The last couple of weeks have been very busy cleaning up our house and getting the boat ready to go. We are T-9 days from departure on our 4.5 month sailing trip up to Alaska which is both exciting and anxiety producing… I’m writing this post to capture in writing some of the work we have done to get the boat ready to go and what the family has been up getting ready for this trip.
We purchased our 2007 Catalina 34 about 9 months ago and we have had a lot of fun with it. We have also spent a lot of time working on the boat and getting it ready for this trip - more on that below. First, though, I did a video tour of our boat - it’s 34 feet long, not huge, but fairly spacious for it’s size.
As I mentioned above, I have made quite a few improvements over the last 9 months - some to make our weekend trips more comfortable and some in advance of this trip. There were lots more little improvements we made, but here are the big ones:
- Installed a new head - See details
- Installed a MPPT charge controller/VSR - This will allow us to install solar at some point and the VSR (voltage sensitive relay) automatically isolates the starter battery from the house battery, while allowing us to still charge both.
- Installed the autopilot and rewire depth gauge - This was quite an involved install. I’ll do a separate post on this at some point. There were 4 major components, the display, the wheel motor, the control unit, and the compass/gyroscope. Each of them is connected via a seatalk ng network - so I had to run a new wiring backbone through the boat to do that.
- Installed the new Axiom 9 chartplotter (MFD) - Replaced an old Raymarine C-80 with the new Axiom 9 touchscreen MFD.
- Fixed diesel heater - Replaced/refurbed the Wallas diesel heater that had stopped working.
- Replaced heat exchanger - The heat exchanger that came with the boat had a substantial amount of corrosion and the Zinc had corroded to the point where it had detached into the Heat Exchanger. Replacing it was the best answer - and was quite the production (full day and a half for Derek and I).
- Installed/integrated a Vesper Cortex AIS - AIS systems allow you to see other boats, including their name, course, speed, etc and for you to transmit information about your boat and it’s speed/etc. The particular AIS we got also has an integrated anchor watch, VHF radio, and collision alarm system - which means we can shut down all of the power hungry navigation equipment and just leave the ais on while we are at anchor. The AIS has a bunch of features that I haven’t even tapped into yet - like an integrated digital barometer and digital weather reports (recorded from the VHF weather reports).
- Davits! - we installed Davits so we could easily launch our Dinghy from the back of the boat instead of having to hoist it off of the front deck (which is what we had been doing).
- Replaced both batteries and upgraded to lithium - Our boat came with the original Lead Acid Batteries. We only had 333 amp hours and our effective capacity was a lot lower than that because of how old the batteries were. I replaced them with 2 x 260 amp hour lithium batteries.
- Replaced Battery charger with inverter/charger - The old charles charger we had was not able to charge lithium batteries so I needed to replace it. Opted for a charger with an integrated 800w inverter - so we could have some limited 120v power while we are on anchor
That’s it for now, our next post will be from the boat!
