Power Transfer Switch

Very early on we bought a commercial Automatic Power Transfer Switch. It went wrong twice and we sent it back to the manufacturer. When it went wrong a third time we decided enough was enough and I designed and built our own.

There are significant differences between the Malu Marine designed unit the the original one that we bought.

1) We use contactors rather than heavy duty relays. These are what shore based Power Transfer Switches for generators use. They are much heavier duty than the relays

2) We use electrical interlocking of the contactors rather than software interlocking. Yes, it's safer!

3) We use 12 volt relays to control the contactors so we can have remote control of the system without exposing the 220 volt mains.

Installed and worked first time!

'Table' on steering column

Some time ago we built a marine ply 'table' attached to the steering pedestal. We finished painting this and then fitted the test throttle for the new electric drive. Funny how a 'lick of paint' can sharpen up something that was otherwise not. Now we're just waiting for the new motor to arrive to test it!

The last month has been a time of designing and building and testing and aligning the motor. No photos... well, there are photos but we're not publishing them! It's all very encouraging to see the new electric drive coming ready for the sea trials. Rob and Simone are here next week and the trials begin in earnest.

Pedestal table

We had added a pedestal table - reason for this is the new electric drive controls plus a drink table.

6 nautical miles

As we were leaving the marina we saw a survey ship moored in the bay. Presumably it is part of the prospecting for oil off the south coast of Cyprus.

It's a strange looking ship with the large heli-pad on the bow and a 360 degree bridge, like a tugboat and a huge crane on the stern.

We motored round to look at it on the way to the club.

Today was Kataclismos race day for the Larnaca Nautical Club and so we took King Malu round to the club to act as committee boat... well really to be one end of the start/finish line.

We intended doing some maintenance on King Malu while we were moored. The bow navigation light had stopped working and this had been traced to the wiring between the light fitting at the bow wiring box.

The wires thread through the pull-pit and through the windlass locker, through a crew locker and finally to the bow wiring box. It took is almost all day to re-thread the wires!

There were actually only 6 boats taking part in the races.

Some of the boats are new and privately owned, and sail very well. When sailed to the limit they are fast. in 8 knots of wind on a downwind run they touch 3.9 knots. I measured their speed on the MARPA on the radar.

Jacob was sailing a club boat. The sails on the club boats are somewhat tired and don't have the sharp 'crinkle' sound of the new sails. However, he did well - sailing safely, but not at the speed of the racers!

There were three races today. The kids seemed to enjoy themselves and worked hard. It's a pity so few of the parents get involved in the club or even come down to watch their offspring race!

These are really preparation races for the island wide events later in the season.

Although they are just practice races, some of the kids were taking them very seriously!

Really today was a coaching session, with Anna and Katerina in the rescue boat giving advice.

For the sail back to the marina we invited Sheila and Marie to join us - they had come out with Jörn to watch the final race with Jacob in it - and Sheila had her first chance to actually sail King Malu. If all works out I will be teaching her to sail in Galini over the summer.

Making a new gangplank

We started with an old aluminium ladder, to which we pop-riveted aluminium window parts, to which we glued (Epidermix epoxy) Treadmaster. Added a pair of wheels at the end, and a bearing at the other... new lightweight gangplank! 

Uphostery completed

Here's what the new upholstery looks like. These are just quick photos from my iphone, but will post better ones when we are back in Cyprus.

We also got a new cushion made to go over the new sail locker in the for'ard cabin.

Cosmetic work on King Malu

We have recently had the mattresses recovered and the cabins much looked better but... the problem was the boards across the stern were rough marine ply and looked really bad. So we bought some 2cm form rubber and then upholstered them in the same material.

Tim brought some teak wood carvings back from Thailand and these just offset it.

The photo doesn't really do it justice, I will bring down a better camera for some cabin photos after we get the seats reupholstered. These will be done in Beirut. When we were over there last weekend we got a quote for that work, so next time we go over we will get that done too.

