One of the slightly irritating things about Blue Opal is that she’s fairly heavy, and when on a pontoon, her weight plus windage plus mooring warps can equate to “squeak, creak, jerk”. It also equates to her teak toerail caps being worn down by the ropes as the rub. A bit of searching, and I found a review of the Unimer U-Cleat snubbers, and promptly ordered some from I also figured I’d get a few bits of stainless steel to provide rub protection around her fairleads.

I also needed a small inverter to be able to top up the laptop while I live on board (and anything else that might want 240V). Initial attempts at using the inverter led to overload alarms. Conversing with Dad, we hypothesised that the cigarette lighter socket might have issues with the amp draw of the inverter when it’s powering the laptop. A bit of looking, and a simple test of croc-clipping the inverter to the battery proved that this was indeed the case (the lighter socket is on ~14 AWG, several metres from the batteries, leading to a 3V sag when the inverter starts drawing amps).

This has led to a discussion about how far I’d got with the re-wiring work last year, and a suggestion to include Anderson Powerpoles in the re-wiring work, and then wire the inverter to also use Powerpoles.

Snubbers and rubbers
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