Episode 45 Electrifying Sandpiper Part 1

Sandpiper came without electrics (not counting the battery-operated cabin lights). There are good reasons for this, other than keeping the price down. There is less to go wrong, and there is a lot of fun to be had on boats without electrics. People have been sailing boats for millennia before the likes of Willam Gilbert and Sir Thomas Browne discovered magnetism and electricity in the 17th Century. (Benjamin Franklin’s later experiment with a kite in a thunderstorm seems to have been embellished, which would have helped his political ambitions). 

Also, there is a lot you can do with small battery-powered bits and bobs. The cabin lights have been mentioned. I now have a battery-powered radio. Other owners use battery-powered outboard motors. But, the list is limited. What about a depth-sounder/fish finder (like the one sitting in my drawer)? Or an auto-helm (like the one sitting in my drawer)? Or the occasional trip with a portable fridge (like the one sitting in my caravan)? Or some electric pumps to pump out the ballast, or to pump freshwater to the tap? True, these latter items are on the nice-to-have rather than must-have list, but the list could expand endlessly with an electrified boat. There are also good reasons to install electrics.

Like other Cygnet owners, I have thought long and hard on this topic. The very last thing I intend to do is to drill a hole in my shiny new boat, which is exactly what I would need to do to install cables tidily. My strategy, then, is to put off this fateful day as humanly possible, if ever I were to change my mind. I need to develop the electrics in a reversible way, being as unintrusive as possible. Further, the Admiral would never forgive me for making some horrible alterations to the pristine Sandpiper (and she has first-hand experience of my capabilities in this regard).

The strategy I have decided upon is to make a demountable plywood base plate that could be bolted and unbolted from the starboard bulkhead (the wall between the cabin and cockpit on the right hand side). 

But, how can you fix bolts to the bulkhead without drilling holes? I’m glad you asked. The answer is to use stainless steel tee-nuts glued to the bulkhead. They are small and don’t need holes. The worst that would happen, with this approach, is that I would be left with the tee -bolts glued to the bulkhead.

The first challenge, then, was what glue to use. I could have used epoxy resin, thickened with a filler to make a gooey paste. Epoxy resin does not flow fast, but it does flow far. I wondered if the epoxy resin would form dribbles and snots on the bulkhead, which leant at an overhanging angle of about 10 degrees and seemed perfectly oriented to create these unwanted features. Also, I only wanted a small amount, probably less than the smallest cans of resin and hardener. After staring at the big shelf of Sika products in the Bug Green Shed for fifteen minutes or so, I decided to buy a tube of Sikabond 145 Supergrip, which promised to glue anything to anything with a rigid bond. I did not want something that would flex and creep.

Before taking the glue anywhere near the boat, I gave it a trial. Not having a suitable piece of fibreglass to hand, I glued a tee-nut to an aluminium square tube, after roughing the surfaces with an angle grinder. I hung some weights off it, using plastic bottles filled with water for the weights; 1 litre being 1 kilogram. 

On my first attempt, I found that the glue had not set in the centre of the tee nut. It seems the Sikabond 145 cures with exposure to the atmosphere, like Superglue and other C3 glues. As the stainless steel of the tee-nut and the alumium proxy for the fibre-glass formed perfectly hermetical seals, the centre of the glue blob took longer to cure than the rim. I tried again and waited three days instead of one.

This time, the glue blob had set, so I started attaching weights, working all the way up to 11kg (I ran out of plastic bottles and buckets) and then left it. A week later, I was pleased to see the assembly still holding the weight with no sign of sagging or creeping. The glue worked as I had hoped.

The next step was to cut a plywood plate to shape. I used a tick-stick on a piece of cardboard salvaged from the greengrocer’s bin and worked on a blank. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could cut the bulkhead plate and the battery tray (more on this later) from a single piece of 6mm plywood that I bought, again, from the Big Green Shed. With a little trimming and shaping, I formed the plate to fit snugly onto the bulkhead with its port side tucked beneath the companionway trim.

I drilled holes into the plywood baseplate where I wanted the tee-nuts so I could use the baseplate to hold the nuts in position as the glue cured. I had to invent some Heath-Robinson struts to push the baseplate against the bulkhead, using some scrap strips of ply and an extendable broom-handle.

