Major upgrades and refits for this season were mostly related to new electronics and improving the functioning of the electrical systems in general. As often is the case in boat investments, one thing leads to another and the whole project turns out to be larger than originally anticipated.

First of all, our domestic battery bank needed to be renewed as the batteries had lost much of their original capacity. We decided to replace the old domestic lead batteries with Lithium batteries. They were very expensive, but outperform traditional batteries in capacity, efficiency and length of the battery life cycle. It is important to buy the Lithium battery system from a quality manufacturer and have the installation done professionally to minimize the fire risk related to thermal runaway process.

Secondly, the bow thruster had been working poorly due to the lack of battery power, so we wanted to improve the reliability of the thruster. We renewed and increased the capacity of the start battery as in this new set-up the start battery is now shared by the bow thruster. Furthermore, our Side-Power bow thruster system was upgraded to proportional control (i.e. speed-controlled). That means that the thruster RPM is now proportional (unlike in a traditional on/off thruster) and thus, can also be controlled by a joystick.

Thirdly, our old Raymarine A125 chart plotter gave us trouble last season so we needed to fix that someway or another. The plotter was only about five years old, but it had started to have all kinds of weird problems with the touch screen: the screen froze frequently and sometimes the plotter started to zoom in or out all by its own. It turned out to be the touch screen which was broken beyond repair and of course the warranty had already expired. Apparently this is fairly common issue with some of the Raymarine’s touch screen plotters as I found similar experiences from various internet forums. Easiest thing would have been to replace the plotter with a newer Raymarine’s product as our navigation eco-system (incl. Quantum wifi radar) was built around Raymarine. However, based on this experience, I was quite unhappy with the Raymarine’s quality, so we bought a new plotter from B&G. This brand was recommended by many of our followers at Instagram, and after testing this 12″ Vulcan plotter, the touch screen seemed to be different caliber in responsiveness and resolution compared to Raymarine. Also the operating system is made for sailing which was a big plus. The only downsize is that we also need to replace our current radar with B&G, but that will be done in the future.
/Antti