contact

"I'm the last moored boat to the west of the bridge" said Suzanne, and by the time I found her I'd begun to wish I'd taken my bicycle. It was a nice spot, though, a few miles west of Devizes. I was going to have a look at the bowthruster, which has never really worked properly since she got the boat. Removing the hatch from the foredeck revealed a bit of a mess, and suggested that the marina people who'd sold the boat had been less than fastidious in their 'repair', and less than honest in their description of it. Quelle surprise, as any boatie would no doubt say, especially any french one.

It's always a bit daunting trying to work out what you're looking at, when you start a job like this on a piece of unfamiliar equipment. I started taking bits off, carefully noting down what went where, and began making sense of how it works.

These are solenoid contactors, that connect the bow thruster battery to the motor when you push the switch. They were all seized up. So we fixed that, and cleaned all the contacts, and put it all back together again, and... nothing happened. So next job is to open up the motor. But on this particular day, we'd run out of time, so I put the hatch back on and got cleaned up for a trip to Devizes.