The for'ard cabin has access to the chain locker right at the forepeak and this also looked rough, so we made another panel and finished that cabin too.

The sail locker was beginning to look rough too, with extra wires and water pipes. So we boxed that in and will paint with bilge paint next week.

What is encouraging is to move from purely safety/functional work to cosmetic. More and more King Malu is becoming homely.

Varnishing finished

Hopefully finished varnishing for a bit. We had repaired and varnished the steps down into the saloon plus the woodwork behind, but there was a piece of black plastic on the port side as you came in that just looked out of place, so we removed it and cut a piece of marine ply which I stained and varnished to match in with the teak behind the steps. We are very pleased with the result.

The for'ard cabin had been used as a workshop when the boat was a live-aboard around the world. This meant the woodwork was in a terrible state of repair. I have slowly been repairing, stripping and revarnishing. The wood is such it will never be perfect, but the cabin is very much more liveable in than it was.

The final part is the forepeak, Again not perfect, but looking very much more presentable. We have just ordered new covers for the mattresses, and I am sure when finished the cabin will look very nice indeed.

Finished reefing lines

Final part of the new sails fixed - added eyes for the reefing lines, so that the reefing lines run along the boom and don't get caught on anything.

Sanding, sanding and more sanding

I'm trying to restore the for'ard cabin, so most of the week was spend sanding down teak or carefully sanding down teak veneered marine ply. The high point was to discover that the shelves in the peak came out to make sanding them easier. One more week and I hope to have finished.

Water tank guage

My intention had been to remove and clean the water tanks and fit a new depth gauge. So I removed all the nuts and tried lifting the cover.

No way on earth was this going to move - the bolts had nicely corroded themselves to the metal panel. Hence it would require manufacturing a new panel to remove it.

Taking photos inside the tank showed that the tank was actually amazingly clean, so other than a small amount of cleaning I left it as it is, and will check water purity some time in the future.

The depth gauge mounted easily and works well. Shows up how we need to repaint the bilges with bilge paint sometime.

Reefing lines

A very pleasant morning was spent fixing cheek blocks, clutches and rope tie offs to the main and mizzen booms. We finished the reefing for the mizzen, but still have to run the lines for the main.

Tidying up

Today was just loads of whippings on the lazy jacks to tidy up the sail packs.

We also created a bridle for the mizzen sheet. This will enable the mizzen to be closer hauled than it had been, and therefore sail better.


With all the lines now tidied away King Malu now looks very smart.

New Sails

All week I had been hoping the new sails would arrive in time for the weekend. I'd been watching the tracking on the courier's website. The sails first went to the wrong place, then returned to the correct port of departure eventually making it to Milan and waiting there for a few days...

Finally, on Friday, we are told they arrived. So off I go to collect them. That they had arrived many hours earlier in Cyprus was true, that the courier's Cyprus representative had collected them from the airport and I could thus collect from them was not true. When I arrived at the collection point an hour and a quarter before they closed for the weekend I was told that their driver was at the airport now and he would be back in a hour, with the sails. 'Please come back in an hour' was what the clerk advised. That would leave only 15 minutes before they closed. I wasn't hopeful.

I arrived at the duly appointed time: Everyone was packing up for the weekend and the computers already switched off. The clerk found some paperwork and said, 'Let me see if it has actually arrived'. Yelling in Cypriot across the warehouse gained the information that yes, our package was here. So I signed for it and took the car round to the loading bay. I had taken our Mitsubishi estate car, since I knew the package would be long as the battens for the fully battened main were long. They were in two pieces, since airlines will not fly any package over 2 metres, but had been led to understand that the package was about 1.75 metres, which would just fit into the car. However, it was actually only a few centimetres short of the 2 metres and I was not sure after all this it would fit in the car! We moved the front seat forward as far as it would go and then folded it forward and the package fitted with maybe 1-2 centimetres grace.

