In
early October Tommo from Caterpillar spent most of a day servicing
our twin Cat 3208 engines and
I spent this time with him, learning a lot in the process.
They’re
supposed to be serviced annually or every 200-250 hours and although they’d
only done about
140 hours since the last service we needed to get the service
done before the summer holiday rush. Half the cost of service is the
multitude of filters, oils, anodes and other service parts replaced.
Due
to covid
we hadn’t used the boat since June, so in
mid October did
a three day shakedown cruise around
Rakino & Waiheke Islands. The fishing was surprisingly good and
we caught
one snapper 62cm long.
Nice snapper caught northern end Rakino Channel
a few issues not related to the Cats
service.
windlass deck switch wasn’t working so replaced that.
Rapport
has a NEMA 2000 network information sharing system and we found some
elements weren’t working properly. Subsequently the Furuno agents, ENL, came to the
boat and quickly found the problem caused by two faulty network cable connectors
which they replaced.
But
the biggest issue was the recently serviced generator kept shutting
down after about 30 mins operation. On
return to the marina we found the 5 year old start battery had gone
flat and replaced it, but that didn’t help. Our regular contractor
called in a genset electrical specialist who after a couple of hours
investigation found that during the service the oil pressure switch
had been replaced with an incorrect type. The switch is supposed to
send a signal to shut off the glow plugs after working oil pressure
is reached, but this switch wasn’t doing that so the glow plugs
were staying on and sucking 10
amps from
the battery. Once the correct oil pressure switch was fitted all was
OK.
Over
Labour Weekend we took out John, Alice and our grandkids Lily, Veida
& Axel. Again the fishing was good and the kids all caught their
first ever fish, but what sizes. We spent an afternoon ashore at Waiheke’s Man
O’War vineyard and although enjoyable was way too crowded with long
delays for food.
Not a bad snapper for 4 year old Veida’s first day of fishing
We
had another two weeks aboard during November, including on week with
Chris. The weather wasn’t great with winds up to 30 knots and many
showers, but everything ran well and again we had an abundance of
snapper.
After
a year of ownership we’ve logged 70 nights aboard and that’s not
bad considering all the time we couldn’t go out due to covid
restrictions.
We’ve postponed our Whitianga trip to around March-April.


