Marty's Travels

My house has wheels

Purpose of the boat

The purpose of my boat is to day-trip around the Salish Sea and the San Juans, take some guests out now and then, take the family out for a ride. It’s not a live-aboard, nor will I be fishing. Fishers are welcome, but they must come with their own stuff.

The previous owner tried to turn his boat into an RV, with amenities like a microwave, sound system, and a bunch of gadgets. Hence the complete re-design of the electrical system. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.

The microwave was removed first. Bring sandwiches and chips. I hit my head on it three times the first day I was in it.

The golf cart batteries failed to hold a charge overnight. This figures, as managing those for optimal life and performance depends on a specific charging protocol, which engine voltage regulators don’t do. So I removed those. They had never been charged properly, so they failed. Took out the inverter because it relied on the golf cart batteries which fed the microwave.

The fancy electrical distribution system was faulty because the battery selector was bad. That was a surprise as it’s a rock-solid part of almost every boat, does the off-1-both-2 sequence in a make-before-break manner (marine electrical talk, I know), but works in the both position. So I can run the boat on it’s one good 12v battery. I’d like to have a backup battery, but that means replacing the $50 switch.

So I’m good to go to put it into the water, come the next nice day. But wait. It’s a big boat and the trailer has an electric winch to haul it up. That runs off the truck battery, so I need to make a circuit and a connector to supply about 50 amps for the winch. My intent is to not use the winch, relying on hand-cranking, but the previous owner warned me that some of the trailer rollers were frozen due to rust.

I can launch and go boating now, but can I load it back on the trailer? Won’t know until I try it.

It’s parked on my lot next to my house so I can do the work on it, but I got dinged because I needed a permit to to park it there. I’ve found it impossible to stay at Chimacum without breaking at least one rule a week. The culture here is that people tattle on others, while breaking some rule or another themselves. Nothing ever happens for breaking rules, but it gives some bored people something to do.