Keel Hairline Cracks

 In my blog post of 19 June I described how the prospective buyers' concerns about the hairline cracks along the hull-keel boundary at the extreme ends of the keel led to the termination of the purchase agreement and my withdrawal of the boat from the market.  The buyers were not satisfied with my contention that these cracks were normal and inconsequential because they were beyond the last keel bolts, nor with my providing the name of the well-known shipwright who had tightened the keel bolts and declared them OK during the boat's refit in 2015, nor the fact that no surveys of the boat had flagged this as a problem..

Last week I ran into Dean, who has owned the S&S 39 "Dr Jazz" for over 20 years.  He asked me how the boat sale was going and I explained the role of the hairline cracks in killing the sale.

Dean laughed in amazement because he said that his S&S 39 had always had those hairline cracks and had never been of any concern to him.  

Later I wondered why I had never thought of getting Dean's testimony to help allay the concerns of the buyers,  but then I though 'just as well' because by then I wanted to keep the boat.

Postscript on Battery Problem

I returned to the boat after a 10-day absence and was delighted to find all three battery banks at 14.2 volts.  I reported this to Bruce who opined that 14.2V was too high and might damage the batteries, and something around 13.6V would be preferable.  The only inputs to the batteries were from the wind generator and solar panels, so we suspected that one of the regulators was failing.  Because the solar panel's Victron MPPT controller is only a few years old the wind charger's controller dating from 2007 became the prime suspect.  

Bruce visited the boat two days ago to switch off the wind charger and found the batteries at a comfortable 13.7V.  Nevertheless he switched off the wind charger as planned to avoid the possibility of overcharging during the strong winds of the winter gales, and later in the year I'll try to run some experiments to determine if the controller is indeed faulty. 

The important thing is that the 5 large batteries on the boat appear to be fine.