SPARE PARTS

For spare parts, first to my mind is a spares for a watermaker capable of producing a reasonable amount of water.

Having no water reduces the quality of life on board drastically. Our Aquabase produced up to 180lt per hour, but failed three times. Obviously, this always happens in the worst spots, in our case in the San Blas Islands and the Tuamotus. The low-pressure pump broke twice, and the high pressure pump once.

Another vital spare part is Volvo’s black box attached to the engine (MDI). Our D2-75 suddenly produced all kinds of rpm without being prompted and it could not be stopped from the helm station. Nobody knew what this could be, and only a search on the internet blogs showed that it’s a well-known issue.

Luckily Volvo sent a replacement, but I don’t understand why they are not recalling all these MDIS. Getting a replacement is probably fairly fast in Europe, but it took us weeks in Colombia!

Bring additional rope and enough cloth to repair sails – as a bare minimum a replacement for the main halyard. A problem for us was the main halyard with a Karver Hook that had too much friction, so we needed an additional line at the head of our sail to be able to haul it down. In addition, one of the plastic masthead sheaves chafed through. Consequently, we had to climb the mast to cut the sail down. Since then we’ve had to replace the main halyard twice where it chafes against the topping lift. Some additional strong protection over the top 50cm of the halyard has helped reduce the problem.