With a wire brush, I scuffed the spots of the bulkhead where the tee-nuts would go. I stuck packing tape to the plywood to de-bond the cured glue, applied my blobs to the tee-nuts and set the thing in place to cure overnight. I did not want to leave it until the glue had set completely, as it might have bonded something to something else more permanently than intended.

I was a little too hasty in removing it the following morning. I had not covered the whole surface of the plywood with packing tape, so wherever the glue touched the plywood, it set. The glue also did not fully set between the tee-nuts and bulkhead, causing some tear-out on the rear face of the plate. The overall effect was that the glue had fully set where I did not want it to set, and it had not set where I wanted it to set, causing me to knock the tee-nuts out of alignment. 

I decided to nudge the tee-nuts back into alignment, only to find the glue setting as soon as I moved them. Thankfully, I got everything back to where it needed to be. After re-assembling my Heath-Robinson struts, I left it, again. A week later, I took off the baseplate and found the tee-nuts solidly set in place, needing some trimming of excess glue.

The bolts were made from cut-down button-head bolts from the local nut and bolt shop. A tip for cutting down bolts with a hand-held hacksaw is to fit a nut between the cut and the bolt head. This provides a flat, adjustable surface to cut against, protects the thread you want to keep, and helps knock off the inevitable burrs when you unwind the nut. If you have ever attempted to thread a nut onto a cut bolt, you will know the fiddly nuisance those burrs can be.

Finally, in this episode, I roughed up the sides of the boxes that I will fit onto the plywood baseplate and bolted the assembly in place. If it survived the road trip to the boat club, and a Sunday afternoon race, it would probably last a while. Thankfully, it did. 

Now, the magic of my demountable system truly starts. I took the baseplate home to work on it further whilst leaving the boat in its parking-bay at the club.

Carboard mock-up made from a mango box

Testing how well the glue holds the tee-nut

Battery tray and bulkhead baseplate, cut to size

Holding the base plate in position while the glue sets

Tee-nuts glued in position on the bulkhead

One of the glued-on tee-nuts

A cut-down holding bolt with its washers

Roughed up assembly bolted onto the bulkhead

Episode 44 LROCP AMSA MMSI ICOM M94DE

This jumble of letters and numbers can be explained by my decision to get a radio for my boat. To the uninitiated, the process is as complex as making sense of all these letters and numbers.

Let me start with the legalities. In Queensland, it is illegal to operate a VHF radio without a license. For safety reasons, however, the Water Police would rather see Moreton Bay filled with unlicensed boaties with VHF radios than unlicensed boaties without them. So, the law is rarely enforced. 

Apart from legalities, another good reason to get a license (properly, a Certificate of Proficiency) is to get a Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) code, which is free and is administered in Australia by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA). Your MMSI inducts you into the world of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Digital Selective Calling (DSC). When combined with your coordinates from a GPS-enabled device, the MMSI can be used to send distress messages with the push of a button. If there is one lesson I have learned about sailing, it is that things can go to custard very quicky, and they often do it all at the same time. The prospect of hitting a distress button, rather than going through the rigmarole of a Mayday call including knowing and relating your latitude and longitude when everything is going wrong all at once, is irresistible. 

In 2016, long before I knew much about MMSIs and GPS, I attended a day-course that qualified me for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) Long-Range Operator Certificate of Proficiency (LROCP). At the time, it was useful for my volunteering efforts with Sails at Bayside, as I could (legally) operate a VHF radio for the day’s activities.

The course taught me some useful fundamentals; for example VHF works (almost) on line-of-sight, thus limiting its range.  The course also taught me some other interesting, but less useful things; for example, methodologies to measure the specific gravity of sulfuric acid in a lead-acid battery using a hydrometer. I am sure this latter technique was widely used by U-Boats in WW2 but I cannot see myself drilling holes into the sealed batteries of today’s world to insert a free-floating hydrometer to find out what remaining charge they might hold. Also, what about lithium-iron-phosphate batteries? A colleague who volunteers with Marine Rescue told me that as radios are electrical devices, the course designers needed to include something of an electrical nature, hence the inclusion of WW2-era battery technology. Maybe it tells us something about the median age of the people who designed the course, but I digress.

