As all of us boaters know, when you live up north the winter months are spent preparing for the next season of boating on the hard. Unless of course you are one of the brave ones who winter in the water. None the less most of us have a hit list that we want to get done within a 6 month window of not so cooperative weather.

We chose a boatyard that could address a wet area in our Starboard hull that was noted on our Marine Survey before we purchased our Vessel Dragonfly. It was a small repair but needed to be done before we went back in the water. We also had a few gelcoat repairs to do, some smaller items from our survey that were noted like, Fuel hose, Compass seal, fire /CO detectors, epirb etc… So lets begin.

We purchased all of the items that were noted in our survey as High Priority through the winter. We wanted to get the hull repair completed before winter as our insurance company gave us a due date of March 01 2021 to complete to maintain our insurance coverage. Lots of time right???? Apparently not. The yard had taken so long to start our repairs that we were right to the wire launching in the spring of 2021. However they did get the work done and had us ready for our launch date.

Another big project for us was a new Solar Array. As mentioned before we had 300 Watts of solar power when we purchased our vessel but it proved to be too little. We reached out to a fabricator and made a new solar arch to hold 6 X 200Watt panels. We split the panels between 2 MPPT controllers and installed the entire system over a weekend before we launched. It work fantastic!! We have full Batteries by 8-9am every morning on a sunny day with running the fridge, freezer, laptops and lights.

We made it to our launch day in June and completed our in-water engine checks. We Installed our sails and hooked up our plumbing and got ready for another season of sailing.

It was not without challenges and unexpected issues this season… more to come in the next post

Cheers

James & Tammy