While our cruising lifestyle may be on pause during the Scottish lockdown, our maintenance log isn’t. Several scheduled service items came due in mid-May, including annual testing, lubricating and changing the oil and filter in our gasoline engines, changing the hydraulic zincs, and charging our backup batteries. We also completed some unscheduled maintenance work, such…
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Load Shedding
One of the challenges with the smaller electrical systems found on most boats is managing the power load. Whenever electrical loads are running on a boat, they are delivered by some power source. It might be the generator, it could be shore power, or it could be the inverter. But, whatever the power source, it…
Water Leak
Saturday morning we lifted the floor covering in the master stateroom head to access stores and found the floor underneath soaked wall-to-wall. We opened up the storage area below and it also had a lot of water in it. The first task was to get everything out of the storage areas and all dried and…
Reduced Generator Output
Our Northern Lights 12kW generator ran for years without any hard-to-diagnose problems. It just ran, and that’s the way we like it. For its entire 6,600-hour life, it’s been able to reliably produce 42 amps. It’s nominally a 50-amp generator, but due to highly non-linear load on Dirona, the power factor often is less than…
Generator Oil Change
In this video, we change the oil in our Northern Lights 12kW generator and discuss related aspects including oil storage, obtaining new oil and disposing of used oil as we travel the world.
Seven Weeks at Gigha
When we departed Amsterdam in February of this year, our plans were to spend the spring in Antwerp and the Atlantic coast of France and Spain, and the rest of the year in the Mediterranean. Since grocery shopping can be a hassle, we’d stocked up the boat planning not to need anything except produce and…
Gigha Winds
Our anchorage at the Isle of Gigha has good protection in most directions, except from east to northeast. The winds generally haven’t been in that direction since we arrived, but high winds with gusts to 38 knots blew from the northeast for several days during the fourth week of our stay, sending large waves are…
Baking at Gigha
While in California back in 2013, we bought a Zojirushi Home Bakery Mini. We weren’t sure how available bread would be as we travelled around the world, and at certain stages of the trip we wanted to be able to devote more freezer space to meats. We’ve found good fresh bread readily available in most…
Isle of Gigha, First Ten Days
With the UK in lockdown, we’re spending all our time on board Dirona. It’s a comfortable boat, we always have excellent internet connectivity, and there’s never a shortage of work to do. This has given us time to complete a few lower-priority projects that have been around for a while. Among the work we did…
Inspecting John Deere 6068 Accessory Drive Belt and Bearings
An important annual service check on a diesel engine is to check the drive belt and bearing condition on all engine-driven accessories including the alternator and coolant pump. The video below steps through this simple service check on our John Deere 6068AFM75. The engine is a 266 hp, M2-rated marine diesel that is just…