I sold my previous VHF radio with Bolero, my previous boat, so I was in want of a radio and in need of a new one. I knew this day would come, but I had been putting if off trusting in the law that says electronic gear doubles in power and halves in price every 18 months or so.

My new boat, Sandpiper, did not have a radio. It did not even have batteries. I was hoping to find a hand-held self-powered unit that had GPS (for position) and AIS (for distress calls). The reputed quality of the brand was important. I settled on the ICOM M94DE. The fact that it had DSC was a bonus. It even had some rudimentary navigation capabilities in that it could point you to preset waypoints. Whitworths had one in stock that, at $499, was $6 cheaper than the best offer on-line, so I set about buying it.

Actually buying it involved some to-and-fro. Whitworths advised me to get an MMSI before buying the radio because you only get one opportunity to code in the MMSI. This might seem draconian, but it prevents the MMSI system, which is run out of Geneva, from getting clogged up with spurious MMSIs. It also discourages theft.

However, when I started my on-line application for an MMSI, it asked for the serial number of the radio. As I did not yet have the radio, I could not complete the application. I called AMSA who reassured me that there was no other reason for me to not get an MMSI, but it might take up to two weeks. I also called ICOM who reassured me that if I stuffed up the MMSI, I could send the unit back to the manufacturer to get the wrong MMSI erased. I then bought the radio from Whitworths and entered the serial number into my MMSI application. I was pleasantly surprised to find the MMSI in my email the following morning and, with my wife keeping careful watch over my shoulder, entered it into the radio, finally connecting all the dots, letters, and numbers.

Before taking it out, or even entering the MMSI, I had to charge the battery. In its first charge, the screen showed a “charging” icon, but gave no indication of progress. This might be because it had not been booted up, did not know its MMSI, did not know what a full charge looked like, etc. I simply left it for  a few hours and returned to a blank screen. Trying the "on" button, proved productive, as it actually turned on. Once set up, the screen showed how full the battery was (without the use of a hydrometer, I hasten to add), GPS position and, when I had typed it in, the MMSI. Incidentally, ICOM told me that I could have used the unit as a MMSI-less VHF radio by pressing the clear (CLR) button when it asked for one. The written instructions in the manual were obtuse on this important point.

On my first outing this week, I found that the radio worked as advertised, but it needed some adjustment.

As noted earlier, VHF works (almost) by line-of-sight. Because of this, I could not contact Volunteer Marine Rescue (VMR) Raby Bay from Manly Marina. There was some higher ground in-between. I had to get to the eastern side of Green Island to talk to VMR Raby Bay. It was reassuring to do a radio check, even though my transmission was weak. It is also worth remembering the line-of-sight nature of VHF when put the radio down, somewhere handy. Leaving the radio on a seat or on the floor lowers its visibility and limits its ability to receive. I found a useful function for the belt clip by clipping the radio onto the handle of the sliding companionway hatch, which was as high as I could get it without holding it up in the air. 

An alternative was to get a fixed radio with an aerial. However, there are no obvious out-of-the-way places to mount the aerial, and it would also need a house battery and full electrics, which the boat did not have. The cost of the fixed radio plus aerial would have been close to the cost of my hand-held radio, not counting the installation of the electrics.

Another issue was that I had not yet dialed in the collision alarm properly. The collision alarm goes off when another AIS-equipped vessel will enter the prescribed radius for closest point of approach (CPA) or time to CPA (TCPA). My alarm went off almost continuously, which was maddening. It went off in Manly Marina, likely because some of the moored boats had their AIS turned on. It went off whenever another boat was travelling parallel to mine, even though it was 1.5nm (about 2km) away). More than once, I wished I had my binoculars so that I could find the converging boat in an apparently empty bay. High on the list of priorities when I got home was to dial in a smaller radius for CPA, a smaller time for TCPA and something called Slow Warn, which is described in the manual with the same lack of clarity as the opportunities to code in the MMSI.

Overall, my VHF radio gives me confidence that it will do what it needs to do when everything else is turning turtle (it is worth mentioning at this point that the radio is waterproof, and it floats and flashes when dropped in the water). My next road test might be a Sunday-afternoon race. 

Radio clipped onto handle of companionway hatch cover