On the delivery trip we had a few issues with the electrics and when I looked at the back-end it just seemed a mess but in fairness it has had a few extras added since it was first commissioned and most haven’t been added very well. We had real issues with the tillerpilot but only every now and then, what we found was when it wasn’t working the power it needed to work was just not coming through the cable; this said when it was tested at other times it was working and the power was as it needed to be so out came the control panel again but it was such a mess it was almost impossible to trace anything on the distribution board. Once we added a direct line from the tillerpilot to the battery we didn’t have any issues again so something is wrong!!

Once in our home port St. Raphael, Limassol off the board came again to try and trace things but without too much luck, even though I could find things we didn’t have any free switches and although the paperwork for the tillerpilot says it should be fused and on a dedicated connection nothing like that was in there!!

Over a few weeks I started to look at what I could do and what I might need to make things better! The issue is I’ve never been very good with electrics but Galerne actually has very little on her and yet they are very important “bits” so things needed to be thought through quite carefully. The standard and original switch panel had seven switches on it and I thought I needed a couple more but I really didn’t just want to add odd ones so the plan from the beginning was to switch out the switch panel for a couple of fives that should give me a couple of spares for growth.

Anyone that knows me will know that I’m quite a strange bloke when I do anything and so by changing out the switch panel I would have ended up with a hole or a mess to cover said hole in the backboard and so new ones were needed but being me I decided to mix it up a bit and make them out of Carbon Fibre, mainly because I wanted to have a go and this seamed as good a place to start as anywhere else! Although they are not perfect that have achieved to two things I wanted, which was to “have a go” and give me two new electrical back panels! I’ve also taken this change to put in a fuse box as there wasn’t anything like that in there before so that’s added quite a lot of work as well but I feel it is a much better solution now.

If you’ve been following this saga for a while you will remember we actually did the delivery trip without the chartplotter GPS working and so as part of this electrical work I have also managed to get the new GPS antenna fitted and working without it looking like a bodge!!