Chapter 30: “Meraviglia 13”

One of my all-time favorite movies is Apollo 13 from 1995.  It is truly a classic.  It details the Apollo 13 moon mission in which the spacecraft suffered an explosion on the way to the moon and the heroics of the astronauts and mission control staff to bring the crippled craft back to Earth.  In addition to starring Tom Hanks, it also stars Gary Sinise, Bill Paxton, Ed Harris, and (of course) Kevin Bacon.  A particular scene from that movie came to mind this week.  It is soon after the explosion and no one is quite sure what happened or how to proceed.  Everyone in Mission Control is talking at once and describing the malfunctions they are seeing-chaos reigns.  Flight Director Gene Kranz, played by Ed Harris, quiets everyone and says “Can we review our status here?  Let’s look at this thing from a standpoint of status.  What have we got on this spacecraft that’s good?”  There is dead silence.  Finally, someone looks up and says “I’ll get back to you, Gene.”  It’s classic.

I got to thinking about it this week as I contemplate the refitting we’ve been doing.  Every time I have thought there was a system on Meraviglia that was “good”, it ends up being “not”.  We’ve been living aboard now for a couple of weeks.  On the upside, we are no longer peeing in a bucket.  We have an actual functioning marine toilet (waste handling on boats is a subject worthy of an entire post by itself) and an actual functioning sink.  We can make meals and sleep on a decent mattress.  Those are definitely wins.  I got to the point where I thought we had uncovered all the “bad”.  This week, though, that thinking turned out to be, ummmm, optimistic.  For instance, our refrigerator/freezer.  Meraviglia has two compartment for this.  One is a freezer and one is a fridge.  They are cooled by a single compressor.  There is a cold plate in the freezer compartment that is supposed to (Duh!) keep things frozen and then the refrigerator compartment is cooled by a fan in a hole in the wall separating the two that moves air from the freezer to the fridge.  After a couple of weeks, we realized that the freezer compartment really never gets below 31-32 degrees and the fridge hangs out in the upper 40s to low 50s.  And that is with the compressor running ALL. THE. TIME.  Obviously, it’s using a ton of power, not providing adequate cooling, and, because the compressor is located in our cabin, is heating up our sleeping area by running all the time.  Not cool.  Literally.  So, we need to replace it.  What we really need to do is disassemble the galley, rip out the fridge and freezer compartments and rebuild them with better insulation and then install a new cooling system.  But we’re not ready to do that, so we’re going to live with the less-efficient compartments and install a new cooling system that should actually keep foods frozen and sufficiently cool while being about 300% more efficient.  We hope.

Then there’s the windlass.  A windlass is a big winch that raises the anchor on the bow of the boat.  Ours is original to the boat and manufactured by Nilsson in New Zealand.  It still works!  I love it!  I love it because I love old stuff that still actually works (like most of my body parts, for instance).  I love it so much that I serviced it last week.  I took it all apart, cleaned it, greased it, and put it back together.  The right way!  I have been excited to be able to go out and actually test it out.  But then we inspected the chain locker, which sits below the windlass and, naturally, stores the anchor chain.  While all the winch portion of the windlass sits up on deck, the motor and hydraulic well sit in the anchor locker.  And, of course, when we looked, we didn’t like what we saw.  It appears that the windlass base, where it meets the deck, has been leaking, allowing water to drip down onto the motor and the underside of the windlass mount.  It’s all corroded and actually coming apart.  So, while it works, how many times could we raise several hundred pounds of anchor and chain before it breaks?  Probably not many.  And since we plan to live “on the hook” (at anchor rather than in a marina), having a reliable windlass is an important piece of safety kit.  Sooooo, yep, we’ll replace that too.

At this point, we’ve replaced or rebuilt the plumbing system, the electrical system, electronics, transmission, rudder, refrigeration, tanks, bimini/dodger, mattresses, portlights, hatch gaskets, and chainplates.  The only significant systems remaining from when we purchased Meraviglia are the engine, the sails, and the standing rigging.  Sheesh.  (For a philosophical discussion of this, google “Ship of Theseus”) The good news, if we want to look hard, is that those three systems have been inspected and tested and are good to go.  We hope. Onward.