Swanwick lift and maintenance - pretty boring stuff really

Swanwick marina had their annual "Motor Boat Show" thing planned and so they were short on berths, even for little boats like our Nordhavn.  We originally wanted to have around 4 days out of the water but this morphed into 10 so that we were high and dry for the boat show time. Actually not a huge issue as the rather high cost of hard standing space is still way cheaper than the exorbitant cost of a visitor berth there. The lift crew are, as usual, a law unto themselves. Maricom asked them about lift timing so they could ensure that the boat was driveable despite all of the battery work going on. No luck, despite them being a commercial tenant in Swanwick.

So, on the allotted day we prepared the boat and waited, while Paul and Mark worked away on some battery installation things. There will be a separate post about that amusement sometime.  Then we had a call asking us to go around to the hoist bay and saying that we would drive straight into it and get lifted. Phil and Jess from Nordhavn Europe were on board catching up so they came as extra crew for the long voyage. Only it became way longer as we hovered off the hoist bay for nearly 15 minutes, waiting for a very slow Fleming to start engines and back out. When we entered, one of the hoist crew was plain obnoxious and needed some serious customer handling training, Very very unimpressed. Les, the yard supervisor man who has been there for many years and kind of knew us from when we were permanent berth holders, looked almost sheepish about things and tried to "suck up" a bit afterwards.

Here we are emerging from the salty stuff:

We retired to the Nordhavn office for coffee whilst the boat was being pressure washed and chocked up. This time they did a very good job supporting her - on the last lift here they used only two chocks underneath the keel and we were mightily unamused. The first report is on the effectiveness of the "snake oil" stuff that we applied to the props last year. Amazingly, it worked pretty well. Almost no fouling on there compared to years in which the prop was left bare. The coating still looked OK so we decided to run an experiment and leave it untouched for a second season to see if it was still better than bare metal:

The crystal prop stuff seemed worth the cost and effort, much to our surprise and delight:

Our folding prop on the wing engine needed new stops inside it (when the propeller blades fold out they rest against these and ours were wearing away. As removing the prop assembly is tricky even though we have the big special spanner needed, and giving the whole thing an acid bath is even harder thanks to the size, we asked the evergreen Geoff from Swanwick marine engineers to do that for us. Geoff is a proper old school engineer, in his 70s and is one of the few people we would trust to work on the boat there. Here is the P bracket and shaft, with the prop hub and blades removed

The crew and then the captain with some brick acid did an excellent job cleaning up the keel cooler:

aided by the glorious weather that allowed outside work to continue :

We cleaned and painted antifouling stuff on the bits that needed it. Replaced the bow thruster anodes, greased the seacocks, removed and acid bathed the main engine rope cutter and did some stainless and GRP polishing too. 

Inside the boat, we drained down the coolant, and replaced the O rings on the gearbox oil cooler. This is simply put, a messy job and not one that is enjoyable. Luckily it is only needed every 4 years. With the system drained down,  the thermostats were removed:

and then replaced:

as preventative maintenance. They were getting on a bit, like the captain and crew really.

We'd been waiting on some more coolant to arrive as we planned to swap out the main engine stuff early, to save having the job when, possibly, we don't have a car and access to a council refuse site to dispose of it. That became a comedy of errors - the 20 litres of pre-mix we ordered on line prompted a message from the supplier saying that when they went to the warehouse, they found their stock computer was wrong and they had none. So, we decided to order the 20l of concentrate they had instead, after negotiating a better price as they wanted more for it than 2x30l of premix. We pointed out that we also had to procure the distilled water and so....

We were told that the concentrate was "on the way" but the courier kept saying that they didn't have the parcel yet. We contacted the supplier who promised to chase them. Another message and they assured us it would be shipped and delivered the next day. Sure enough, it was but it arrived as pre-mix the stuff originally ordered, not concentrate.. A credit later we at least had some coolant but we also now own 20 litres of distilled water and a 10l drum to mix it all in. This little saga burned many hours.

We could then drain down the entire system via the keel cooler and refill it nice and slowly. The cleaned up wing prop with new stops was refitted with tons of grease inside it, anodes fitted and the boat was pretty much ready for relaunch:

Inside, the stabilisers had a top end overhaul (new bearing surfaces, hydraulic oil and filter change and at long last the pressure gauge was swapped for a test port that the captain had bought ages ago. Pressure gauges are known to fail in a nice spectacular way and we didn't fancy mopping up all that messy oil coming out at lots of PSI. We also fitted a new pressure switch - the manufacturers of the system, told us that the older unit had a history of failing as they aged and ours was nearly 20 years old. Again, we'd bought a replacement a while ago and that was fitted too. 

Finally, the Seafire fire extinguishing system was checked and certified OK by the dealer, Golden Arrow who also did a chunk of the stabiliser work for us as the fins have a sensor that needs to be realigned after the new bearings are fitted.  Very luckily as it turned out....

During all this fun we stayed with Ann and Martin who live very close by. An excellent B and D service indeed, plus a couple of Toddlerville trips to take Mrs T to her normal spot - the Southampton hospital eye department and on a little shopping spree. 

Les, the boatyard man was most accommodating offering us a choice of times for relaunch. The tide times were less than ideal so we expected some fun getting into a berth afterwards. We popped into the marina office the evening before the 7:30 am relaunch to ask about where they wanted us to go for a couple of nights once back in the water (pre-booked by Maricom) and were told to "ask again in the morning". What could possibly go wrong?

Cowes then the Hamble revisited

Being mean types, we thought that the ideal next port of call should be East Cowes. Why? Well, E Cowes is part of the same group as Penarth so we get free berthing there, except for weekends. With the bank holiday approaching and a lift out and work booked in just after then at Swanwick, a little Cowes stop off before going there was good.