Saturday turned out to be God's grace on us weather wise, it was pretty close to dead calm all day. Whatever wind did happen should come from the north so we motored King Malu over to the wet dock which meant she was facing north and started unpacking. Laying it all out on the ground beside the dock we saw for the first time our logo on the sail bags.

The old sails were quite soft and we had been able to fold and bundle them quite easily. The new ones were directly the opposite, especially the genoa, which was made of Dyneema Hyrda Net. This is the balanced weave material that the sailmaker uses for the Performance Cruising Sails. This is the same as Ellen MacArthur uses on here round Britain yacht Skandia.

The sail had been neatly folded to a barrel on the floor of the sail loft in the UK, which made it easy to get on board.

To my surprise it also went up the new Furlex easily. Now we see our logo flying on the corner of a sail. It also furled very easily, the padded luff making it a smooth roll on the Furlex.

Fitting the main with its stack-pack and refitting the old and cleaned mizzen with a new stack-pack would definitely need more than just Tim and me, so my son Daniel and daughter-in-law Becky came down to help. Becky to take photographs and video.

First discussion was the battens: There were flat and round battens... the old main had flat battens, but the new one had round, the flat were for the stack-pack. The technology of sails seems to bear little resemblance to the old sails, which had been on the boat for goodness knows how many years. The round battens were impressive, with locked and threaded screws to tension them meaning the sail could be set to a very much better shape and the battens would also fall into the stack-pack easier when dropping the main.

But... what really concerned me was getting the bolt rope around the stack pack into the slot along the boom. We decided to raise half of the sail up the mast to get it out of the way and then have less marterial to try to deal with along the boom. This proved a good move.

The sailmaker had added a piece of white cloth along the edge that went into the slot. It looked much tougher than the blue of the stack pack, which seemed sensible. However, what we also found was that this material was slippery and made the whole process of getting the sail plus stack-pack onto the boom very much easier.

We then tied the lazy jacks to the stack-pack and dropped the main into it.

The main is a Long Distance Cruising Sail, made by the same sailmaker and to the same specification as Gypsy Moth IV used in the second round the world trip. This is cut from Bainbridge Ocean Sailcloth, not quite as crisp as the Hydra Net, but stiff nevertheless and dropping it into the stack-pack for the first time was interesting to get it to flake correctly and actually fit.

We raised it again and then dropped it and the second time was very much easier.

Finally, we fitted the old, now cleaned mizzen into it's stack-pack on the mizzen boom. We now have three sails to demonstrate Premium Cruising, Long Distance Cruising and old technology cruising sails.

Time for lunch!

After lunch we move King Malu back to her berth, except we couldn't resist taking her out and seeing the new genoa filled with air.

The shape of the new genoa was excellent, it filled and sailed like a dream. The forecast for next Saturday means, if it holds, we can have a long full day sailing to see how the new suite of sails performs.

The wind was too light to get a real feel for the new sail, but the shape was fantastic even in light wind.

Tomorrow, time to do whippings and clean up all the little fiddly bits.

For'ard cabin

The previous owner had a fire onboard. He and the boat were very lucky to survive. He had no smoke alarms and a fan in the for'ard cabin caught fire during the night when he was asleep. This caught the wood alight and in the process doing damage to the to a significant amount of the woodwork. The fire put itself out, but the woodwork looked really bad. He never bothered much with it as the for'ard cabin was not used as a cabin but as his workshop.

We have now started on the interior restoration, so I have removed the front of the locker in the for'ard cabin and will be working at replacing and upgrading. I have also started stripping the varnish off the wood to re-varnish. In the saloon the varnish is matt, whereas in the cabins it's a mixture of gloss and matt, so when I re-varnish I will make it all matt.

The Fein Multimaster is really coming into its own - not only did I use the saw blade to cut out the old panel in a way that would have been impossible with even a jig-saw, but the sanding attachment allows getting into the ridges and corners of the cabin.

