After mounting the dingy on the new Sea Wise Davit in the raised position, the dingy hides the stern light which is against the Coast Guard Navigation Rules pertaining to lights.  We are having an additional mast mounted white light installed on the transom that will extend above the top of the dingy and provide 135 degree coverage and can be seen for 2 nautical miles.  Problem solved.

Derek from Alcom reinstalled the FLIR Mariner camera and the system came up immediately on power up.  FLIR replaced our faulty unit with an upgraded model.  We can see the difference in contrast levels.  When the camera output is routed to the flatscreen TV in the Salon, the picture acuity is much greater.

        After many adjustments the dingy and the davit finally came together.

The Outboard had to be raised to clear the bottom (port side) pontoon.

Now to have the cover modified and wait for the conversion to electric and then we are done.

The installation of the Sea Wise Davit is more complex than it seems.  Alignment of  the attachment brackets on the dingy and associated hardware on the swimstep  is very precise.

The FLIR Night Vision camera system developed a problem.  When the system is powered up, the initial screen  (system information, etc.) displays for about 10 seconds and then the screen (Raymarine E80) goes blank with just the word Flir in dim grey letters  displayed at the top right of the screen.  When left on for over 30 minutes, the display shows what the Flir camera is pointed at.  The system continues to work without any problem until powered down.  If the system is immediately turned back on, it works and displays correctly.  If the system is left in the off position for 5 or more minutes, it displays a blank screen when powered up again.  Referred the problem to Gary at Alcom Marine Electronics.

Looks like I didn’t follow a version of the old adage “measure twice, drill once”.  If we had of purchased the right dingy initially, we would not be going through replacing the dingy davit.  We are fortunate in that our Mainship broker, Don Ross of Heritage Yachts came to our rescue with the idea of replacing our Rosskelley ST-275 dingy hoist with a Sea Wise manual hoist (to be replaced by their electric model in January of 2010).  In its final form, the Admiral will be able to push a button and raise or lower the dingy without using any muscle.  We researched the Sea Wise Slim Line Hydraulic system which is a bit pricey and decided to go with the manual/upgrade to the Electric system at about half the cost.  We will try to sell the Rosskelley ST-275 to offset some of the new cost.  We meet with Don and his installer this week to take a hard look at the swimstep on the Makai to see how the new davit will be installed.

October 21, 2009

Met with Don and Don from Heritage Yachts at the slip and they took all of the necessary measurements required to install the  Sea Wise Davit.  Don Ross is now a distributor for Sea Wise.

What started out looking like a relatively easy task of replacing our Achilles soft bottom, boat in a bag with a Carib 9.6 C9 with a Honda 9.9HP 4 stroke turned ito somewhat of a mess.

Problem # 1, the Carib is a bit longer and much heavier than the Achilles so the length of line on the davit’s 2 wheel pulley system were sized for the Achilles and not the Caribe.  Solution# 1, add more line.  We bought 2 - 36 ft 3/8 inch lines and rerigged the pulley system.

Problem #2, Weight of the dingy plus outboard plus 12V battery plus 5 gallon gas tank (full) proved to be too much for the 2 pulley blocks to handle.  Solution #2, buy a set of 3 pulley blocks (expensive).

Problem #3, 36 ft of line not enough to feed 3 pulleys instead of two.  Solution # 3, Back to West Marine and buy 2 - 50 ft 3/8inch lines and another set of 3 pulley blocks.  I will rig the new blocks tonight and take them to the marina on the 22nd.,

Carib Dingy

The Makai was first polished in November, 2007.  Then she spent 4 months basking in the hot Ensenada Mexican sun and has been in Long Beach since April of 2008.  Last week, we noticed that the top of the pilot house and some of the foredeck surfaces were starting to lose the glossy shine provided by the polish. The shine lasted from  November , 2007 to August 2009 which is 22 months without any additional application of polish.  The shine is dull but water still beads up on the surface so the actual protection of the fiberglass gel coat is still there.  The sides of the Pilot house and the entire hull still have the glossy, look like new shine and water still beads up on both. We decided to have the only the dull sections polished so that we can see just how long the polish will last on the dark blue hull and the sides of the pilot house. Martin Chavez is doing the polish work.  He maintains the topside of the Makai with bi-weekly, water only wash downs and has experience applying our Marine Polish as he has used it on some of his other clients’ vessels.

We  had Jason from Jason’s Window Tint apply a dark tint to all of the salon windows in 2007.  The tint proved to be too dark to see through at night so we asked Jason to remove the tint from the 3 front windows early in 2008.  Initially in 2007 when Jason asked us if we cruised alot at night we said absolutely not so he applied the dark tint.  Turns out, we do cruise at night and that is why we had the tint on the front widows removed so that we could see.  The Makai sits facing east when in our home slip and catches the sun from sunrise to about 12:30.  It heats the salon to an  unconmfortable temperature.  So we called Jason again today and asked for his help.  Jason has a new product called Geoshield that will block a lot of the heat transfer plus block 99% of the  sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays.  The Geoshield will not be as dark as the rest of the tint and also will allow you to see through the glass  alot better.  We will add comments to this entry regarding how well the Geoshield works later this week.

Derek from Alcom worked his magic again and replaced the Raymarine AIS250 receiver with the Raymarine  AIS500 Transceiver.  The hardest part of the install was pulling the cable from the required stand alone GPS antenna on the top of the pilot house down to the Electronics cabinet behind the helm.  After the install, our boat showed up on the AIS receiver of a 43 ft Nordhavn  down the gangway from our slip with all of our AIS data, Lat/long, MMSI #, etc.  So now we can be seen as a AIS transponder equipped vessel by other vessels so equipped.

We now consider the Electronics suite on the Makai complete.