Spent today alongside, as I’m tethered to my phone and laptop (the joys of being on-call for a technology company).
First job was to reduce the starting amount of furling line on the drum for the yankee. This was the easy part. When putting back the torx M6 bolts, one of them went for a swim. Bother. There’s a local Selden agent though, if I’m unable to find a replacement.
Second job was general tidying of the boat, nice and easy. Also went through all the manuals and paperwork, and transferred a lot of it in to a box file. It’s perhaps not as easy to skim through as a ring binder, but it’s a lot easier to handle given a number of the sections on the ring binder had booklets that were larger than the plastic sleeve.
Third job was tensioning the alternator belt. Turned out to be a lot easier than I expect it to be, especially once I found my 12mm ring spanner. Slacked off the pivoting bolt a fraction, slacked off the tensioning bolt, heaved, tightened the tensioning bolt and the pivoting bolt. Started the engine and pointed my iPhone at the front of it, and captured another slo-mo video; much less play than was previously visible. Also confirmed by twisting the belt – before tensioning it, I could almost turn it 180 degrees, and now it’s much closer to 90 degrees. Vacuumed up the belt dust too.
Looking at that video, I think I still have an issue with the water pump – the rusty spot under the flywheel is not a good sign, given I had wiped it clean a week or two ago. If I’m back out tomorrow, perhaps I’ll tackle that.
Fourth job was checking the state of the raw water intake filter. Found an old rusty screw, and a floating bit of plastic in there, but otherwise the mesh was pretty clean.