It has been a lot of work for us on Kerpa, one of the major tasks was to tidy up some of the crow’s nest of cables the previous owner had created. That was necessary but also a good opportunity now when installing the new instruments and the new electronics for the Autopilot.

Quiet some difference before and after, there was some of obsolete cables and gadgets hanging around so good to get rid of them. In my eager to sort things out I got too ambitious and manage to cut away the alarm for when the Bow thruster are in the up or down position, and unfortunately, I can’t find the cables without some serious search. The short-term solution is that Kerstin has to have a look at the bow thruster when I operate it up or down from the cockpit and she communicate with me with our inter come, but she has to release the safety pin anyway so not so much extra work, but rather irritating mistake. Anyhow we have the new course computer and the old one side by side, both 12 and 24 Volt fused out lets for some old and new equipment added by me earlier, and now very quick and easy to add new gadgets.

One of the more difficult and boring job is to get the new cables from the transducers to the new instruments. It took a few days and some days to tidy up but it went well not to many bad words came from my mouth in the process.

Instruments in place only the closed hauled is missing at that moment.

Looks good when using them, must say we are very pleased with them.

Another important job was to change the lining on the freezer, the old metal lining was not ideal, it was rather extensive condensation between the two lids that we have. Metal lining was the only material available when I built the freezer in Levkas. I have been looking for PVC sheets but have not found it anywhere. However, on Amazon I found a material called Kydex I guess it normal polyethylene of some better quality, it is available in many different dimensions and thickness good to have aboard for unexpected trouble solving. It can be formed by heating and one can find on YouTube people making holsters for guns and knifes of it.

The old lining of very thin metal could be cut away by using a fruit knife!!

How a piece of Kydex becoming a box covering the blue polystyrene block after a lot of work and measurements.

The box taking shape, each bend need to be done individually by heating the bend and shielding the other part from heat to get a very short radius bend, it is quite a few bends already on the box

Will it fit? Or do I have to……..

Perfect!

We kept the top lid as good to put hot pots and pans on

When working aboard it becomes chaos aboard and living aboard gets difficult, when looking for things one find things one have not used for some time, such as well over 100 charts now no longer on Kerpa, a Weather fax, the old satellite phone system just to mention a few things we got rid of to create space for new “important” stuff.

Kerstin had to fight some of my tools when preparing food.

The engine needs some attention, such as a new

Raw water pump bought from Parts4Engine.com at a cost less than the original repair kit for the original raw water pump cost! It works fine so far.

The old semi flexible solar panels looked a little bit dull, but some light abrasive polish and they look almost as new again.

We have solar panels on the bimini and the Velcro who keep them in place needed to be replaced on the panel. A rather time-consuming job to get rid of all the old glue that was still on the panels. Kerstin worked a few days with that spoiling all hear finger nails. I had bought what I thought was high quality Velcro for out door use, but a real set back just after a few days.

The Velcro did not stay on the panel. And the worst thing is that the glue did lose from the Velcro and sticking to the panel, it will be very cumbersome to get rid of the glue.

More fun is to install new gadgets such as a Hydro generator

 

The new Hydrogenator from Swi-Tec

Relatively easy to fold up, but the mounting brackets and folding mechanism is a little bit oversized and over engineered, very heavy. Might be difficult to find a good place to store it when not in use, the propeller is in aluminium and could easily get bent when handling the unit. The unit is supposed to generate up to 500 W at a speed around 8 knots. Have only tried it a short moment and it gave around 6 A/24V at 6 knots.

One thing that was not overengineered was the contact, rather flimsy I would say, so I took an ordinary 16 A shore power plug instead.

Probably boring reading for you who do not get going on boat maintenance and boat gadgets, as we boat junkies do, so therefore I spare you from all the other things we did, and to be quiet honest I was rather feed up as well as the yard did not finalize the thing they should do in time, they worked very disorganized, one day they started something and then suddenly they went away with the job half done. A few days later nothing had happened, and I had to have a row with the owner at more than one occasion. That made it very difficult to plan own work. But we could enjoy some beautiful evenings

The big bird is a very large Heron we think, it was our nearest neighbour, we could hear him walking our deck in the early mornings.

