Resurrecting Misty

When Lily contacted me to do some rewiring on her motor sailer Blue Mist, she said it was a mess and she wasn't joking! Everything had been let go on the 1986 Halvorsen Morsen & Gowland sloop, that would have once upon a time been the envy of the coastal waters!

We started with the troubleshooting the start/stop switches on the motor which were performing unreliably, along with the starter motor. We installed much needed isolation switches by fitting them in a convenient location in the bulkhead that should be on all vessels as a safety measure, but were totally overlooked in the existing system. We then completely rewired the helm, which had old corroded wiring, causing issues with the navigation equipment causing power to fluctuate dangerously and enclosed it in a weatherproof box made to fit on site.

We then moved onto cleaning up bunches of messy wiring to the battery, which was wired and without fuses and should have been going to the switch panel. After cleaning this up by removing legacy wiring which had been left disconnected to rot, and testing all of the existing wiring for faults, we custom designed a new switchboard to specifically meet the current onboard requirements and to replace the old one which had well and truly seen its day.

Piece by piece we replaced switches, fuses, fixed a faulty bilge pump setup and rewired the solar and VSR to parallel the crank and house batteries, allowing for sharing of power and overflow to top up across systems. We fitted new cabin lights, went up to the masthead and fixed navigation lights that were mis-wired and replaced the drive unit on the autohelm.

What started off as a world of pain for her new owner, we have resurrected into a fully safe and functional sailing vessel, so Lily can enjoy her new boat without the risk of electronic failure and potential fire hazards.

Re-wiring the helm with custom cable box

Installation of battery isolation switch

Sorting cables & rewiring batteries

The pièce de résistance (new switch panel)!