Relocating
You would think that after so many years cruising, it would be obvious where to put equipment – and that the installers would also just know instinctively what to do as well. However, what seemed like an obvious location when we were planning and designing the boat turned out to have a lot of disadvantages so we decided to do some changes.
First of all, we relocated the through-hulls for both the generator and the water maker …. they were not installed wrongly in the first place but they were not installed in the optimum location. Coming from a motor-boat background, we didn’t really think about heeling at the start and it turned out that when we were sailing aggressively upwind, sometimes the intake through-hull came slightly above the water line, causing small quantities of air to be sucked in. This meant that we were unable to run the generator or the water-maker underway as we did not want to risk any damage to either of them.
We think that the lower position in the boat will be better when heeling and solve this problem.
The generator was also turned around 180 degrees in it’s cubby-hole above the engine. The initial installation was done with the optimum orientation for the space, and removing the engine covers – however it meant that the serviceable areas were more difficult to access. Turning it around has made a world of difference to the time taken for servicing, as everything is very easily accessible via the aft cabin side door to the engine bay.
We’ve also relocated the invertor from under the bed to behind the saloon settee – as we have this running all the time, it had led to a lot of sleepless nights as we were frequently woken up with the whirring start up of the fan!
With every boat you learn a little bit – with this boat we have learned a LOT! We thought we had been very careful with the planning of all the equipment to optimise the space but there’s always something you forget.