Fixing a severed shore power cable on my yacht at the Marina

On a busy day, we might have 40-45 yachts leaving and arriving. Every single one has different dimensions, length, width, and draught.

BHPian Jeroen recently shared this with other enthusiasts:

Over the last 6-8 weeks we have had a number of friends and family staying with us. This is what you get from having an internationally spread out family and group of friends. Nobody visits us for just coffee. They all come and stay for several days. Good fun though. And we took them all out on Sirion. Usually for a nice relaxing day up and down the gorgeous river Linge. Very relaxing, but I have shown many images of the Linge on this thread already.

Last week I took Sirion out for a day by myself and did a 75 km trip across the river Merwede and through the Biesbosch.

I have also spent two full (very full I might add) days at our marina doing my Harbourmaster apprenticeship. It was really good fun, very interesting and I learned a lot from the harbourmasters that coached me during those two days. One was the current chairperson of our Marina, the other one, was the previous chairperson. Both have been a member and very active in our Marina as volunteers for many years.

One of the main duties of the harbourmaster is to receive what we call "passer-by-yachts". We have a few berths received for visiting yachts. During the summer season, many of our members leave for days or even weeks on their yachts. We use the empty member berths to accommodate passers-by-yachts. It is an important source of income for our Marina. The harbour master needs to keep track of all berths, the coming and going of all yachts, welcome them, help them moor, and connect to shore power. Do the admin, run the cash register and another billion other things. (e.g. looking after the various marina facilities, toilets, water, electricity, safety aspects, selling ice-creams, keeping track of bicycle guests can use, dealing with boats on trailers etc etc.)

On a busy day, we might have 40-45 yachts leaving and arriving. Every single one has different dimensions, length, width, and draught. And so do our berths! So it is quite a big puzzle to fit everybody in.

Next year I will do a special write up about being harbourmaster for a week!

On Saturday I got a call from the harbourmaster on duty. The volunteers from the "green team" had been cutting the grass. And somehow they managed to cut through several shore power cables, including mine. It caused a complete blackout of all power across the marina! They managed to restore most of the power by simply resetting the respective circuit breakers. However, they did not want to restore power to the section that had our shore power cable connected.

You might recall, my shore power cable fits into a special pad-locked protected outlet. Although the padlock and key were provided by the marina, they did not have a spare key. So they could not unplug my shore power connector with its cut-off wire!

Long story short, we managed to unplug my connector eventually.

I managed to refit the connector to the shore cable. It is almost a meter shorter now. Luckily, it's just long enough to be still used. But if they cut it one more time, I will have to think of a different solution. I don't like to splice a shore power cable.

Later this week Mrs. D and I are out for a four-day trip on Sirion. Next week I will be taking out Sirion by myself for another three-day trip. I am visiting Wijk bij Duurstede on the river Lek/Nederrijn for a maritime event there.

I have also made arrangements for Sirion to be taken out of the water and put back into the same hall where she stayed for the last 13 winter seasons or so.

Lift-out is scheduled for the 31st of October. I have also arranged for some service and maintenance work to be done before lift out. I am pretty sure I could do it all myself. But I'm letting the yard handle it, whilst I will be watching. So I will know for next year.

Depending on the weather I am planning to make that last trip back to her old marina and lift out a 3-4 day trip too, going via the canals in Amsterdam!

Jeroen

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