Then finally, the yard was ready 22 of June! Not end April as agreed!!

Before we cast off we needed to do the provisioning of important items, above my priorities

Different from Kerstin’s priority of good nutrition. Well we will not only drink, we did stock up with some solid things to eat as well, so freezer is full.

Cast off

First trip we did was not long, just around the corner, then rest and just enjoy being on our own anchor

First anchoring, outside where Pat and Diane also Amel owner who have assisted us during our stay, so we invited them for dinner

They brought the desert of course Apple-pie, delicious this beautiful evening

 

North, we go

Well after a few days we passed the Chesapeake & Delaware canal out to the Delaware bay, a big bay facing the ocean 50 Nm in South East. Of course, we had head wind ca+/- 20 knots apparent, at first with the current, reasonable speed but very uncomfortable sea, water breaking over the boat and we were slamming into the sea sometimes with very high force, resulting in that one of our downwind pools fell down, on deck fortunately and not in to the sea.

On the port side you can see how we usually store the down wind pools to have them quickly ready to deploy, but one of them broke lose and we had to secure them with water splashing over out deck.

The rivets were broken off, When inspecting the other pool, I saw that we needed to replace the rivets on that too.

After a while the tide and current turned against us and progress in the I must say at that time violent sea was about 2 knots with the Volvo working at almost full rev.

Time to motor sail, usually we do not make very good progress upwind, headwind is not the strong points for an Amel SM, and now with the current against us 1,5-2 knots, we mentally prepared for a long and uncomfortable trip down the bay. To our positive surprise progress was excellent, refed genua and almost full mizzen gave us a speed exceeding 8 knots with engine at 1400 rev. a fellow boat who passed us motoring a few hours earlier, deployed the same tactics and we overtook them rather quick. The seas soon became much gentler as the tide and wind was in the same direction.

This is our progress with the new autopilot in wind vane steering mood. For our Amel standard, excellent

Exiting the bay we could easy the sheets a bit and cut the engine, we did very good progress now as current at the mouth of the bay was not very strong. It felt divine.

Nantucket

The aim was for Nantucket a trip of ca 370 nM, and as usual more motor than sail as the wind died on us much earlier than forecasted. But the sun was shining and the temperature was gentle

Dingy dock in Nantucket, not very crowded compared with last year where it was packed on the anchorage and on the dingy dock.

We had hoped to go directly from Nantucket up to Maine but the forecast changed so we decided to make some local cruising

Evening at Hadley Harbour

Morning mist

We have a lot of free passengers from Georgetown, tons of spiders but this morning we had many beautiful spider webs to admire

The area is well known for its fog but fortunately it cleared up a few hours later when we entered the Cape Cod Canal.

So we got a slow but nice downwind sailing to Provincetown for the 4 of July celebration

We were in Provincetown a few weeks ago by car, but it was different this time definitely

 

The dress code had changed and this was far from the most extreme on the contrary, not all Americans are prudish, but I was to shy to take photos of the more extreme, sometimes the street looked more like a drag show.

The beaches were empty as most people were in the town showing off.

We did some showing of on the boat with our first exercise for the season, we had been rather ambitious with training when being in Portugal and the idea was to continue exercising but working on Kerpa and the mental stress with the delay did not give us any energy left for training.

New equipment has also been brought aboard. Two sandbags, one in the form of a Kettle bell, but instead of filling them with sand we bought dive weight in the forms of bags with lead shots. We do not want a lot of sand aboard and much easier to adjust the weight. Just used it a little but it will work. New elastic bands were ordered all this from Amazon.

Kerstin using our old TRX band

And I trying the new rubber bands, putting several together give good resistance, now lets se if we can keep up the “healthy” life. If you see some contradiction between my priorities in provisioning and healthy life style you might be right…….