November Report 2

Pachuca's steering station has two components: the steering pedestal to which is attached the wooden binnacle which supports the compass. 

The Cobra pedestal steering is an all-gear system that is considered to be more reliable than chain or wire systems.  During final preparations for the circumnavigation in 2008 my friend Reg Kelly suggested that we remove it from the boat and have it checked out, and what wise advice that turned out to be.  We managed to remove it and deliver it to a local engineer who took it apart and found it to have a frozen bearing and totally dry of lubrication.  When  I picked it up a grease nipple was pointed out to me but after  the installation of new batteries in New Zealand I very rarely got access to the below-cockpit area for greasing the bearing.

After pedestal removed

Base of pedestal looking very sad

Two weeks ago we removed the unit and found it to appear to be in  bad shape with corrosion starting to eat into the aluminium base.  The bearing  was found to be in bad shape although not corroded, and it appeared that ordinary rather than marine grease had been applied in 2008.  After picking up the refurbished unit we sent it  out for re painting.  The spray painter had done a beautiful job and the unit presented as new. 

By then we had decided have the stainless steel binnacle rebuilt, to be higher and have a bend at the top for better presentation of the instruments.  I agreed mount a Scanstrut instrument pod which would look smart and protect the instruments from the elements.  The pod would also enable us to pass the instrument wiring down the legs of the binnacle rather than down the side as before. We then had difficulty in mounting the stand-alone Garmin 152H GPS which had not been designed for this kind of mounting but we came up with a solution utilizing the woodworking skills of Zelko.

So the instrument pod will accommodate the Garmin GPS in the centre, the Raymarine autopilot head at the left, and the anchor up-down switch at the right.

And last week Bruce and I managed to reinstall the boat's stainless steel bow plate.  The job took a lot of time and patience but fortunately there were no catastrophes.