mattm
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Posts posted by mattm
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On 24/11/2023 at 12:08 PM, Psyche said:
There are plenty of places to view the course from,
I think that might have been part of the problem. Sail GP want every seat with a view to pay an admission fee for a seat in a grandstand or more $$ spot. There are too many places in the harbour to view for free from.
Think that’s why Lyttelton worked so well for Sgp. The council, I assume agreed, to the tunnel being closed to nearly all but locals, so to get out there you took a SGP provided bus to the SGP provided viewing area. -
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Seems to me there is a disconnect between the words and the intent. Other than the title of that section of rules reading ‘Steering and Sailing’, I can’t see anything that says the proper lookout excludes anchored boats. It says ‘all boats at all times’. So, if we accept MNZ’s ‘new’ interpretation, does ‘all boats ant all times’ also include boats on swing moorings? Pile moorings? Marina berths? Where does it end? Hardstand, trailer? That’s surely not the intent, but the intent is not spelt out even poorly, let alone well.
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5 minutes ago, Black Panther said:
On his budget he won't be going to marinas.
Unless he wants work done by a pro - gas or AC he can’t do himself, then it is far cheaper at a marina, assuming he can find a tradie who would come to his mooring to compare the cost too anyway - it takes much longer to get to the boat, to return for extra bits or tools, and it typically risks getting the tradies gear wet on the dinghy ride, which is unpopular.
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You will have NZ laws and regulations to deal with also. You are not allowed to DIY AC electrical work, so will need to pay a qualified AC electrician, who will likely want to supply the parts too. Same for any LPG work. Also, any AC electrical item must be approved as complying to NZ rules. If no one has imported the exact item before, it won’t be complied. If it doesn’t have an NZ plug on it, it doesn’t comply even if the model has been approved with a NZ plug. Perhaps no one will check, so you will get away with it unless the item causes an issue. This applies to gas appliances also, so again, no China import or you won’t get a gas cert. needed for insurance and marina entry
You won’t import paint, anti foul, new motor, or running rigging either, so will be paying NZ prices for many things.
Is that a petrol generator? You’ll be the most hated man in the bay for the noise, then there is the danger of the fumes to you, the fuel use etc. Portable generators are not popular, but the e-bike will need charging….
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One other thing to think about is power. Many of the boats in your budget will have very old electrics, does it need a rewire? Does it have an electrical wof for plugging in at a marina from time to time? Are there enough batteries? How will you charge them? Unlikely to get a genset, so you’d rely on solar and the main engine. How much space is there for solar? You maybe need quite a bit, $1k+? Would you need to have a solar arch built? +3k more? Then you’ll still need the main engine, standard regulator on factory alternator? That’ll need quite a few hours at idle, or even at crusing revs to do anything. That’s more wear and tear, noise, diesel, servicing. Alternator and regulator upgrade, plus associated wiring, more than another boat dollar ($1k) there, maybe 2.
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I have read some but not all the novels written on your various posts. I think your budget is way too low for what you want to do. And your ideas still seem very scattered for someone giving themselves 2 months to buy from your position.
A boat in your budget will likely have many major systems on the brink. Any one of them could need half of your budget plus to remedy. You say you have more money to fix, I’d tend to be looking at buying the best you can afford, not buying cheap and fixing, which will cost more in the end for certain. Imagine two boats of the same design and age are for sale. One fully maintained and one not at all. You can’t make the bad one good for less than the good one is asking, so if you can’t afford to buy the good one, you can’t afford the bad one either. Maybe you buy the bad one and accept it’s old motor and flogged out sails, but you’re going to single hand it round the coast of NZ, what level of risk to you and others are you will to create?
Quick thought on sails, lots of cruisers say they don’t race so don’t need nice sails. Nice sails aren’t just about racing, they make the boat sail properly, powering the boat forward in gusts or heavy winds, rather than just healing the boat over and going sideways. They allow you to sail off that lee shore, not along and onto it. They allow you to get down the coast fast enough to miss the looming bad weather. Sails with the right shape are important. Sometimes sails can be recut to be good again, but that comes at a cost too.
At 25-40k for 35’-40’ or 35’ish if that’s what it is now, you’d be expecting an old motor (25k), old sails (10k), old rigging (10k), old paint (30k?), old canvas 6k+, old electronics (8k, old wiring (10k), old plumbing, old running rigging, needing a bottom job, the list goes on and on. Those who have maintained their boats in operable condition with all of the above, know the cost of such, and thus the value, it also tends not to happen often on boats/designs which are cheaper, as they attract buyers with less money to begin with.
