intact for the most part. My plan was easy - wire a new plug on the end of the starboard outlet run, and plug it into my inverter. When I want them to work, I switch the inverter on. This too, went off with only one minor hiccup, in that I originally installed the plug on a pair of wires without paying attention, and that was just a pair of 18/2 marine wire that ran to the hanging locker but with nothing attached. Once I realized my mistake, I changed it around, and bingo, done. Granted, it turns out the Display Port to HDMI adapter I have in my laptop bag doesn't seem to carry audio like my last adapter did, but otherwise, it worked fine. It also meant I could plug my laptop into the outlet on the wall instead of running a cord back to the inverter and risking tripping over it. So at least that worked. I tried hooking up the USB GPS puck I bought, but got nowhere at all with that, and didn't feel like messing with that too much.
I wound down with a couple sandwiches, and some Netflix, and called it an early night.
SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!
I woke up and it was pretty breezy, and still a little cool, but in short order, the sun came out and other than wind being a little more than I was hoping for, it was a nice day. My biggest issue was just that I was out by myself. Sure, now I can turn the outboard left and right, but I was still solo. The wind was from the South, which in my slip was blowing me off my pier. This would mean as soon as I left the dock lines go, I was going to blow across the slip pretty quick without anyone else to help maintain control. So instead, I emptied out the anchor locker, and swapped things around a little. I eliminated the old dried out lines in the chain locker, and straightened out the roll of 100' 3/8" Walmart special. I shackled my new 25' of chain to the end, and wired that with some safety wire. Then I put removed the tiny two anchors in the locker, and tried to hook the larger Danforth onto the chain, only to then realize it won't physically fit in the locker. With the absence of anchor hangers on the bow, I removed it and put it back in the cockpit locker. I have 200' of 1/2" line to replace that smaller stuff with anyway.
One nice feature of the Victron SmartSolar MPPT controller, is that it has built in Bluetooth which you can connect your phone to, and get information about your system at a glance. So around noon, with a decent sunny day, I took a peek. Simple button presses, and you get a nice shiny screen. Plenty more screens too, but the first one is the one most people will look at:
I also decided to get a better handle on the head and holding tank situation. Goodness, what a mess. Not just because of what it contains, but how it did so. I took a quick video to explain how it was set up, which you can check out here if you want, but the short version is: There's normally a thru-hull somewhere, that the head draws water from. In this case, I can find none. Anywhere. The hose that feeds INTO the head for water, is just capped off under the V-berth. From there, the discharge goes into a fitting on the top of the holding tank. The outlet of the tank has a Tee in the line, one goes through a manual pump and to a discharge thru-hull, which I can't use being on an inland lake. The other side snakes a long way around to a fitting (mislabeled) on the starboard deck. There are two vent lines from the top, one that goes alongside the pumpout hose, and the other into the chain locker. This normally wouldn't be as bad as it might sound, if it wasn't for that the fill for the freshwater tank, is IN the chain locker. I don't know who designed it, but it was unsmart. It's also something I intend to change soon. But soon is not now.
While I do want to replace and re-plumb everything brand new, that's a few hundred dollars worth of expense, and then the time, that I'd rather not have to outlay right now. Instead, the plan is to remove everything on board, and replace the fixed head with a Port Potti. In this case, I'm planning on going with something like this SaniPottie 975MSD from Defender:
This will allow me to have almost the same capacity to hold as the original 6 gallon holding tank was, at a lower initial cost, and I can still plump it (with new hose) to a pumpout fitting. This allows me to not need to haul it out of the boat if I don't wish, and it also more importantly, satisfies Canada's requirement for waste. A regular removable porta potti is not acceptable in the province of Ontario, so mounting this "permanently" with the kit, and hooking to a pumpout, solves that. One option was to just re-plumb the intake for the head into the sink drain thru-hull and use that sort of setup, but that would hinge on the rest of the system being ready to go and frankly I'm not sure it is. If you're curious to see how it's set up in shaky video form:
After I sorted that out, I decided that it was time to stop being a wimp, and get my hands wet. The wind had died down and shifted so there was no excuse to not get this boat out for her first sail with me at the helm. The outboard fired up fine, still surprises me every time, and I let it warm up. I backed out with a lot more control than I expected to have, and headed out to open water. The main is already tied on the boom, so once I got out into the lake with a little more wave action, I was able to hoist that relatively easily. The headsail, I had to actually get in place. I decided to feed it up through the hatch instead of hauling it up the deck the whole way, and it worked fine. It took little effort to raise, and other than having a bad sheet angle, I was soon able to move along at 4-5 knots, according to Navionics.
I only stayed out a little while, before I had to head back home. Docking was my biggest concern, with the displacement, and that I was solo. I secretly hoped for a dockhand, but since the A dock on the marina has yet to fill out, that was only a dream. I did manage to slow down enough, that aside from bumping the port side a little more onto the finger than I hoped, the boat actually didn't do too horrible coming in. In hindsight, I should've burst it into reverse a little more right as I entered which would've pulled the stern in more. Lessons learned for next time. Tied off, cleaned up, and away I went. The season has just begun.
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