Down in the hole
Tom pulls Tim’s strings
What child does not love a blanket fort, with the peculiar and awkward spaces made by upturned furniture, and the wonder of knowing just how to navigate the passages through? Working on boat wiring requires some of that same kind of agility, but without the inherent charm and forgiving walls made of soft goods and clothespins. Instead, you climb cautiously into the compartments that lead to the underbelly of your boat, where your body has to conform to the compromised spaces, awkward angles and protruding hoses and other behind-the-scenes equipment that runs your boat, while manipulating tools and the ends of wires and trying to not drop all the tiny screws and things into the bilge.
At the Annapolis Boat Show we bought ourselves brand new radar, and a MFD, which stands for Multi-Function Display. This is the screen that shows you electronic maps and radar and other navigational delights. Our previous MFD, vintage 2004, crumped out somewhere in Buzzards Bay, and we particularly missed the radar in the darkness off New Jersey. Fog would have been worse. So, shiny new objects, yes! But also: safety first.
In order to have access to this whole new world of electronic marine technology, we needed first to install it. The initial challenge was the radar, which dangles off of the backstay (one of the cables that holds the mast up) about 10 feet above the deck. One way to get up there would be in a bosun’s chair, but we decided instead to rig up a complicated platform above the deck with a horizontal ladder with wood scraps to step on. Rube Goldberg, eat your heart out.
Timbeaux gets ready to lower the radar down to the deck.
We got ourselves all wigged out about the logistics of getting the cumbersome radome down to work on it, but that was only the beginning of the project. We had old wires to remove and new wires to run all over the boat — wires that carry electricity, and wires that communicate between all of the different electronic systems of the boat, so that we can know where we are and how deep the water is and how strong the wind is. (We also have analog ways of knowing these things, but it’s sure convenient to have the tech at hand). So we had to contort ourselves mentally to figure out how to configure everything and then configure ourselves physically to make it happen. One such challenge was to run the cords from the radar and other instruments up through the stainless steel tubes that hold up the MFD, which would be hard enough given the size of the plugs and the diameter of the tubes, but the cords coming from belowdecks had to turn a tight corner into a tiny little hole squeezing between the top of the fuel tank and the bottom of the cockpit sole with big bolts blocking the way. We worked at this futile exercise in bonking your head against the same piece of fiberglass for pretty much two solid days before Tom, Tim’s dad, came in and caught up with what we’d already tried. Luckily he arrived before we did anything too drastic—maybe he arrived just moments before—and was able to re-imagine how we could remove the steel tubes from the floor and cut larger holes. We finally were able to thread the cords, even still not a simple task, and after another series of awkward contortions in the bilge, we finally got all the cords where they needed to go and attached.
Imagine our satisfaction when the thing worked!
For your sake, dear readers, I am sparing you the majority of the details of this story due to its being very technical and frankly too painfully boring to read about, but suffice it to say that there are many more steps than what I’m sharing here. There is a little bit of magic involved, however, that harkens back to the days of blanket forts. It is the same kind of satisfaction that one gets from sticking a butter knife into a fresh jar of processed peanut butter, or peeling that weird gluey stuff off of the back of a new credit card. That is, when attaching a terminal to a wire there is a step which involves using a heat gun to shrink insulation around the connection you just made. It is tremendously satisfying to heat up the red plastic tube and watch it transform before your eyes to snug up to your wires.
Billy Pilgrim’s distribution panel.
The boat’s interior transformed from a living space to a workspace and now back to its homey self. We’re all packed up and ready to head south after a month of taking care of business. Tim’s family fed us well with home cooked meals, stories, and games and are sending us off with a boat-load of groceries and even some choice new tools. We still (we will probably always) have projects we need to do, but it feels good to have completed this particular round. And now back to the actual sailing.
—Lesley
