Birvidik

Over to the Dark Side

So here we are. John and Elaine are playing in the Greek sun on Birvidik, while we are ensconced in a motor boat (imaginatively renamed 'Birvidik II') in the pouring rain* in Amsterdam. So it comes to pass that our five months of living in a motorised shoe box have come to an end and we are once more afloat, albeit this time on a steel Dutch motorcruiser.

There are significant differences between living on a sailing boat at sea and living on board a motor boat in inland waters. The two lifestyles do, however, have a lot in common. By way of a single example, both types of vessel are complicated pieces of kit, combining as they do all the systems, gadgets and appurtenances of home life with those of a waterborne transport. There are endless opportunities for things to go wrong.

And believe me, they do.

Those who frequent boating circles will be conversant with the term 'shake-down cruise'. This is a sort of pre-cruise cruise, during which all the little potential niggles, hassles, irritations and disasters lurking in the boat are teased and tempted into showing themselves so that they can be identified and given a good seeing-to before the cruise proper begins. We really should have had one of those. However, we didn't. Instead, our journey from Lathum, where we bought the boat, to our winter berth in Amsterdam had to serve as the shake-down.

Another thing that all boats have in common is the presence of a significant number of idiosyncrasies, quirks and foibles peculiar to the particular boat in question. As we soon found out, Birdie II certainly has her fair share of those.

I suspect that our moving onto the boat was as much of a novel experience to the boat as it was to us. She had previously been used as a holiday home, taken out for a couple of weeks at a time on a few occasions per year. This was underlined by the fact that she had clocked up less than a thousand engine hours in the 21 years she had been in commission. So I imagine that having two people and a cat living on board full time must have come as a bit of a shock to the poor thing. Her systems have probably had more use in the two months we have been living aboard than they had in the previous ten years.

The first quirk that strikes you is that she has no gas on board at all. Nasty, dangerous, explosive stuff, gas. All cooking is done on 220 volt AC. The galley would have served for a small restaurant, with a microwave, an oven, a kettle, a toaster, and a four burner ceramic hob. In addition there's a bloody great immersion heater in the engine bay. The question is, of course, where does said 220v AC come from? In marinas it's easy - you just plug in to the shore power.

Well, actually, it's not quite that easy. In many stops, including quite a few marinas, the shore power, if available at all, would be stretched to supply enough current to keep the Duracell bunny in action. Four amp maximum is not uncommon. This will support just under 900 watts. That's not enough for one of the four rings on the cooker. Stick the toaster on as well and you're likely to take out the local substation and plunge the adjacent hospital into darkness mid liver transplant.

The builders installed two cunning devices to get round this problem. The first was an inverter to transform the 24v dc output from the domestic batteries to 220v ac. This would be fine if you wanted to charge your phone or power up a Duracell bunny. Try running a couple of rings off it though and your batteries will make alarming buzzing noises as they try push out the several hundred amps required to do this from 24v. If you're very lucky the batteries will run completely flat in seconds and refuse to accept any charge ever again. If you're not, and the batteries have enough capacity, the battery leads will glow bright red and the terminals will melt into pretty, silvery blobs just before the whole caboodle bursts into flames and incinerates your home, your possessions, the only copy of your recently completed groundbreaking new novel and the cat.

Perhaps aware of this possibility, the cunning Cloggies had also installed a sodding great five and a half kilowatt diesel generator. This lurked in the engine bay and glowered out of the hidey-hole into which it appeared to have been shoe-horned with the assistance of a couple of powerful hydraulic rams. There was about a fingers' thickness of clearance on all sides.

So it was that we set off on our maiden voyage, first stop Arnhem then on to Wageningen where we moored up, plugged rapidly into shore power and toddled off to have a look around. On our return we were sitting in the saloon when there was an ominous sounding 'click' noise from the electrics cupboard and all the power went off, plunging us into darkness. It had tripped on both the boat and the pontoon supply. Tripping it back in had no effect - it immediately tripped out again.

