Great, thanks for the info.
Any other wee pointers or nuances with the 469? I've sold my SO37 and just finishing up the paperwork (and cash
) side of the deal so hopefully i'll be joining the 469 club in a week or so.
Hi Findhord
First, if your 469 has a generator, make the current owner do all of the periodic maintenance items on the generator before you close! The generator is great but it is extremely difficult to get to the access area where you need to do things like drain the oil and check the belt tension. If the current owner has someone he uses to do the maintenance, have that person freshen up all of the maintenance (even get ahead on the schedule while you can) especially if you will be moving the boat somewhere else. Also, does the 469 have an inverter? Mine did not and it was an absolute must-have because I refuse to fire up the generator just to use the microwave or coffee maker, so I installed one complete with source selector switch. I can walk you through that if you want. But I love having an inverter - I actually have two, one services the main 115VAC loads and I bought a small 200 watt one which is solely dedicated to powering the big salon TV, so the kids can watch TV without needing to use the generator.
My boat also came with a plow anchor - I've heard some people prefer the Bruce, so looking into swapping that out.
Aside from that, here is a list of things I sent to my friend who recently bought a similar boat. These aren't 469-specific, but may give you food for thought.
---Grill: When under way and cooking a meal, the oven and stove in the galley is great, but when at anchor, a topside grill is much more fun. I was looking at getting a $300 Magma grill (Newport 2), plus another $150 or so for the adapter which lets you couple it to the LPG tank. After spending hours and hours researching and reading forums for the best marine grill (the big thing is that it tends to stay lit with the wind blowing), it turns out the most highly recommended boat for a grill isn't a Marine-designated one at all, it is the Weber Baby Q now called the Q1000 or souped-up version, the Q1200. So I bought one of those for like $100 (the Q1200) and it's awesome. To mount it to the rail, I bought the rail mount for the Magma grill (part number T10-680) for like $80 and jerry-rigged the grill to mount to it. Works like a champ and since the mount is elongated it keeps the grill out over the railing, which both keeps it out of the cockpit as well as ensuring that anything hot which might drop out of the bottom drops out not into the cockpit. Also, instead of that $150 rip-off adapter to hook into the gas line that Magma wanted, Weber makes an adapter hose (part number 6501) which hooks directly to the LPG tank and it only costs $25. The downside is you have to unscrew and remove the hose line from the galley stove regulator when you want to use the grill (unless you had a separate tank...looking into that now), but that's not hard and only takes 15 seconds to swap out.
---AIS: If you ever upgrade your radio to one which has AIS, check to see if the radio has a NMEA 0183 or NMEA2000 output for the AIS signal. If it is like the Horizon Standard GX2200, that only outputs NMEA0183, so I had to buy a $200 converter (NGW-1-ISO-AIS) with an adapter cable to get it to interface with the Raymarine network. But at least now, I can see ships' AIS signals right on the chartplotter which I couldn't do before. Well in theory, there are no AIS-broadcasting vessels on land-locked Texas lakes, but I feel awesome having it installed and if I ever move the boat to the coast it will come in handy. If the radio outputs NMEA2000 directly, all you need is the $30 adapter cable so it will plug into the Raymarine network.
---Cord bundlers: A few weeks ago I became tired of having my front-of-cockpit lines always in a huge mess after you get the sails up and such. I used to have these line bags hanging down at the front of the cockpit but they were always overflowing. So I bought some 3M Command Cord Bundlers which just use adhesive, so are removable, and now all my lines are in nice neat coils hanging down off the front cockpit bulkhead, whether the sails are up or down. No more trip hazards and looks really nice.
