Don't scoff at this as it proves its weight-in-gold when it comes to Insurance. Thinking smarter, not harder, easily allows you to jot down pointers in the early stages and during the 3-year plan stage. Bring this all together, as it will be required.
Jot down 'how you change a propeller', 'where are all the circuit breakers?', 'how to change a battery'. And for your crew's sake how to do things simply.
Can your crew take you (an incapacitated person due to a fall) to safety.
This link will take you to our final document that we call the CREW MANUAL.
We were lucky in that our yacht already had 600lt water capacity. This water needs to be EASILY separated in some way near the tanks to provide water redundancy.
Should a pipe or pump fail, you need an alternative and a ball-valve separating the tanks is a quick and easy way to provide this.
Remote areas require the ability to make your own water. Relying on remote area top-up is fraught with challenges. Water-making needs to be no-nonsense with sufficient planned power storage to suit.
We changed our water maker for this reason.
There are four areas that need to be considered:
- Yacht Insurance cover for local waters,
- Yacht Insurance cover for International waters,
- Personal Medical Insurance cover, and
- Personal Offshore Medical Insurance.
The first three are self explanatory. Personal Offshore Medical Insurance however is an odd one. Fine print in standard medical insurance will not cover a person who is injured on a private vessel in international waters and seeks medical assistance once on land.
Evacuation in international waters is another excluded from Personal Medical Insurance.
We took the bold move early in the plan to go solar as much as we could. To then feed this into a large lithium battery bank to drive 95% of the equipment on board.
The power system needed to be all of one brand, limiting to the mixing of units and then controlled electronically with a backup.
Should solar fail, we increased the size of the alternators as a backup.
This however comes at a price, a hefty price. 3-years on, everything is working 100%.
- We have NO FIXED LPG at all.
- We have NO GENERATOR, and
- We do NOT PLUG INTO SHORE POWER.
Food storage is broken into four areas:
- Frozen,
- Refrigerated,
- Dry Goods, and
- Fresh goods.
In the power planning stages, sufficient battery power must be set aside to drive these appliances, plus 30%.
Why? Because these appliances are going to be working very hard opening and closing two or three times a day in some hot places.
We have a good quality external esky used for drinks and water. We stock of an evening and by morning the temperature is down to 16-20 degrees celsius.
Consideration, what if refrigeration fails?
Major components were installed early in the three year plan in an effort to use them and ensure reliable service.
To date this has worked well, except for the TV.
We now know the quirks of the various bits and have backup fixes should things start to go pear-shaped.
We have done three offshore passages, all 2-3 weeks at a time and the systems worked flawlessly.
We are however, very proactive with our maintenance and replace consumables on a regular basis as per our home-made schedule.