Winterising

With the night’s drawing in ever quicker and a definite chill in the air it is almost time to start thinking about starting to winterise Naughty-Cal again. Summer seems to have been and gone very quickly this year and autumn has certainly taken a firm hold.

As we use our boat all year around we don’t need to do too much to winterise her. First up is a simple yet very effective step. We reinstall the cockpit carpets. During the summer we remove them as they make the cockpit look much brighter and make it easier to keep clean and mop out. During the colder months we refit them as they make the cockpit feel warmer and as an added benefit help to add some extra insulation to the engine bay from both engine noise and a heat perspective. This year we are looking at getting some new cockpit carpets as the old ones are starting to show their age and are not cleaning quite so well anymore.

Next up is the installation of the heaters. Naughty-Cal has an indirect raw water cooling system for the engine. This means that she uses river/sea water through a series of heat exchangers and coolers to cool the engine coolant, oil and air charge for the turbo charger. These coolers need some extra protection during the winter as they will have unprotected raw water in the system, this can freeze and cause serious damage to the internal components of the coolers and in extreme cases can crack the casings of the coolers. To prevent this there are two courses of action you can take. The first is to drain the coolers and fill them with antifreeze, but this method is only suitable for those not going to use their boat over the winter. The second method and the one we use is to add heaters to the engine bay and keep the temperature well above freezing thus removing the risk of the raw water freezing and expanding. We have a large tube heater that we use in the engine bay.

Lastly we also install heaters in the cabin to reduce the risk of the domestic plumbing freezing. Last year we didn’t get the heaters quite right in the cabin as we did have frozen domestic water for a while. Luckily this didn’t cause any problems or leaks once thawed out. This year we have added an extra heater to our list so that we can try and keep all of our domestic water in a liquid form.

Hopefully this winter will not be quite as harsh as the last one. We do enjoy using the boat year round but last winter was much more of a worry than previous ones for us. We don’t mind the snow or the ice but not for such prolonged periods of time.