And there was light

The day started innocently enough, with me wanting to install a new switch panel. The old panel had old-school fuses that actually blow, which means that every time there is a short circuit, I would need to find new fuses of the appropriate caliber. This can get difficult, considering that a mini is likely to broach sideways, let some water in through the keelbox and short some circuits every now and then. It's pretty clear I would not or could not do this for long: after a while, I'd run out of either fuses or patience, and I'd just stick a copper bar in there.

Incidentally, this is what every single grown up did when I was a kid and a fuse blew up in the house; namely, they'd replace the fuse with some thick copper wire, held in place with some coins. The thicker the better, because the sole goal was to avoid the inconvenience of another blown fuse. I had taken no electrical engineering classes at that point; in fact, I must have been around 8 or so, and yet, even then, I could tell that this was a bad idea. An interesting upside was that, years later, if the wire blew again for some reason (and it'd take a massive short for that to happen), we'd open up the fuse box and these quaint, antiquated coins would fall out. Of course, if everyone does this, then you no longer have any household fuses that actually could blow even when they had to, so instead, electrical equipment upstream starts catching on fire. Which is precisely what happened to the distribution box that supplies our street. And once again, amid the fanfare of 50+ people watching the fire, the doorman opened up the gigantic box where the fire was, extinguished the fire, took out the badly singed porcelain-and-metal connector using wooden barbecue tongs (one misstep and he would have become an integral part of the power grid and slowly turned into a crisp piece of carbon by the force of the water flowing over every single dam throughout Europe and West Asia), then  wrapped the thickest wire I've ever seen around the porcelain connector and placed it back. The whole operation is a fractal screwup, messed up at every level. Like someone whose 23andme profile came up with a gene for cancer, I know that fuse abuse is in my vestigial DNA and I need to take measures not to trigger it. The only way to avoid this is to use thermal circuit breakers.

I was doing this today, on a smaller scale.

So I treated Guizmo to a new switch panel with thermal circuit breakers. These things can blow any number of times, and can be restored with just the press of a button. Also, the new panel has little lights so you can see which switches are on, though the jury is out on whether these things are a bonus or a liability, as they might consume too much precious power.

In the process of changing the switch panel, I decided to fix another thing that had been bugging me. Guizmo has two chargers, one to charge from the solar panels, the other to charge from the shore electrical supply. The boat is set up such that one could, in some ancient past, isolate either battery; that is, use either the left-side battery or the right-side one. This is useful in case one of the batteries develops a problem. But the charger wires had been connected directly to both batteries, effectively bridging them. I could no longer isolate the batteries. I'm not sure if this functionality is actually critical or will ever be useful, but every single boat out there has the capability to isolate its battery banks, and it bugs the computer engineer inside me. So the circuitry had to be redone such that the batteries get switched to a common point to which the chargers connect.

All of this quickly ballooned into an all-consuming, 8-hour rewiring spree. I started out by ripping out almost all the wiring in the boat (and for a small boat, it has a hell of a lot of wiring), enlarging the hole for the new switch, cutting away soldered connections, placing marine-grade crimp connectors everywhere for a modular setup, rerouting wires and cable-tieing the whole lot into place. I ended up removing 24 meters of wires, with no loss of functionality. I'm that good. If I were a surgeon, I'd have patients doing great with just half of their organs.

The electrical systems are now done. The inside of the boat looks clean and tidy. The battery boxes are installed and lashed down according to mini class rules. The electrical setup looks awesome.

Thermal circuit breakers, best invention since sliced bread

New switch panel

I was tempted to label the leftmost switch "radar" (actually, I wanted "torpedoes" but my unit came only with a stick-on that said radar), but decided to go with the boring and literal description. Want to avoid any confusion if I sell the boat later.

By the way, back in the 80's, it was well-known that Russians would steal VAX microchip designs and OS code from the US. A Polish friend used to say that if you got a Polish error message, it's no big deal, Russian, and you'd better pay attention, and God help you if you got an error message in English. For Guizmo, which was manufactured by Frenchmen, owned by an Austrian, then by a Spaniard, the same applies. I dug all the way down from Spanish to German to French (prises! pilote! and best of all, feu de nav! "fire of navigation") today. If I had some more time, I'd be all the way down in Chomsky's primeval language.

In other news, I replaced some blocks and checked to make sure that the carburator I brought with me will fit my engine. Everything looks good. The three must-have items remaining on my list are (1) launch the boat, (2) climb the mast and fix the masthead wind instruments, (3) replace the carburator and make the engine work. After that, I'm ready to go anywhere. It's high-time: if I stay here any longer than a few days, I'll be unable to leave -- people are too nice and the island is too beautiful.

My new digs in Pto Pollenca
The current guests are just me and 25 women on a bachelorette party