Everything starts getting back together into a ship. The rudders, the windvane back on the transom, the deck panels, wiring, painting, and the surprise of meeting old friends.
Rudders and Windvane steering back on the transom
Peter scrwes the big bolds of the windvane steering on this side of the transom……and on the other side neigbour Anna holds the nuts from turning.
The solar deck panels
The first panel is mounted.the second panel is mountedand nearly allTerry bends corners in the aluminium to make cable linesAdriana mounts the cable lines on deckthis is the result. We made pieces of Iroko over the cable connections to prevent them from breaking.
Surveyer
For the insurance the surveyer spent a day with looking, measuring, checking, and a lot of hammering on the hull.
the surveyer hammers on the hull and the tone of it will reveal if there are bad delaminated pieces. No worries, Ya is a solid yacht.
Wiring
What can we say about wiring? It is for the new solar panels on deck, for the new motor displays, the rewiring of the window solar panels. here a small impression.
Varnishing
Adriana manages to completely strip the stairs, only because of the constant support of her labrador Puku, who stands by her all the time.
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Adriana just finished the second layer on the table.
Stig and Anna become neighbours!
We know Stig and Anna already from Gambier, or first Pacific island, where we made a great tour together. Now suddenly, we saw their boat being hauled on the boatyard. What a great surprise!
Going on the hard was necessary, the barnacles are with that many, that it is senseless to scrape that off with a scraper. Stig uses a shovel!
Ya’s name back on
Now when Ya is formally Ya again, you can feel that she is smelling the water..
This curling mass of rain is a typical cyclone. This cyclone is called Vaianu and it travels with a speed of about 20 knots to the South. The red color means heavy rainfall. Here the winds are generally 50 knots, with gusts of about 80 knots. (resp. 95 and 150 km/hr). The more to the South, the colder the temperature of the sea so the lesser the winds. Vayanu becomes a tropical storm when it hits Ya in New Zealand.
This s a screenshot from Predict Wind. The red dot is where the Ya is right now. This is the picture of the very moment that this blog is written. The windmarks show 30 knots of wind, coming from the East, with severe gusts making the Ya tremble and shake all over. The Eastern wind builts up large and steep waves along the shore. If you are sailing along the coast now, you have a problem.
The continuous Eastern wind sweeps the water from the ocean up to the coast. The Ya is now in Whangarei. Normally when the flood turns to ebb, the water level will drop. But tomorrow morning, when it turns to ebb, it is expected that the water level will not fall, simply because the heavy winds have pushed the seawater level some 2 meters higher. So the water from the river will not be able to get out.
Some 6 hours later the eye of the cyclone will pass. The Ya is to the West of the eye of the cyclone. The wind will rapidly turn to South…
… and then to the West. Everything, all debris, that has first been blown to the West, will now be blown back to the East. At sea, the Western winds meet the West going waves. This creates hectic and unpredictable waves. No ship can handle these waves. This is when ships perish.
Lucky us, the Ya is in Whangarei on blocks, on the boatyard. The only water she will feel, is rain water soaking from her deck along the hull. And perhaps the bottom will feel a touch of river water when the water rises beyond the banks of the river. But, while writing this blog, she shakes and trembles all over. Respect for Mother Nature.
Wars are usually short-term, or at best medium-term, events. However, they can be incredibly effective in bringing about long-term changes, lasting for many decades, or centuries.
Some examples.
Industrialization and the emancipation of the working class into a middle class began even before the First World War. But immediately after the First World War, broad industrialization got underway. We see world leadership shifting from Great Britain to the United States. First in the United States, but soon also in Europe, we see the middle class growing strongly. The First World War resulted in 20 million deaths. The confrontation with so much violence, of such unprecedented massive scale, already led to a strong pacifism. The Second World War was the turning point for formulating policy based on this. The establishment of the United Nations is one example; the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (which was the first step towards the European Union) is another example of preventing war. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is one. The subsequent European Convention on Human Rights (1958) contains concrete regulations to protect people against greater powers. For example, Chapter 8 regulates the protection of refugees. Each nation also enacted privacy legislation to prevent governments or large corporations from knowing too much about you and me.