---Batteries: A few months ago my 5 house batteries started failing. Eventually they all went. I spent a ton of time researching what are the beefiest battery for the money and after a long search found them: The best house battery you can buy for our boats, short of $1000-per-battery Lithium Ion batteries, is the Deka Intimidator 8A31DTM, which is an AGM and even better than the famous Optima Blue Top. Blue Top only has like 75 amp-hours, these Deka's have 105. Usually this Deka battery goes for (after shipping) $300 each but I found out that it is rebadged as the Duracell 31DTMAGM which sells at Sam's Club for $180, and sometimes they run a $20 off special. The savings was so much I bought a subscription to Sam's Club ($50) just to buy five of these batteries. I love them to death, they are so much beefier. You have to break them in, I can tell you how to do that, but they are amazing. You can discharge them a lot lower than regular wet cells without damaging the battery (whenever you discharge a wet cell battery less than 50% charge you shorten its life), which means less frequent and shorter chargings.
---Battery charger - I'd recommend check what battery charger(s) you have and make sure they are set to the correct battery type. Mine has two of the factory Cristec CPS3 40 OEM battery chargers. They come from the factory set to the "Sealed Lead Acid" battery type, but my house batteries were regular wet cell. As a result, the battery charger was over-charging the battery (maintaining the float voltage about 0.2 volts higher than should have been) which was causing the electrolyte to boil off slowly. Eventually I figured that out and flipped the dip switches to get them on the right battery type (which float at 13.4V). Then when I bought the new AGM batteries, I had to set the switches again to AGM (which floats at 13.6V). Only takes a few minutes but could help preserve battery life. Note that the bow thrusters are charged via a regulated step-up transformer which doesn't care what the main battery charge level is as long as it's around 12V.
---Buoy light: I bought two of these, called an ACR SM-2 Buoy Strobe Light. If someone falls over, you pull this off the railing and throw it to/near them and it starts flashing with a super-bright strobe light which makes it easy to find the person in the water. Designed to be tied to a ring life buoy, so the person in the water is thrown both the buoy and the marker light, but works well just by itself. Bought them because we once had a kid fall off a raft / tube we were towing near sunset and they became hard to see even from 100' away. I mounted them to the rail using some SeaStow rail clamps. The trick with these is to only use one of the recommended lantern batteries, because a battery not on that list will be too heavy and the light will sink.
---Speakers: The cockpit speakers were pretty worn out, breaks in the grill and holes in the speaker cones. After a lot of research, bought what are some of the most highly recommended marine speakers called Fusion MS-FR6021. The cutout for them is slightly larger than the stock factory speakers, and while I am strictly against making permanent modifications to the boat, everyone said these were so much better. So I took my Dremmel tool with a small sanding drum and widened the holes. Didn't need much, maybe 3 millimeters more radius. They sound absolutely incredible, I had no idea what I was missing out on. It sounds like there is a symphony orchestra playing inside the cockpit.
---Bottom-imaging sonar: [Assuming you have Raymarine electronics] This is awesome. It's called the Raymarine CP100, and make sure you get the CPT-100 transducer with it. Sometimes they sell just the computing module, you need the module (grey box) plus the transducer. This is where I took some toilet bowl wax and mashed the transducer down onto it in that front storage locker, making sure it was solid hull underneath. Then I built a small wood platform to cover the transducer to prevent it from getting stepped on. It works perfectly, crystal clear images even through the hull. The side-scanning sonar, called the CP200, I have that installed too via 3M 4200 under the transom but the down-vision one is more useful.
---Mini-generator: For boats, year and engine hours drive depreciation. Gen set hours aren't as meaningful as main motor engine hours but I still like to keep mine down, but also the deck vibrating when it's running stinks. One thing I have thought of doing is buying the best small generator out there, called the Honda EU2200i, and using that to power the portable air conditioning unit (plus charge the batteries) so we can have some A/C at sea without running the generator. The "Companion" version of the generator even comes with the locking plug used for shore power, so no adapter needed. I'd strap/mount it onto the back. It would struggle to power a main 16K BTU installed AC and the associate seawater pump but not a problem for a 12K BTU portable (the best 12K BTU portable A/C unit you can by is called the Whynter ARC-122DS Elite 12000 BTU Dual Hose Digital). At the hottest part of the day, I've found my little portable AC unit (the 12K BTU one) will keep the interior of the boat about 10 degrees cooler than the outside - so if the day gets up to 100, the AC will keep the inside at 90. Also I found a DOE study on the single vs. dual hose portable AC efficiency. Basically the dual hose is more efficient and the delta in efficiency increases substantially as outside air temp increases.
