Bunch of small stuff I just did OR a nice way to spend a sunny day

So this was originally going to be about the next stage of the LifePO4 install (spoiler alert: I finished and it works) but it’s a lot of writing and I couldn’t be bothered yet. HOWEVER today was actually SUNNY (at this stage it feels long enough since we saw the sun that I couldn’t actually really remember what it looked like) and 10 degrees! So I took the opportunity to do a bunch of small jobs that I had been putting off for EVER

• Unblocked cockpit scuppers. These are the holes in the cockpit that lets water drain out of the boat if you take a wave in the cockpit or it rains. These had decided to completely block up recently, meaning during the heavy rain we had the last couple of weeks the cockpit completely filled with an inch of water, making it the worlds shittest paddling pool + leaking through the engine hatch and thus into the cabin. Today I got under the cockpit, unscrewed the hoses and jammed a screwdriver into the through-hulls. There was a LOT of disgusting grime there and I mean a LOT. All unplugged now though (note to self – bottle caps are a bad thing to lose track of)
• Ran the power from the alt regulator to the ignition switch. More detail in a later post but it means the regulator wiring is almost all done.
• Removed the old stereo + speaker wiring. So I got these two new wireless speakers that work on Bluetooth –Ultimate Ears BOOM 2 Wireless Bluetooth Speaker on a half price deal, and been using them as a test. The sound quality is great so I decided to remove the old stereo and speakers.

Here is one of the old speakers pre-removal

And here is the stereo and some of the wiring

Weirdly I felt a bit sad about removing it – it’s one of the very few original fittings from when I bought the boat so it’s been through a lot. But getting rid of it frees up space so I can move the SSB and more room on the shelves. This job took WAY longer than I thought, as there was around a million miles of speaker wiring EVERYWHERE. Ugh.

• Moved the SSB to above the desk. As mentioned in a previous post (or maybe not actually) I was taking the opportunity to rewire the SSB while I was meddling around in the guts of the wiring (i.e scope creep). Ideally it was not supposed to be wired through a breaker panel (it was) and not have the power cables run near anything else (they were). So I assigned it to a surface breaker all by itself and wired everything back in, giving it a wiring run that is (hopefully) a lot less prone to interference. You can also see all the holes where the stereo wiring used to be (again, a LOT of wire)

Last but not least, I wired in the newish light I got for above the nav table, which hadn’t had one for years. Which was kind of annoying as I bet you can imagine. I had lost a wire up inside the headliner but a bit of drilling holes and fishing got it back.

It has both white light

and red light aka Das Boot mode

And Finally…

So that’s what I got up to! Lot of small things crossed off, feels good man.

Maybe one day soon I’ll actually go out again so I can write about stuff other than wiring.

And one last thing… yesterday I officially hit my savings target for my trip, 4 and a half months early! YEAH! I think some of the excess will be spent on a partial DIY watermaker, but more details on that later.