>Scott wrote: >I've been advised by some people that I have great respect for, to budget >one to two years to wring out a boat before departing. I had similar thoughts as Scott. Fortunately, I was not able to take off as quickly as I wished. I have encountered two major problems during our shakedown cruising. These have generated extra experience for me as well as getting initial manufacturing faults out of the ship. 1) At 200 hours, I had an oil fitting on the transmission fail and it blew all the transmission oil into the bilge. With the ZF transmission, oil pressure is used to engage the clutch plate so no further damage occurred, but we were dead in the water. The fault was traced to an aluminum fitting to the oil pressure sensor. It was replaced with steel fittings. This occurred while we were in mild current waiting for a drawbridge in Portsmouth, NH (second fastest tidal current in the US.) Having spent so much time on the T&T list and others. I immediately dropped anchor and it held in time to prevent washing into the marina behind me. Since we were in a comercial port, it was a 5 minute tow to a dock and the mechanic was a block away. We were back underway in at the next slack tide. It would have been a very imaginative fix at sea. The transmission oil pressure is 400 lbs. It would have been difficult to plug the hole without a threaded fitting. This gets me thinking, how would I fix this at sea? I think the answer is to carry a variety of threaded fittings, and some taps and bolts. In this case I could tap the hole and plug it with a bolt. For all my other hydraulic lines I need spares that will fit every connection or the ability to make them. 2) At 265 hours the Mathers engine controller failed. No throttle or shifting controls work without the controller. The fault was a failed controller. Mathers did a root cause analysis and found an electrolytic capacitor had been installed backwards in manufacture. It just took this long to fail. Solution was to replace the unit. With great luck, this happened while I was idling just after docking. It caused a delay in our departure, but we had a safe, convenient place to work. Mathers replaced the unit as the permanent solution, but it took several days to get the replacement. To get going the following day, I rigged a manual throttle in the engine room and found out how to manually engage the transmission from the engine room. The next day we operated in the old fashion method with me radioing commands like "forward 1000RPM" to my wife in the engine room. In this case, we now have this emergency procedure that in our knowledge base and we could put into effect in a matter of a few minutes while underway. There have been other minor issues with other equipment like the Hurricane heater and the water maker. There are a couple of issues I am still debugging with a Marine Air thermostat and one of the Maxwell windlass controllers. These are not as mission critical, but are easier to arrange service and parts, closer to home. At this point I am happy that we did not just take off. I really want a few uneventful months of cruising before I start out for more distant places. During this time I am spending even more time thinking thorough how I'll solve problems at sea. I don't expect the arrival of new issues will ever go away, but once they are to the point that I can handle them myself while underway, I feel I'll be ready. Some of the shakedown is to fix infant mortality issues, the other is to bond with the ship. On one passage I had the captain and chief engineer of many merchant ships aboard. He said he always hated the first year of a new ship, because it was always a great deal of work getting the bugs out. Along these lines, I would be very interesting in stories of the experienced passagemakers on this list about how they prepared themselves and their ships for their voyages. -Wray Wray West M/V Anjumal (Cape Horn 65) Portsmouth, NH www.anjumal.com