##Awaiting hauling at Mast & Mallet.
A W inter R efit , P art I I :
The Pros Take Over By Mike Pitchford
The trials and joys of a winter-long restoration of a Legacy 32.
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n the last installment our readers will recall the opening chapter in the saga of a long-neglected boat and the purchase and restoration plans of a perhaps slightly delusional new owner: me. What follows is the second installment of this refit story, including work on the electrical and electronics systems. The goal of this exercise is the transition from a currently ugly duckling to the proverbial beautiful swan, with all work done over the winter, while not breaking the bank. We will see… Subsequent to the last installment, I took delivery of the boat. This of course meant I had to bring her home to Annapolis from the Eastern Shore. It is a trip of 20 miles and not necessarily daunting to the many experienced cruisers on the Bay. However, on this trip, I had to do it in a new-to-me boat with no functioning navigation equipment, including a depth sounder, while navigating the unfamiliar waters on the upper Eastern Bay. Let me take a moment to thank my iPad and the Navionics app, as well as my friend and 54 February 2020 PropTalk.com
crew for the delivery, Eric Rubin. While carefully navigating from aid to navigation (ATON) to ATON with two sets of eyes, it was comforting to both of us to see the boat icon in the white (deeper) water on the chart app. Having arrived safely at my home dock, the real work started in earnest. A little cleaning, a little winterization, and the replacement of a few pumps followed. Pumps, it seems, are the most unhappy components on a boat when suffering lack of use. There are 10 electric pumps on the boat, and I have already replaced three! Learning new systems, especially for winterization, is not for the faint of heart. Not only does the process take twice as long, allowing one to “learn the system,” but you also live in fear of screwing something up. While winterizing, I discovered a pinhole leak in the sea chest. On this boat the sea chest is fed by two large seacocks, and most raw water systems draw from it. I did not cause the leak, but it was a fear-inducing discovery. Ever so smart
(and ever so dumb), I closed the seacocks while she sat at the dock. All of you readers know what happened next. I fired her up for her first visit for refitting and found her overheating before I got out of the creek. I nursed her back to the dock and only later discovered my mistake—closed seacocks and no engine cooling water flowing as a result. Okay, all of you who have never done something stupid while working on or driving your boat can smugly stop reading now. The rest of you, kindred spirits, read on! Naturally, I had fried the impeller. Naturally, it was hard to remove. After some difficulty and counsel from my new best friend, Sean Thomas at Bay Shore Marine, I got the old one out and the new one installed. Upon restart, the engine sounded fine for a few seconds and then died. This repeated itself several times as I tried and tried to get it to idle and my concern grew. What had I done? While worst case fears gripped me (replacing the engine was definitely a