Silverton 34C: It's good we like old things

December 8 - We park our old car in its accustomed place in front of our old boat for a Saturday afternoon of fun. Actually, we like our 1990 Mercury because it still looks good and is super reliable. We like our 1980 Silverton because we have so much fun on it and because it's safe in winter storage. We read today that there were 65,000 boats sunk, destroyed or damaged by hurricane Sandy. At least we still have a boat to work on and enjoy.

We decided to devote the day to cleaning up the wiring in our lower helm. Everything worked but we were bothered by the mess of wiring with everything tacked in, spliced and thrown together. It took the previous owner 30 years to crate that havoc and it's going to take us more than a few hours to straighten it all out.

We posted this photo before but it is typical of the way things were wired behind that helm. Sorry, but we can't abide connecting +12 volts to five accessories using a bolt and nut.

That little terminal strip is a common ground point and it's okay, we guess, except for that red (ground?) wire that is tacked on at the end. We removed that and found that it was more than 3 feet long and was wrapped around many other wires to take up the slack. Why not just cut the damn thing to the right length and wire it neatly and directly? Needless to say, it's neat now and just 11 inches long.

We disassembled the bolted-together connection and rerouted all of those cables to a new terminal strip that we mounted below. One the 12-gauge orange wires is the +12 volt supply and the others bolted to it distribute power to the port and starboard instruments, switches and fuses; the trim tabs, the lower station radio and the pump in the toilet. Amazingly enough, the other orange wire is the +12 volt supply for the entire fly bridge. No wonder the chartplotter on the bridge recycles when you transmit on the radio.

Here's what the connections look like now.

Notice all those butt connectors at the bottom of the photo? It looks like someone, over the years, cut many of the connections and spliced in extra wire. Don't know why or why they didn't at least follow the color coding of the wire. Check out how the orange wire at the bottom of the photo is spliced to red wire? If you could see down under there, you'd see that the red section is only about 5 inches long and another butt splice connects it to a red wire again.

Maybe someone tried to replace the entire lower helm at one point. Short (no pun intended) of that, we can't see why anyone would would add all of those butt splices and there are many. But for now, everything works. It does make us think about rewiring the entire helm, although that won't happen this winter. We do intend to run new #8 positive and ground cables from the port and starboard batteries to both the upper and lower helms a little later this winter when we install new throttle and transmission control cables.

Today's efforts yielded the usual pile of junk. Good to have it gone.

One note for any boaters who are reading this. A great place to buy electrical stuff (wire, connectors, etc.) is Del City in Milwaukee. Just Google "Del City" (and no, we don't get any money for mentioning them). This is a wholesale supplier with minimum order policies so unless you're planning a big project, they won't be useful. Our winter boat yard charges about 50 cents for a 14-16 gauge butt connector. We bought 100 of them last week for about 5 cents each. Call and ask for their catalog. Besides being a good reference, it makes ordering from them on the Internet so much easier.

Before we left, we had to take a walk around the boatyard. We've been here during the winter for many years (and before than for many summers) and we know many of the boats and their owners well. It was gray and damp today and when we took these pictures, getting dark quickly. Everyone had left.

Most of the docks are out.