The fossil free future
We now view sustainability as a new problem. Again, a long-term issue. As early as 1987, the UN Brundtland Commission concluded that sustainable development is necessary. Simply put, this is the development that does not compromise the lives of future generations. An example: we should cut down our CO2 emissions, because otherwise our lives will cease to exist in the future.
President Trump and President Putin (source: Foxnews.com)
Presidents Putin and President Trump have both started wars that are driving up oil an d gas prices significantly. Meanwhile, renewables can be manufactured much more cheaply. Fossil fuels still have the unique selling point that they can also be deployed when wind and solar power fail. But now that batteries are becoming increasingly cheaper and last longer (almost endlessly), that advantage is also short-lived. At this moment, the purchase of a battery bank is already at the break-even point. And to think that battery innovations in China, Europe and California continue to follow one another, while more and more second-hand batteries are coming out of vehicles that can still perform excellently at home for years to come.
President Putin and President Trump, the side effect of your wars may well be of great significance in pricing the use of fossil fuels out of the market for good. To a sustainable future.
It is a small working week because we had two days with an awfull lot of rain and there was not much to do inside. There is stuff from Holland and Poland, a new service battery, Peter Kaad the electronic engineer started working on the replacement of the Etech displays, and Adri and me started on installing the deck panels.
this brought Peter from Holland: 24 kilo of spare parts of everything. This is the service battery that has to be replaced, that’s all. Isn’t this a boring picture? Terry is making a 90 degree angle in pieces of aluminium that will be the cover of the cables of the deckpanelsAn old leak from some 10 years ago damaged the carpentry under. So a picture to find a good oak veneer to repair it.Peter is putting Sikaflex on the deck to glue the first panel on, for a try.Etech made a cable for the exchange of the displays, and how to solder the next plugs. It is a start.
just a shot of a part of a lot more spare parts and they all have to find their way into the Ya.
The skipper put this beauty of a tarpaulin over his boat because, he says: “we’re worth it.”
Progress. Jobs are finished and that is nice. Jurgen started a new job on the entrance frame last week, Peter is reinstalling the motor controllers that has been taken up and down to Europe for a revision.
Simon is marking the waterline. Not that easy, because the width of the line has to vary to keep optically a consistent line. We sand with pleasure.and we sand with attention.Simon painting the second layerThe result from the aft……and from fore. Isn’t she a shiny beauty?Jürgen is putting in a new frame, because there was a leak on top of the frame.he is nearly finished hereThe frame is ready so he ceiling is glued in, 24 hours to harden. Predictwind says the night will be dry, so let us hope there will not come a sudden shower from behind the mountains.peter is reinstalling the controllers. It appears to be no plug an play, so a lot of configuration with manuals and contact with the technician of Etech.The next controller is waiting to be installed. Next week more news.No this is not the Ya. but the neighbours wooden yacht. They just started.
What about a future with this environment but then without the power plant on it? It could very well be the future. The reason: LFP batteries, like the ones in the Ya and in the new electric cars (almost) never get ‘old’ anymore.
Some 10 years ago the LFP battery started to conquer its place in the market. In 2021 the batteries were installed on the Ya. But still that was expensive. Now, they have become cheaper and cheaper. The battery is also very effective. The kWh per kilo weight has increased, so the range in kilometers an electric car can make, increased. The electric car is becoming a competitor to the fossil car.
Another major disadvantage of a battery was the aging. With every charge, the capacity decreases slightly. After about 1,000 charging cycles, only 80 percent remained, meaning you had 24 kWh of power in your battery instead of 30, good for a ride of only 144 kilometers. At that point, the battery is considered old and due for replacement. On average, you achieved 162 kilometers over those first 1,000 charging cycles, making a total of 162,000 kilometers.
The LFP batteries last longer—1,500 instead of 1,000 cycles—before reaching 80 percent. The more modern LFP battery even reaches 5,000 charging cycles.
The Lithium Ferro Phospate battery is mostly made in little tubes. They can be combined in bigger batteries, from a handy small one till a massive one of thousands kiloWatthours.
Translate that into kilometers, and for lithium-ion, you get 1,500 times 90 percent times 65 kWh times 6 kilometers (in fact, that could already be 7). That is 526,500 kilometers. At 13,000 kilometers per year (the Dutch average for passenger cars), the battery already lasts 40 years before it ‘needs’ to be replaced. The LFP battery only reaches 80 percent after 1.7 million kilometers, or 135 years.