The trailer boat idea is OK. Again, the good designs which sail well and are sea kindly (you mentioned the Noelex 25) have kept their value - as those in the know, know they are worth it, many have seen better maintenance because of this, or maybe it’s that boats of the lesser designs often get no maintenance at all, and the low cost of ‘park it in a paddock and forget it’ means they are held onto for too long and in a sorry state when sold. I think you’d find the Noelex 30 on a trailer impractical single handed. You’d struggle to raise the mast alone without a very good system to do so, maybe not even then. Launching and retrieving at some places could be hard too - do-able, for someone with experience.
There are also very few boats sold cheap to someone because that person will look after it well. At least not as much of a drop as the boat you want for the money you want. Seems like very wishful thinking.
For living aboard in comfort and safety, there are lots of things to consider that many boats won’t have. Heating, and a way to control the damp. Dinghy storage - you’d need quite a good one- it becomes your car, trips to shore for food etc, to save you needing a marina every week for shopping or what ever it might be. Then you need a good safe way to store the dinghy and outboard aboard the yacht. Water storage, water maker? More cost and ongoing maintenance. Decent / useable shower? - hard to get in a smaller boat.
I’d say most boats are sold via a broker or trademe. Not too many via yacht clubs or racing, not cruisers anyway, maybe a few race yachts sell that way. The NZ market is also quite small. If you input your budget and size into Trademe, which will have well over half the options currently for sale in NZ, you get less than 20 listings, and some of them are clearly non suitable anyway.Finally, your comment about living aboard costing no more than a room in a house seems optimistic. Maybe week to week, factoring in food and mooring costs. But add in insurance, fuel, repairs, antifoul, haul out, then eventually sails, rigging, motor, paint. There are many live-aboards hoping it’s cheap living. Many end up with a worthless boat as no budget was allowed for for the less frequent stuff, only the day to day, and the boat deteriorates badly. By no means does that apply to all live-aboards, many can afford their boats, and brought good boats to begin with, not end of life wrecks.
There’s my novel. Hopefully you can find one useful bit of thought / opinion in there.
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There are only a few that meet the standard for marine installations. This rules most if not all of the cheap ones out. The only ones I’ve seen in NZ are Mastervolt, Victron and the more expensive Juice ones. There may be others now, I haven’t kept up lately. The main trait that rules the others out is that they need to sound an alarm before the battery management turns off for any reason. The cheaper ones have no output for this. The Mastervolt ones have an Ethernet output to connect an Easyview5, for example, that will sound an alarm, and also a high / low voltage output signal to trigger an alarm buzzer directly.
I found a total Mastervolt install with their alternator regulator, shore charger and Easyview5 a really good system. The system is all Ethernet connected, and the battery can tell the chargers what it wants. Makes a very low admin system. Pricey though. -
It’s a B&G, 508 model by the looks. 608’s look the same and use the same bearing, mast cable and base. The complete 608 unit is still available as a spare.
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Agreed Screwball. Who ever said 13.8v kills them doesn’t know what they are talking about. Their own alternator supplies over 14v. Actually, reconsidering, maybe they do know what they’re talking about….
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5 minutes ago, ex Elly said:
Next leg starts 4pm today. They will be heading back up the west coast, even though Katana just proved that East can be done.
Your not suggesting that the east coast would be a good idea for the race are you? The navy have said their boats got bashed going round there to help.
An incident requiring assistance (from a Provence in a SOE) would be a PR disaster for a race which has good PR and reputation, and for sailing / sailors in general.
From Katana’s blog - hardly sounds like he’s in race mode.
4knsb
Tue Feb 28 2023
The other advantage of going slow is to avoid damage if I hit a log. Just seen a few big ones. Had hoped 30nm offshore would be safe…mmm
East Cape
Wed Mar 01 2023
Easy night with only a mainsail with 3 reefs. Trying to go as slow as possible in case of logs. 5-6 nm/hr Shame…great surfing conditions. We’ve passed or seen 7 big logs, generally within 20 meters of Katana last one just a few minutes ago, 25nm off East Cape. Probably same again reasonable size branches. I talked on the radio to the Wellington yacht Gannet. They were closer to the East Coast and lost count of how many they’d seen.
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Yeah, just call TCC and do as they say. They do heaps, and just get stuff done.
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You think he’ll be able to calibrate it IT? Speed shouldn’t need it, but direction almost always needs a tweak. I’d be skeptical that he’d be able to calibrate the B&G wind via a Garmin display.
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Agreed HT, but I read this as he wants to keep the boat on the tidal morning permanently, and the ‘further out’ mooring is until the beach legs are sorted? Is that the plan Finns?
Are you hoping to have the boat naturally sit on the legs between every tide? -
I like the Victron stuff to, but understand not wanting to spend so much in your circumstances.
Just remember, in a 12v circuit, an mppt controller does not give its best efficiency (any/much greater than a pwm??) unless you have 2 x 12v panels in series, or a 24v panel.
