Getting Azimuth ready to go

Fixing Stuff

Sailing last summer was a wonderful experience! It is hard to describe what it feels like to have the freedom to roam wherever you want without time pressures and free from the other burdens of life. We think we did the Western Isles of Scotland and the West Coast of Ireland justice, and we gained a lot of sailing experience, as well as some of the skills required to live full time onboard a boat away from port. Read about our trip summer here

Azimuth is a great boat, but like every boat, stuff breaks! One of the purposes of taking a long cruise last summer was to test out some of the changes in equipment that we had already made in the previous two years. Similarly, we wanted to find any problems, so that we could fix these over the winter in time for us leaving this summer for blue waters.

Well, there was plenty of stuff that broke! These are some of the major things:

Gas Oven

An oven is something you hope you can rely on. Whilst we were in Scotland, the gas started to play up. Basically we would turn the gas on and light it to be presented with a flame thrower! The gas bottles on Azimuth sit in the anchor locker. This is a pretty inhospitable place, right at the front of the boat, continually soaked by seawater. It turns out that the regulator that sits on top of the gas bottle really does not like this salt water environment. Its been a constant source of problems over the years. This time though was a problem we had not seen before. The regulator basically stopped doing its job, and released the full pressure of the gas to the cooker. Hence the flame thrower effect! Even scarier was lighting the oven. It was a fateful day somewhere on the west coast of Ireland, that we decided having gas on board Azimuth was no longer for us. Ailsa had prepared a wonderful loaf of bread, and went to light the oven to bake it. The oven erupted in to a mass of flame. Shutting the door quickly, flames were shooting out of the sides of the oven door! Luckily we have a solenoid operated by a switch right next to the oven that disables the gas at the bottle, so turning that off saved the day, otherwise things might have got significantly worse.

So it would have been an easy fix to get the oven working again. Just replace the regulator…. We have tons of spares onboard, but the law seems to be that however many spares you have…. you never have the part you need. We hunted for a new regulator all the way down the West coast of Ireland. There was not a single red propane regulator for sale anywhere! Apparently covid had led to a general shortage of things like that. We had plenty of food onboard, but no way to cook it!

Microwave to the rescue. We had to get creative, and download lots of recipes for microwaves. Actually its surprising how much stuff you can cook in a microwave with a bit of experimentation. After a month though of reheating food in tins, its starts to wear a little thin.

The Solution?

We have decided having gas onboard is not for us. Despite the experience of nearly blowing ourselves up several times this summer, there are some other things about gas we don’t like. Gas is a fossil fuel, so we want to do our bit to reduce our environmental impact and stop using it. Getting gas bottles around the world is notoriously difficult. We have read plenty of forums and watched videos from other people sailing the world, and the difficulties that they have sourcing gas. All the fittings for bottles are different from continent to continent, never mind trying to find gas in remote places.

A year ago, we upgraded the electrics on Azimuth, and changed to Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. Life with Lithium batteries is sweet. We have solar and wind power onboard to charge the batteries, and we have enough renewable power to run pretty much all our fridges / freezer and other electronics onboard. We have also installed an inverter. This allows us to run our AC devices from the Lithium battery bank, such as the microwave, Ailsa’s hairdryer (very important, and this is how I justified the cost of the inverter!) and other stuff like laptops, kettle etc. Taking this one step further then, this winter we have removed the gas oven and replaced it with an electric induction hob, and mini electric oven mounted in a custom built housing.

So far we are pretty pleased with the new oven. It took some getting used to cooking on an induction hob. However the electric oven is a great success, and much better than the old gas one. Time will tell whether this is a practical alternative to gas onboard, we hope so!

Outboard Engine

We all take our cars for granted these days. Easy to jump in the car to do your shopping, or visit friends. Well having a decent dinghy and an outboard engine is the equivalent of your car when you live on a floating home. Never was this bought home to us than our trip last summer! We had invested in a brand new (to us anyway) dinghy bought from a friend in the marina. That was a vast improvement on our ageing inflatable dinghy. The new dinghy has an aluminium hull that makes it go through the water much better (and potentially faster) than the old one. That given, whilst we were enjoying the new dinghy, we were still stuck with our old 2.5 horse power Tohatsu two stroke outboard. A workhorse for sure that had been fairly reliable with a good deal of maintenance thrown in for good measure. However, 6 weeks in to the trip, and the old workhorse decided it had had enough and no amount of stripping down and rebuilding would coax it back to life! That made our lives a lot harder. Basically we had to row everywhere. Great for fitness, but several times we found ourselves stuck onboard looking at a beach, pub or shop in the far distance from an anchorage in the knowledge that it was too far to row, or the simply too difficult due to weather or tidal streams.

The solution?

Well its obvious isn’t it? Get a new better engine! A visit to the boat show in Southampton last September allowed us to do the research and identify the one we wanted, and we managed to secure the last one in the UK of our chosen one.

Looking forward to trying this out soon. Electric start and everything!

More to come …

This post is just a small flavour of what’s going on at the moment.

Here’s a list of ongoing projects as of Feb 2022:

• Replace Fridge and Freezer plates and compressors
• Replace standing rigging (post to follow)
• overhaul generator
• Safety equipment upgrade (post to follow)
• Fix electric winch
• Lots of other small jobs
• procurement of all the spare parts! £££££!