We conquer lots of boat projects while we are in the yard at Norsand Boat yard. Some we hire contractors and some we do ourselves. Be sure to read Beastly Boat Projects Part I. Since we had so many boat projects to complete we had to break it up into two blog posts. Here is Part II.
Heaters
Did you know that Sugar Shack came equipped with heaters? We don’t have a generator or AC, but we do have heaters. The problem is that they stopped working. Starboard never really worked and port gave out last season while we were in NZ. This is our old heating component inside the engine room.
We had (2) new heating systems sent to us while we were in Fiji and they needed to be installed now that we are in chilly NZ (even though it is summer time we are cold).
We purchased (2) Eberspacher Hydronic M-II systems that are 12voilt, D10W, 86W from Heatso in the US. Matt installed them and they are a thing of beauty! Wow what a difference they make inside. Warm and dry. Our new heating component and dehumidifier! We will be going to some countries with high humidity and these units will come in very handy!
The Boat projects continue and both Matt and I are working hard along side our contractors.
The Beastly Anchor Chain
I love our 10mm stainless steel anchor chain. It is long, shiny, self folding and really strong! We mark our chain every 10m with a coated webbing from strapworks.com. The straps that were in the chain were old, ratty looking, and difficult to see from the deck so I wanted to replace them. I drop all 100m (over 300′) onto the ground and prepare it for cleaning and new straps.
It took several tools to extract the old webbing from each link and a good set of needle nose pliers to help me pull the new stiff webbing through each link. Then I used ospho to clean up the chain and she looked like new!
Dinghy Repair
We loved our Avon dinghy, but the pontoons were dead and needed to be replaced. We decided to buy a Highfield 3.6 CL which we regretted. In retrospect, we should have just replaced our pontoons and kept our last dinghy as they just don’t make them that good anymore.
Our dinghy was used for a month before the non-skid (EVA) started coming up. We were so mad. We had lots of communications with All Marine the company that sold us the dinghy and the manufacturer. In the end, after much negotiating and me being a brat, the manufacturer agreed to replace the non-skid at no charge. New Zealand has a Consumer Guarantee Act which guarantees products have to be replaced or repaired within one year of purchase. I love it! This is regardless of the actual manufacturer guarantee. So, they repaired it at no cost to us after I reminded them of this act!
Inverter Charger 12v
Being in New Zealand made us realize that we needed a 220 inverter charger. We have a 110v inverter charger and we have a 220 charger but it does not invert. So, we bring our friend Matthew Duckett from Cleigh Ltd. to help Matt install it.
New Mirrors
This is not one of the “beastly” boat projects but it drove me to beastly states every morning I looked into the mirror. Our medicine cabinet has pretty damaged mirrors and old rusty hinges. They are double sided which is super cool but evidently really expensive to replace. So we decide to go with single sided mirrors with a mirror vinyl finish for the inside.
I know it is a small thing but I just love the new mirrors. We hope to find the hinges in stainless steel as I am not a fan of the mat black, but other than that they are much better.
After weeks of being on the hard and working on dozens of beastly boat projects, here are a few photos of sunset on the hard.
Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind actual live events. This blog post occured during our stay a Norsand Boatyard, 7 Nov-22 Dec. Stay tuned out if we are getting kicked out of New Zealand. Coming up next we share our visa issues.