At this point I didn't know if the fault was with us or the pontoon supply. "I know" I thought, "I'll start up the generator. If everything works on that we'll know the fault's in the shore supply." The genny roared into life but everything still tripped out, thus exonerating the shore supply. While I was pondering the implications of this, the genny coughed, spluttered, hiccoughed a couple of times and then died, stubbornly ignoring all my subsequent efforts to coax it into starting again.

Sitting in the encircling gloom we began to question the wisdom of an all-electric setup. I put on my headlight and began crawling into cupboards trying to make sense of the wiring system.

This is where I missed Birvidik I. More accurately, I missed the intimate knowledge I had of Birvidik I. Over the 21 years we had her I had explored, rebuilt, modified and recorded every aspect of her. I knew where every bolt, screw, pump, wire, pipe, handle, lever & switch was. On Birdie II I was pushed to find the fuse box. No schematics or explanatory diagrams with this baby.

After about half an hour impersonating a Welsh miner version of Gollum I found the ac trip switches. Fumbling around with these eventually led to the identification of the faulty circuit, namely the one to the galley. This operated the microwave, hob and extractor fan. I isolated this and things improved slightly. We may not have been able to cook but we could, at least, see. We decided to limp on to Amsterdam and get things looked at there. A few days subsisting on lettuce and cold baked beans would do wonders for our expanding waistlines.

Upon arrival in Amsterdam, it took a few days to get the electrician and the mechanic organised, but come they did. In both cases they furnished an excellent example of the relative merits of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. Given enough time and amphetamines I could probably have worked out the causes of both problems. The professionals, though, have seen hundreds of cases like these. They know with 95% certainty what the problem is likely to be. The electrician looked at the set up and immediately said that it was an earth leakage, probably in the hob. I'd have gone for the microwave. He was right.

Practical experience 1 - Theoretical knowledge 0.

As for the generator, both the mechanic and I started from the same assumption, namely fuel starvation. Checks on fuel lines, fuel filters and stop cocks all came up clear. At this point I'd have had to have had a sit down and a long think. Not so the mechanic. "In that case" he said, "There's probably a stuck stop switch somewhere". A quick ferret around found exactly that. A single screw had not been tightened up properly and had worked loose with the vibration. The stop switch contacts had then worked loose and switched off the genny. Simple as that.

Practical experience 2 - Theoretical knowledge 0.

I had been getting a bit worried. The generator was integral to the whole set up for living aboard. If that had failed it would have had to have been replaced and the cost of that would run into thousands. As it was, solving both problems cost us about 500 quid, including a new hob. A very expensive new induction hob. As specified by Liz.

We decided to celebrate with a shower. Don't say we don't know how to have a good time. It was at this point that Liz discovered that the shower tray wasn't pumping out. Now I used to share a flat with a plumber and he taught me everything he knew. Plumbing, he argued, boiled down to two salient points:

1. Shit flows downhill
2. Pay day's Friday.

Armed with these insights I cleared the outlet pipe which ran from the shower tray to the pump reservoir chamber. What came out looked like a particularly gruesome teratoma. Then I got Liz to run the shower so that I could check that all was working OK. It was just as well I did that.

When she pulled the plug on the shower tray, some water did, indeed, flow into the reservoir to be pumped out. A considerable amount, however, poured into the bilge and flowed into the deep bilge below the prop shaft. This could only be accessed through two slots either side of the prop shaft, each just about wide enough to get a pencil in.

I traced the problem to the plughole fitting in the shower tray. This had either worked loose or had not been tightened up properly in the first place. Water ran past the sides and down the outside of the pipe rather than the inside. Judging by the amount of water I pumped out of the deep bilge, this had been going on for some considerable time, probably since before we bought the boat.

I'm going to check and tighten every nut, bolt, screw, fitting and hose clip on this boat; especially those on seacocks and engine cooling pipes.

And introduce the previous owner to the concept of a maintenance schedule.

Footnote

* This is a complete fabrication and has been inserted solely for effect, in order to try to brighten up an otherwise drab narrative. The weather here has been almost without exception bright and sunny.