ENVOY LEAVES MARMARIS MARINA

We’ve just had a great three days with our daughter Amy, who flew in from London to be with us for my birthday (I’m counting backwards now!). Amy will join us again in August for a week. While Amy was here we got a rental car, and used the opportunity to stock Envoy up with groceries etc. The car was cheap at L50 per day (about NZ$42), but petrol is so expensive here that the 1300cc car cost L190 (about NZ$158) to fill up with 45L of petrol.
It’s getting a little warmer – now in the low 20s, but the weather hasn’t settled, and lots of boats have delayed their departure because of that. This has led to a shortage of berths in the marina, and the travel lift is now only launching boats that have an imminent departure date – making quite a few people p’d off.
Tomorrow we do some final shopping, and leave the marina on the start of our 2011 cruise – heading north to meet our first guests Morris & Gail somewhere near Izmir.
TECHNICAL
Today we had a sea trial with a couple of engineers aboard from Demir Marine. This is the very first time we’ve had engineers aboard Envoy under way. The objective was to ensure they were happy with the alignment of the prop shaft with the gearbox – we don’t want a repeat of last year’s gearbox problems. Anyhow Yulmaz is a competent engineer, and he said there was very little vibration, and all is good – so here’s hoping he’s right!
We’ve had no progress with the Naiad stabilisers. The new electronic control system was installed, but the hydraulic system would not centre the fins, and after several hours of experimentation I said “enough is enough”. I spoke with Naiad USA, and they said they would never get this kind of work done except by a factory-trained electrician. We had a competent, and well meaning electrician who’d never worked on Naiads before, and had little information supplied to him. This is not a major issue as last year we cruised safely and comfortably relying on our simple paravane stabilization system, and we’ll do the same this year. The new control system was going to cost over US$4,000 so I just said disconnect it, take it out, and when we can get a factory-trained electronics person to install it, and then if it works, we’ll pay for it.
The relay for the inverter I mentioned in the last post didn’t work – it couldn’t take the high current the inverter puts out. Actually all I wanted was the present isolator switch to be moved from under our bed, where it is obviously hard to access, to the outside of the bed, where I could access it. The electrician recommended the relay – who am I to disagree? Anyway his idea didn’t work so we’re back to my idea which is now working fine.