It's going to be a long task doing the woodwork, so watch this space...

Sails... bolt rope repair

We have a new genoa and main sail on order and they should arrive on Wednesday. These are being made for us by one of the premiere sailmakers in the UK, but banded with our own Malu Marine brand. These will be the first of the new brand sails so we are really looking forward to seeing them.

The old genoa was not too bad, but had an 8mm bolt rope and the new Furlex needs a 4mm bolt rope. So there were two options: 1. Send it to the UK and get them to change the bolt rope 2. Do it ourselves. We opted for #2. Yesterday evening Tim was up till midnight unpicking the bolt rope and then this morning I joined him. So by lunchtime it was unpicked. It was a phenomenal amount of work. I calculated that we (and Tim did most of it) unpicked between 5,000 and 8,000 stitches.

After lunch we attached the new bolt rope and pulled it through and then using our trusty hand sewing machine re-sewed the new bolt rope in place. Next weekend will be sail weekend. We'll check the new bolt rope on the genoa fits and then take King Malu out for a sail with the new Malu Marine sails. Let's hope the weather is good... it's been pretty awful recently and we're due for another storm this week.

Varnishing, EPIRB and 200V switch

We're slowly moving from phase 1 to phase 2 of the restoration of King Malu. The deck work is mostly complete, we have ordered a new suite of sails and so we are starting to look at the cabins.

The most obvious part is what the saloon looks like. The cabins are seen only by us, but when we invite guests on board they see the saloon. In general the saloon looks pretty good. We need some new upholstery and a carpet, but the lockers are solid teak and look smart.

Notice the bolt cutters behind the steps. These are a critical safety tool every yacht should have available. If you loose your mast you need to be able to cut the rigging free quickly.

Anyway... what didn't look so good are were the steps down into the saloon and the teak behind the steps. So the first thing to tackle was stripping and re-varnishing that area.

We used some cheap triangular sanders we bought from Lidl plus a Fein Multimaster. The Fein Multimaster is new and expensive, the sanders from Lidl are at the opposite end of the cost spectrum. In combination they worked well. The Lidl sanders for the large areas and the Fein for the detail. What the Fien was particularly good at was the gaps between the teak tongued and grooved boards. There is a rubber linear piece that takes sand paper for doing exactly that. We highly recommend this tool.

We then used a Sadolin water based clear varnish. On the teak woodwork I put 4 coats and on the steps I put 8 coats. The steps took a bit more work. We removed the old anti-slip, which was no longer anti-slipping and replaced it with Treadmaster. We kept the metal anti-slip tread holders and we are very pleased with the result.

At the end of 2011 we also bought a McMurdo EPIRB and fitted that.

It is fixed in place very close to the steps, as in an emergency you need to get and deploy it quickly. It won't do any good being in a locker if the yacht sinks!

The EPIRB will automatically start transmitting when it's in salt water, so you might wonder if water coming in through the companion way will set it off. This is not a concern as there is also a magnetic switch in the unit, with a small magnet in the bulkhead fitting, so it has to be removed from the fitting as well as be immersed in water to set it off. There is also a way of setting it off manually.

We bought the McMurdo EPIRB from Mailspeed Marine in the UK. Dave Somers is the representative we deal with and he is both helpful and very knowledgeable.

The McMurdo G5 Smartfind Plus is a 406MHZ Epirb designed to operate with the COSPAS-SARSAT international system, but is also fitted with a 12 channel GPS receiver. This addition ensures that the exact position of a casualty is relayed directly to the emergency services.

Finally... the last thing we did was to fix the Sterling 220V Automatic Switch in a new place in the saloon locker above the chart table.

This switch is a great device. It automatically swaps between shore power, generator and inverter, but in each case makes sure the power is clean and stable for 10 seconds before connecting it. You can buy it from our store at Malu Marine.