No car lasts that long. We like to trade in good cars because the new version has extra safety features and new gadgets. On average, I think a car lasts ten years now. And if we start living more frugally, the current electric car might reach twenty years. By then, the lithium-ion battery will still be good for 90 percent charging capacity, and the LFP is not yet ‘as good as new’.
You aren’t going to throw those batteries away; that would be madness. So, a second life for batteries is being devised. That already happened in 2018, when the first batteries from crashed cars became available. The Johan Cruijff Arena in Amsterdam was equipped with about a hundred ‘old’ car batteries that could store a combined 2,800 kWh of electricity. When combined, the lights in the Arena were literally visible. The test turned out well, and the battery park has since been expanded to 8,600 kWh, or 8.6 MWh.
Second-hand batteries are now appearing in more and more places to store electricity on a large scale. The amount of car batteries we discard annually is growing rapidly. Last year alone, we bought 156,000 electric cars (plus another 176,000 hybrids with smaller batteries). If these are discarded after more than fifteen years, ten million kWh of batteries become available for reuse almost for free. And that happens every year. Within a few years, you will have enough old batteries to cover the electricity demand of the entire evening peak.
You plug your car in at home and it gets charged when there is energy available. And if not, your home battery pack will deliver the electricity
And that is just talking about passenger cars. More and more buses are driving electric, and by now, half of all new trucks in China are electric. Then you are not talking about batteries of 65, but of 650 kWh. And they will all be discarded eventually.
China, the country where most batteries are manufactured, has already calculated that by 2050, old batteries could cover two-thirds of its total energy demand.
This will have great consequenses. First, we will all get a battery pack at home, and a big one at work. This will shave the peeks in the electricity usage. The electricity can become cheaper. And it can be sustainable, because there will be no more fossil power plants necessary.
Second, the network can change completely. Now the electricity network is based on security of supply. But if we all have our own decentralized power in stored, we don’t need power when it is not available for a day or more. The electricity network can do what it is good at: just transport electricity.
It means that we won’t need power plants. Also the nuclear energy plants will be obsolete. The LFP battery fills the gab to create a sustainable energy use.
So, what about a future with this environment but then without the power plant on it?
Especially the painters made progress: After 3 rounds of filling, 3 times primering and 3 topcoats, the Ya’s side boards are coated. You like it?
Terry and Simon painted and Adriana did the mixing. In one day everything was done, with a fine and consistent result. The final touch will be a double waterline and then the Ya is like new. But there is done more.
Since the windmeter cable suddenly malfunctioned, Adriana replace it and here she is checking the windmeter – yes it works now. The heat exchanger is painted with a fouling release system and here is the new anode mounted.a new floor for the bosuns box. Under the floor is the fridge compressor, so that needs to be provided with enough air for cooling. there is more to do. 26 kilo of stuff will go to New Zealand. Here a part of it: 2 controllers for the motors, all checked and revised, a new anchor switch, 2 new displays for the electric motors, handles for the halyard stoppers, a new shaft-shaft coupling, and more stuff which is too complicated to explain.
Adriana, Terry, Toni and Jurgen work hard and here are some results of the process.
Terry leads the painting job. Here he just finished the second primer layer of the side boardsTerry and Adri proudly finished the third primer..and the last onehere the first coat of the new capri blue top coat.Meanwhile Toni finishes the electricity repairs.Adriana polishes in the meanwhile the stainless steel. here a part of the railng, with new lashes. Then we discovered a leak that must have been there for years and the first rot is in the oak carpentry. A new job: find the leak and renew that carpentry. Later more.
Hannah Frank of Greenpeace sent me this beautiful message.
Ocean lovers, what about a one life stand with the Earth? She loves you already, you only have to answer. Your love will give the next generation of people, animals, every life, a great chance to do the same.
You can start easily with being aware of your own life. Check the Sustainability-starter-series
for each motor we change the two stainless steel supports for aluminium ones.The navigation lights must be renewed…..and that requires another support as well. here the drawingsall drilling in the stainless steel with a hand drill, is not easy and the drills breakmeanwhile Evan starts cleaning the windows the plasticizers from the fenders sticking to the windows