From a victron manual:
Recommended number of cells for highest controller efficiency: 72 (2x 12V panel in series or 1x 24V panel).
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On 8/07/2022 at 1:38 AM, Peter Hunt said:
Sorry to revive an old topic, but I have bought one of these gauges and don't have the programming unit. I have a USB to serial converter, and it looks like the box is simply connecting these three wires to the serial cable, does anybody know the pin out of this box? Or can check? Otherwise I bought a sending unit I can't use because there's no way to get that programming box where I am easily.
Don’t have mine with me at the moment, but I can tell you there is also a 9v battery in the box. Needed to power the sensor during programming, so it’s not just connecting the wires. I’m picturing a small circuit board too, but can’t be sure on that at all.
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The wired wind sensors and kits normally come with the GND10 IT, as the nexus output of the sensor does not plug into the displays, which are nmea2000.
If you mean the wired one, and you have a GND10, you just network everything with NMEA2000 and wind will show up on the Vulcan. BUT, you can’t calibrate the wind sensor without a Garmin display of some sort at least temporarily connected, if not permanently in the system. I have a Vulcan plugged to a Gwind instrument kit on one of my boats, with the Garmin display still used, I will change it all out to BnG, the Triton2’s are a much nicer racing instrument display.If you mean gwind wireless, they talk directly to a Garmin instrument or certain plotters, and you will need one in your system.
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31 minutes ago, Dave said:
Yeah, but obviously lightly loaded, old mate is trimming it without mechanical advantage!
No. No he’s not. At 14 knots of wind and 9.1 of boat speed on a 52’ boat? The jib sheet runs aft from the low friction ring. The line he holds runs to the foredeck hatch, likely to the kite?
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As far as inverters go, a piece of toast will take a certain amount of energy to toast. It won’t matter if you have a 500w toaster or a 1000w, it’ll just change the amount of time required, with perhaps some difference to depth of toasted-ness. Same as a jug element for boiling water. The only way to save power would be to use white bread, not Vogel’s.
I’d stick with gas for toasting. -
What are you saying the issue is with the charge current to two seperate banks being unequal?
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CD, the DBC type is one physical switch, that effectively has 3 switches inside it, so it’s for both house, start and parallel functions.https://www.bepmarine.com/en/p/772-dbc-ez
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The old 1/2/both ones aren’t that good in my opinion(and most others). With normal wiring configuration your picking which battery does all jobs, there’s no separation of loads (there are other ways to wire them if you have more than one 1/2/b switch, but I think it’s typically unnecessary complication).
The modern (3ish years old or less) Dual Battery Control (DBC) switches are good, operate similar to a 3 switch system but take less space. You’ll know the difference, the 1/2/b has 3 main studs on the back (some had 2 extra small ones for alternator field control), the DBC has 4. The Marinco DBC has the benefit of a house only on, the Blueseas one does not.
For those who haven’t seen a DBC switch, they have an On position where house batt. is linked to panel, and start batt. to engine, a parallel position where the two banks are linked, and a house On only position, mostly in case you have an engine issue (ie alternator smoking) and want to radio for help without powering the engine. Down side would be you can’t have the house bank power the engine with the start bank off, without disconnecting a wire at the battery anyway.
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1 hour ago, wheels said:
the battery the VSR disconnects never gets fully charged.
I swear we had this conversation some 5+ years ago wheels, but a VSR does not disconnect one battery from anything. It just joins two banks together, exactly like an emergency parallel switch does.
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At a place I worked, a guy once came in and brought a basic stereo for his boat, about $120 worth. After paying for it, asked if one of the electricians would be able to come down and fit it before he went out (that afternoon). We changed work plan, did it straight away, spent a total of 2 hours installing the stereo, fixing numerous other electrical issues, using numerous parts, and teaching him to use his electronics. At the end, he didn’t want to pay for the time or extra bits, thought all the extra would be covered by buying the stereo, profit margin of maybe $15.
I guess there are customers and there are customers too. Goes both ways.
I guess the moral is, expectations need to be set at the start, especially if it’s the first job being done between the two parties, subsequent jobs should be easier as long as initial expectation and performance and maintained. If you have totally no idea how things work, you should certainly ask, and not be sad after about a completely industry standard practice happening if you don’t.
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SailGP
in RaceTalk
Posted
Yeah, agreed. No way everyone driving themselves would have worked, but isn’t that my point? SGP all but got control of the town. Lyttleton’s maybe never he so many people, bar maybe cruise ships, but the main street was dead.
There was no where free to get up close. The other side of the harbour, sumner road or in houses up the hill, long way away.
I don’t think Auckland would be so flexible to allow sgp such control of numerous areas. Take over part of Silo park, half the car park on the northern side of westhaven for grandstands (sorry about the parking boat owners), means closing the marina during races in an attempt to put the action in an area they can control/sell access to.