It’s been a bit blowy over the last few days, so there hasn’t been much sailing. We have had a moderate “Grigal” wind, that blows straight into the harbour from the North East, making things a little lumpy. However, with extra lines on, Nautilus has been really stable and not rolling around (like some of the other boats around us. So, no sailing means more time to tinker!
One of the things that was bugging me is that the chain counter wasn’t working. It’s a super-helpful piece of kit as it lets you know how much chain you’ve let out.
The usual rule is that you want to let out 4 times the depth of water. With the depth sounder, you know how much water you have, so add in a chain counter and you can be super-accurate.
However, ours wasn’t working, so it was time to service the windlass to work out what was wrong.
Jumping into the anchor locker I opened up the windlass and found it was jammed full of salt. It took about 3 hours of gently chiselling it out, but I managed to clean it all out and free up all the components. I think the drain got blocked in the past and backed up.
Finally after lots of poking around and digging behind panels, I tracked down the issue to a snapped cable in a juction box. A bit of rewiring later and we were up and running again. 6 hours of cleaning, polishing and rewiring and we were up and running again.
