Csárdás

Having just read through the logs for the summer I realise I should tie up a few loose ends. I see that I was pretty fed up with the problems surrounding the engine. I have to say I was more annoyed with the lack of support in Spain than with the engine itself. I actually think the Yanmar engines are very good. The day after we returned to Hamble I phoned Marine Power, the local Yanmar agent. They were quite bemused by my description of the problem and had never heard of anything quite like it. Anyway, they sent someone out on Wednesday and after spending all day on it they had it fixed. Now THAT is service. The engineer had to take the crank case off to get at the lever inside and simply found that the nut had fallen off the end. They have never seen this happen before. Anyway, it is now fixed. It was fixed within two days of getting home. While it was a small problem it took the engineer all day to get at the problem area and put it all back together again. Impressive service.

A week or so after returning I helped Hanse out at the boat show, extolling the virtues of the Hanse 371. I think it is useful for potential customers to be able to talk to someone who has used and lived with the boat. The sales people know the boats from a technical point of view, do frequent short demo sails around the Solent, for example, but don’t have the same in depth experience of living with the boat that the owner’s do. I will also be helping out by doing demo sails on Csardas for potential new 371 customers.

I have just installed a nifty new computer system on the boat. Having used a laptop for electronic charting on the way back from Spain I decided a more permanent, more secure arrangement would be appropriate. When not navigating I use the laptop for work, so I’m actually using a computer on board almost all the time. So a permanent setup which protects the laptop from water and movement makes sense. At the boat show I also ordered the Nobeltec radar solution with charting software. The radar array connects to the computer and provides radar images overlayed onto electronic charts (and loads of other clever stuff). So the computer installation will accomodate that well. I look forward to getting it installed …