Here comes the sun.

Shorty posts the next….

Actually…..here comes the solar power on the Pathfinder.

It’s a cold and wet autumn already here so maybe I should have made a quip along the lines of Mr Shakespeare’s “now is the winter of our discontent”. This week, as I write, we’ve had a sudden dose of snow near home which closed one of our major roads (the A30) all day and then this weekend storm ‘bert’ arrived so now I have a Pathfinder with it’s cockpit almost full of water due to a tarp which simply imploded so now i’m shopping for a drain plug like the one we used to maintain on RNLI lifeboats ; funnily enough the little Passagemaker is out in the heavy rain but it already has a drain plug hence it’s doing fine.

The continuation jobs on the stalled Pathfinder project have now floated to the top of the must-do list while I wait for the sail for the little CLC Passagemaker. Last week, in blog time, I moved my outboard motor mount from starboard to port because of the strange problem I had of the outboard’s tell-tale weeing on the boomkin which is the same side and dripping down into the cockpit. At the same time I made a real mess of the transom paint and just after I used the last dregs from the tin painting the passagemaker and then threw away the tin – I didn’t make a record of which precise shade of grey it was either so I had to order a new Epifanes color chart and work it out from there – I think it’s no 18 grey and i’ll be left with most of a tin so guess what color the CLC Skerry will be when I get it and repaint it. Grey or mostly grey boats are a bit of a thing around here !.

This week I moved the jobs on by one notch in that I got around to fitting the solar panel, it’s MPPT controller and wired the whole lot into the boat’s electrical system. When I left it today, on a very dull and wet afternoon even the small amount of light getting through the boatbuilding shelter cover was giving me a tiny amount of charge. I’ll be moving the Pathfinder outside real soon now and although it will live under a cover attached to the outside of the shelter I can peel that back on sunny days and keep the whole system topped up with solar power rather than having to rig a charger every few weeks.

I must admit to having a really bad day doing those jobs because it meant having to maintain a high kneel under the cuddy and at the same time do fiddly jobs with poor dexterity. It also meant that I had to climb in and out of the boat multiple times which is a bit of a pain because one foot always wants to catch on something.

A lot of tidying up to do but that’s the PV panel on and the MPPT controller wired in and charging the battery.

The immediate purpose of that work is to fit a pair of internal (domestic) lights inside the cuddy and then fit a set of deck level navigation lights such that nothing relies on the masts being up except for when I use my anchor lantern – for anchoring my preference is a 12v battery lantern hoisted up the mainmast.

Decisions decisions. As you can probably tell now I have some difficult decisions to make regarding the Pathfinder. The obvious thing for me to do was to start work on advancing the work towards it being a much better expedition boat and that point to maybe push my limits and take the boat out for at least one long trip expedition style. My work with the motor mount and especially now my fiddly work with the electrics shows me that I have great difficulty with fine and fiddly jobs when I am trying to also maintain balance under the cuddy – I had to give up on my work today when I realized that my core was shaking and I came out exhausted. Bigger work isn’t so bad especially when I can stand or brace whatever I am working on so I will push on with the spar jobs but might well have to leave the electrcal gubbinses in the boat’s bits box in the hope that somebody some day might use them.

With every job that I do or attempt to do on the Pathfinder the decision seems to become more and more clear – that I should shift my focus entirely to the Skerry project as all of the jobs I did (so far) on the similar Passagemaker went well.

So yes, now is the winter of our discontent I guess.