www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/05/f15/pac_tp_noda.pdf---Head: The guy who de-rigged and re-rigged the boat gave me his tip for having the head not smell bad and keep the inside of the holding tank clean. What you do is get some liquid laundry soap, some water softener, and some Calgon Bath Beads. After you empty the holding tank, pour some laundry soap, water softener and bath beads into the toilet and flush it all into the holding tank. The soap will do what it does, the water softener keeps any poo from clinging to the walls of the tank and keep everything liquid-y enough that it makes sure to pump out when you empty, and the bath beads make it smell like lavender in the head. It really works. Some people on forums say to add chlorine in there are well to kill bacteria, but others said don't do that because the chlorine also kills the "good" bacteria which helps break down the poo or something. I also every now and then pour some vegetable oil down the toilet because that supposedly helps lubricate the macerator pump.
---Monitoring: I bought a internet webcam and have it installed on the nav desk pointing at the electrical control panel. For it I set up a free internet service called FreedomPop, it was like $50 to get started but you get 500MB per month free after that and the camera only uses like 250MB/month max. It lets me check in on the boat and see if there is shore power and if, most importantly, the bilge pump is running or not (not good if it is). During the winter, I used it to monitor the temperatures in the boat - I bought a set of three external thermometers, which all feed wirelessly into a central monitoring display which I put on the nav desk. This way with the same webcam I can monitor the temperature at different places in the boat and see if any are in danger of freezing, and if my little 600W Boatsafe bilge heater is working. It's great peace of mind during the winter, since to winterize I only fed antifreeze into the generator and air conditioner lines and the sink/shower drains. The webcam is plugged into a USB charger into the 12V outlet in the nav station, so not reliant on shore power.
---SSB Radio: I bought a nice one (ICOM M710) intending to use it to catch long-range voice weather forecasts on the MF/HF band, but could never find a good place to mount it in the boat. So I moved it into my office at home and ran an antenna in the attic. I occasionally listen to the USCG voice weather broadcast. SSB cruiser radio nets are dying off thanks to satellite point-to-point and the general trend of how social media is displacing real-life human interaction, but they're still out there.
---Weather forecasting: The owner before me had XM weather but didn't like it. I eventually plan to get the PredictWind and PredictWind Offshore app on my ipad and run it through an Iridium Go! satellite internet connection. It makes looking at the forecast animated/graphical instead of having to download weather faxes or read long texts that you have to plot out. I downloaded the two apps and play with them every now and then.
---Voyage planning: I actually used this live and it worked amazingly. There is a free computer program you can download called SeaClear II. What you do is download that, then download (free) from the NOAA website the charts you plan to use for your trip. You can examine the charts on the computer and plot out on it the course you want to take in advance (and most importantly, see what areas to avoid). Then buy a little USB GPS puck (for like $25) and when you actually get underway, your position will show right on the map. So you can see where you are in relation to the route you pre-made. I love it because I can interact with the route and study the charts at night in my hotel room when traveling for work. You can also download, upload and email routes so you can compare routes with others. It also lets you play navigator sitting anywhere down inside the salon, you don't need to be topside to use the chartplotter.
Again this uses the official NOAA charts, other ones like Navionics have more detail but people have also run aground using them if you don't zoom in enough (see
www.wavetrain.net/techniques-a-tactics/795-tanda-malaika-lost-on-an-unmarked-reef-in-french-polynesia).
---Bilge pump: Bought a 3,700 GPH beefy bilge pump to give the boat some real dewatering capacity if anything ever happened, but trying to figure out a way to run the 1.5" ID discharge hose to a pre-existing through-hull. Not having much luck. I can't believe the boat only comes with a 1100GPH, that will help pump out a wave through the companionway once in a while but wouldn't help much if a through-hull came loose or even worse a puncture of the hull.