After several days of rushing around attending to other matters, today was dedicated to working on Pagan. (I had planned otherwise but the foul weather made a trip to Brightlingsea on work business distinctly unattractive - it's being blowing old boots and chucking it down all night and most of the day)
After a stop for breakfast at the clubhouse, in accordance with senior officer's orders, we popped down to Burnham for some bits needed to do the main job I wanted to tackle today
That task was the fitting of a 900 gallon per hour main bilge pump. Pagan is sadly lacking in the pump department having only one manual bilge pump and that rarely works at all (it's very reluctant to prime, a sure sign it needs servicing if not replacing)
I wanted a serious bit of kit and I'm impressed with what I got ...
That's fifteen gallons a minute and it was the fastest pumping rate pump I could get for sensible money that would fit in the ideal spot at the deepest point above the keel
The challenge, as always, was running the hose from the pump to the best place for the outlet. I chose to fit a new skin fitting high up on the port side adjacent to the manual bilge pump outlet. That meant running the hose from the pump under the saloon sole through three floors and a bulkhead between the engine bay and the port cockpit locker.
That took a couple of hours plus and then the cable had to be run via the same route up to the existing electrical switch panel where I removed a redundant toggle switch and replaced it with an on-off-on switch to give us auto - off - manual switching
I was a very happy bunny when I powered everything up and it ran perfectly. It's a very quiet unit and it shifted the last lot of water dumped into the bilges by the leaking water tank in no time at all.
Of course, the ultimate purpose of fitting a high capacity pump isn't to overcome our temporary fresh water leakage. The pump is a big 'un in order to deal with far more serious leaks from the outside in.
Whilst I had the saloon sole boards up, I also ran the cable from the new fluxgate compass head I installed the other day down to the Tacktick transducer box under the navigators seat.
And since I had the switch panels out to wire up the bilge pump, it made sense to connect up the Tacktick NMEA interface to the Raymarine NMEA to Seatalk converter while I was at it!
The fluxgate compass will give us heading information on both the Tacktick instruments and, via the interface, on the chart plotter.
That's good to have - it allows the wind instrument to display true as well as apparent wind and enables proper target tracking on radar and AIS targets on the chart plotter plus a host of other benefits.
The NMEA interface will make the depth, speed (log), heading and wind data available to the chart plotter which apart from the above benefits gives access to information such as calculated set and drift as well as heading and wind vectors on the chart display
None of it is mission critical but I firmly believe in having as much info as I can get my hands on and wrap my brain around. More data is better than less when it comes to navigation and pilotage!
Anyway, back to the plot ...
The Fluxgate worked out of the box needing only to be corrected by 180 degrees because of the way round it ended up being installed (this is not a mistake, it just comes set up to be orientated in a particular direction and if you nail it on to a suitable place the other way round you go into the setup and reverse the heading)
However, the wireless network isn't seeing the NMEA interface at all. I suspect it isn't getting any power as I had a succession of niggling problems behind the switch panels which led to a rather later finish than I intended.
The panels and associated wiring are slated for replacement at some point
I gave up and left fixing that until another day as it was by now gone seven and we were both hungry. Jane knocked up a quick meal of tinned stew - the delay in finishing work having scuppered her plans to pop out for some fresh ingredients to make a casserole
Tomorrow is a trip to Kettering and back as Jane is back at work then if the weather gods will just play fair for a few days I've got work to catch up on up in Brightlingsea and then on Sunday it's the Fambridge River Festival where I'm part of the entertainment
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