Refitting pt. 2
During the winter 2023/2024
After our summer in Sweden, we moved to Aarhus in connection with Signe starting her studies. We were lucky to be able to bring the boat with us up north, so we didn’t have to drive too far when we wanted to work on restoring the boat over the winter.
Christian sailed it to Kaløvig with two friends, and shortly after, we got it on land and prepared it for the coming winter.
We winterized the engine, the cooling system, and the toilets, and drained the hoses and hot water tank to prevent anything from freezing and bursting when the temperatures dropped below freezing. However, for some reason, the hot water tank continued to release a bit of water throughout the winter. Have you maybe tried this as well?
We made a list of all our thoughts regarding the boat and prioritized them: Urgent, Winter 23/24, Winter 24/25, Before leaving Denmark, Before the Atlantic, and Nice to have. All points were put into a spreadsheet, and the list was long! It ended up with 67 items, of which 31 were categorized as Urgent or Winter 23/24—and we managed to complete 21 of them! We felt quite accomplished with that, but now we have 10 items to add to Winter 24/25.
Here’s a bit about the various projects we completed.
New Navigation System
We knew when we bought the boat in 2021 that we’d need to replace the old navigation system. We liked B&G and had researched their products online and at the Düsseldorf Boat Show, Boot 23 and 24, so we decided to stick with B&G.
There was absolutely nothing we could reuse when it came to the entire electrical system, so we had to start pulling cables to replace everything—what a huge task! We spent about a month intensively working on this, going out every day to pull cables, coming back home, and then doing it all over again the next day. Personally, I (Signe) found it quite exhausting! I think it was the whole process of doing a massive amount of work, but not seeing any visible results afterward!
All the cables are hidden in trays and under the flooring—so when you can’t see them, it means you’ve done a good job! But I think it was also just an area that interested me less than it did Christian—and thank goodness for that! Now we’re on the other side of it, and the result is fantastic!
New Batteries We upgraded the battery bank to lithium batteries! It’s really an upgrade! We now have greater capacity, and we appreciate the security lithium provides since you can discharge them more than AGM batteries. The upgrade, however, meant we couldn’t place them in the same spot as the old ones, so we placed them under the floor in the saloon and built a box with brackets that fit perfectly and could be mounted on the ribs of the hull.
Reinforcing the Cleats
After our small accident where one of the cleats got ripped out during the winter of 2022, we reinforced all the cleats so we wouldn’t have to worry about that happening again. After the accident, we attended Boot23 in Düsseldorf, where we checked out the newest boats on the market and looked into whether there were differences in how boats were built in 2003 compared to today. Unfortunately, nearly all were mounted the same way as ours—with just a small washer of 2-3 cm. So, it might be worth checking how your cleats are mounted on your own boat.
Toilet Hoses – What a Sh*tty Job...
If we didn’t already know the hoses needed replacing before our circumnavigation, we certainly found out when we arrived in Cuxhaven, on our way back from Portugal in 2021, and one of the hoses was completely clogged with scale and urine stones. Before ending our summer vacation in 2023, we emptied both tanks and hoses, hoping we’d have a more pleasant job ahead of us. I wasn’t there when the tanks were dismantled, and Christian figured I probably wouldn’t have been able to handle it. The tanks were brought back to the apartment, where they were cleaned. They were filled with toilet cleaner and hot water, left for about a day, and then Christian had the honor of sticking his arm in to clean out the residue.
After reinstalling clean and shiny toilet tanks, it was time to install new hoses from the toilets to the tanks and to the deck outlet. It was much easier than we had feared. Removing the old hoses was quite challenging because they were so stiff and worn out. The new hoses were super flexible—we used Sanipomp hoses, which are 100% odor-free.
We wrapped up this task by replacing the seals on both toilets so that water no longer flows back into the toilet. The reason this usually happens is that the joker check valve is in poor condition.
Thru-Hulls
Before Vela was returned to its rightful element, we replaced all the thru-hulls! Some were in more urgent need than others. We would have preferred to replace them all with TruDesign, but after looking into the options, we discovered that space was too tight in our engine room. So, we decided to go with bronze for all the thru-hulls. There were 16 in total. Some of them had been installed with epoxy and didn’t really need replacing, but we felt it was a good idea to make sure everything was in top shape before our circumnavigation—after all, these are the parts that keep the water out.
After being in the water for a few hours, we realized that one of the seacocks was leaking water. This was a bit of a blow for both of us because we were FINALLY back in the water! We had a long to-do list, both for the boat and for work, family, and friends. After attempting to temporarily stop the leak with Tec7, enough water was coming in that the bilge pump kicked in about once every half hour. We ended up staying in the water for about a month before pulling Vela out again to replace the leaking thru-hull.
It took us just two hours to remove the faulty one, sand, clean, and install the new one! A new record! We primed a few times and applied antifouling paint around the area before getting back in the water the next day—super efficient! We hope we won’t have to do it again anytime soon, though by the end we’d gotten pretty good at it.
Other Small Projects
Between these larger projects, we also tackled several smaller tasks, such as:
Reinforcing the rudder stopper
Installing a light dimmer and red lighting in the saloon
Adding touch spotlights in the aft cabin and hallway
Reinforcing and sealing various areas
Installing white and red lights in the cockpit
Painting under the floorboards everywhere
Enlarging the inspection hatch behind the mirror in the forward toilet (we had to do this to replace the hoses leading to the deck)
Drilling inspection hatches to dismantle the grab rail, preparing for the installation of the targa bar
Polishing the propeller