The tricky bit with E Cowes is the tide. It kind of roars through the pontoons so you need to arrive at the right state of the tide. Here is the "official"  info about it:

Fortunately for us the right tide time to arrive in Cowes fitted with chucking out time in Lymington and the short trip through the Solent:

The various wobbles in the course were due to yacht avoidance tactics. It is such a shock being back in the Solent with so many pleasure craft around. We trundled upriver to the marina, backed into a berth and settled down. After lunch we reported in to the marina office and were greeted as a very rare thing. No, not because we were on a Nordhavn, but because we were visitors from Penarth. Is seems that very few Penarth boats escape the captivity of the Bristol Channel and no others make it to Cowes.

The marina manager kindly set up our Penarth access fobs to work in the Solent marinas, shared some of our distain for the Boatfolk marketing / the central office folks and was most welcoming. 

We had arrived just before the Round the Island Powerboat race. We witnessed several race boats being launched and tested, often with very loud straight through exhausts attached to their huge petrol engines:

Luckily you don't get to hear that one.

We took the chain ferry over to the much posher West Cowes which was amusing in the extreme. If you do an internet search on the new chain ferry you will find lots of violent criticism of the council, the way the ferry was designed and built and the reliability of the service. Bearing in mind that there has been a chain ferry operating there since 1859, you would think that they understood the tides and the river flow. Oh no, the new ferry needs a little pusher boat to help hold it against the stream during peak tidal flows. The council end up chartering this little boat and very bored skipper on a regular basis. Funnily enough, the last ferry which was a bit smaller, could manage unaided:

You can see from the wash coming out of the stern that it was working quite hard too. Rather embarrassing all in all for the council folks and expensive too. After exploring Cowes, grabbing a coffee and raiding a couple of shops, we headed back. Lovely weather, lovely day.

Our second day on the Island involved a walk along the E Cowes shoreline as far as you can go - there is a permanently closed gate now due to landslip trouble. Again, lovely weather. Returning via the huge Waitrose which is rather incongruously situated there, we had lunch on board and chilled for a while (well, most of us did, Linda went for a long walk to help with the Fitbit step contest). We then took the ferry again and met Alex and Gisele, the owners of Lady Grey the HUGE Nordhavn55 for dinner in a local pub:

Dinner was fine but the entertainment.... What had to be one of the worst singers / guitarists ever was crooning / caterwauling away. We asked the staff not to pay him - they agreed that he was terrible (the serving staff closed the kitchen door to try and drown him out) and told us that it was "Open mic night" so anyone could sign up and perform, no payments of course. We tried to tempt Alex to a guitar solo but he resisted, quite firmly.  The music, if you can call it that, was so bad we were tempted to pay the guy to go away. Much merriment ensued as we joined in, making wolf howl noises that still sounded better than the performer. Quite a night.

The one drawback of being in E Cowes and then wanting to head to Swanwick is the tide thing. Both marinas suffer from quite evil tides through the pontoons. You've seen the Cowes info above and we knew Swanwick from when the boat was permanently berthed there. If you are well out from the shore, the tide rips diagonally through the finger pontoons and at mid tide can be really nasty, even for the massively powerful plastic fantastic flying machine boats with many hundreds of horsepower on tap. We have around 165 of them to push our near 40 ton boat and a long deep keel that the tide can pick up and move sideways very nicely thank you.

Since leaving Cowes at a sensible time means arriving at Swanwick when the tide is flowing more or less at its peak, things can get interesting, We headed off just before midday as the powerboat race fleet was assembling in E Cowes. Good timing, it was getting noisy. We slowly headed over to the Hamble river and when we got to Swanwick saw that the berth we were allocated was not much wider than our boat, with a shiny looking Azimut thing next to us. The tide was fierce and there is no way we were going to be able to reverse in a straight line back into the small gap and fight the sideways tide at the same time. So, we turned around, headed downstream again and went onto the mid-river visitor pontoon run by the harbourmaster. Lunch, chill and then Alex with the HUGE 55 came into view:

Not only does their boat look massive, it was also very shiny thanks to a couple of guys from the Netherlands who had just finished polishing the superstructure for them. We didn't feel too jealous, our superstructure is in dire need of polishing but our bank account felt happier that it would be a DIY job.

Having waited for the tidal stream to drop, we headed back upriver, backed into the rather tight space and chilled. Andrew looked in a contemplative mood:

whereas Linda looked to have been at the gin:

This picture really doesn't show you just how closely cuddled up the two boats were:

When the stream / wind pushed our neighbour towards us, the fenders were interlocking meaning that we could not motor out unless we pulled up ours. It seems to happen all too often in Swanwick to smaller craft like ours. Yes, when we were permanent berth holder here back in the dark ages (2009-2013) we were one of the bigger boats in the place. Now, we are a rounding error and get stuffed into most unsuitable spots.

At least all the crew were happy though:

We rounded off the time with our visitors by getting the train to Southampton, a bus to Hythe and visiting Toddlerville, returning in the Toddler wagon. On the last morning, we met with Alex and Gisele and went for breakfast at the revamped Boathouse restaurant. We were joined by Vince and Clare, owners of a Nordhavn 43 that we'd not met before. A good time ensued and the regulation group photo was taken in the cockpit of the HUGE Lady Grey: 

We then became semi-famous, being mentioned on the Nordhavn USA website. Have a look at website link for an almost factually correct version of things.

We took Andrew and Linda to the train station so they could head back to Weymouth. The boat seemed strangely empty without them on board after 10 days.

Maintenance news:

Well, we didn't do any. Far too busy being sociable. We so need to catch up on things now.