Dragging down the cables

The focus of this weekend was twofold: find a place to mount the radar and GPS-Chartplotter displays on the fly bridge where they wouldn’t block the view of what is directly in front of the boat while underway and run two cables from the fly bridge to the compartment next to the lower steering station.

First, the displays. There isn’t much room on the bridge console to mount anything, although there are dozens of holes where the previous owner (PO) must have tried. We tested mounting the radar display directly in front of the steering console and the GPS Chartplotter to the right of it but it was apparent that the radar would make it difficult to see what was directly in front of the boat without having to stand up. Not good.  Lobster pots appear out of nowhere and we need to keep a good lookout for them even while seated at the helm.

The solutions came after much measuring. For the GPS Chartplotter, we fabricated a small “L” shaped bracket that will be mounted on the right side of the helm console.  It will be below our sightline but still close enough to reach to set waypoints. For the radar, we came up with the idea of mounting the radar display on a 24” high seat pedestal, mounted to the left of the steering console. We’ll have to fabricate a top for the pedestal, but right now, it looks as though it will be at the right height and be close enough to work the controls on the display. We ordered a 24-inch pedestal and spider today, so we’ll soon see if this works out as planned.

The two cables we needed to run from the bridge to the lower steering station became quite a lot of work. One of the cables would be RG-58AU coaxial cable from the starboard VHF radio antenna and the other, a cable from the bridge-mounted AM-FM antenna. The goal here was to have good AM-FM reception from the AM-FM-CD player in the salon and the other was to have a second, standby VHF marine radio down there.

All of the wiring and control cables in this boat run down along the starboard side of the fly bridge and down through a pipe to the starboard engine space. We found several cables from a long ago disconnected bilge sniffer and we used one of those and an unused transducer wire on the bridge as pilot wires. We taped the new cables to the old ones, and then went below and pulled the new wires down. Amazingly, that actually worked, although it meant pulling down a foot or two of cable and then going back up to the flybridge and forcing a few inches of cable into the pipe. I certainly got my exercise doing this routine about 30 times that afternoon.

While doing all of this, lying down behind the starboard engine, I found lots of disconnected wires so, between pulls on the new cable, I cut away lots of old wire including, oddly enough, part of an extension cord that had no use that I could figure out.

Next weekend, we’ll mount the lower station VHF marine radio and the AM-FM-CD player and wire them up. Hopefully, we’ll hear some tunes.  If we do, it’s off to the next project on the list.