Ed’s optimism of a few days ago has faded as he is struggling to do what is needed on his own – he can’t get into the tiny spaces necessary, and he needs another pair of hands and some “project management” to try and focus on what needs to be done. I have now rushed to finish the essential work – and decided that everything else will need to wait and I need to help him out to move us forwards. We sat down and made a plan so we can get some logic into the job …. Keto will be arriving in a few days to finish off their tasks and over the last days we have ticked off a few things from our lists.
Ed installed the washing machine in Isola but we have come to the conclusion that the lazarette floor is not strong enough to properly support it, even though he and Keto did add some re-inforcement at the time of installation. We took a trip to the local DIY store and now have some 2″ marine ply from which Ed has cut the templates to re-inforce under the washing machine. This has been varnished several times on a makeshift workbench outside the camper … creating a bit of interest in the marina!
We have also taken a trip back into Slovenia and have collected our dinghy – we had visited the Novomar factory during our brief trip in April but we also knew them from research we had done for previous boats. One of the key factors for us is weight – the davit solution we have gone for has weight limitations, especially when we want to keep the engine on the dinghy all the time. The davit solution is the only feasible possibility with the design of the Bavaria transom which has almost 100% fold down swim platform – therefore only a small area where davits can be fitted. The Novomar dinghy has a hard shell hull and also has good sized tubes – however, it is light weight and also good value for money. Of course, there will have been compromises in the quality of the construction of this particular model in order to have the weight benefits – but it is the best compromise we have found. The dinghy also has to be fairly large – in order to work with the davits! The dinghy itself is 3m40 and we now need to design a way of hooking up to the davits once they are installed.
We borrowed a trailer from Novomar and drove the dinghy over the EU border with fingers crossed! Unfortunately, it had not been ready in time to be imported with the boat so we were just hoping we didn’t get any issues. All went well and we safely arrived back in Umag.
Ed has also started some of the preparation work for the electrical and electronics installations but this is where he got stuck!! The design and planning of the cabling really needed two heads together to work out the logic and plan the cable loom – and also a smaller person to be able to climb into the cubby-holes ….. this will be our major project once Keto have finished next week.