I come from a family of engineers. As the journalist, I’m the black sheep. Although pretty handy—I’ve restored a Whitehall skiff and five houses—I’ve spent my entire life avoiding electrical work. I once installed an auxiliary power outlet (a car cigarette lighter) on my boat, but other than that, I’ve always left this type of work to the professionals.
But more than two years ago—when my 14-year-old handheld Garmin GPS proved to be too small for me to see where I was going as my 17-foot RIB was bouncing up and down on Maine’s rock-strewn waters—I decided it was time to upgrade to a boat-powered MFD with a larger screen. And because a Raymarine Axiom+ 9 MFD installation would justify a second 12-volt battery, I decided to go whole hog. I would replace my handheld VHF with a Raymarine Ray 90, install a Raymarine RV-100 transducer and a Raymarine RMK-10 keypad on the console so I could control the MFD while bouncing up and down. I’d also add the MOB+ wireless man overboard system to replace that annoying red kill cord, put in USB connections to charge cell phones, add a powered horn, install a Raymarine AIS 700 Class B transceiver for additional safety, and put a Rule Mate bilge pump on the boat. (I always drysailed, so I just pulled the stern plug while underway to drain the bilge.)
I was encouraged by photographer and Soundings contributor Onne van der Wal, who had just completed a Raymarine installation on his 1986 Grand Banks 32. I was fed up with being electrically and electronically ignorant. More than that, I wanted to know how all the parts fit together so I could fix them myself if something stopped working.
Fortunately, I had a secret weapon. My brother-in-law Nabil is an electrical engineer who loves tech toys. He is not a boater, but whenever I’d charter a boat, he’d show up with an iPad with all the necessary navigational charts, plot our courses, and take charge of anything that was beyond my technical abilities. I’d play captain while Nabil was the ship’s engineer. Nabil had never installed a marine package, but as a self-acknowledged techno geek and former U.S. Army tank gunner who understands how the latest tech can be lifesaving, the new gadgets made him downright giddy. The challenge of figuring out how to fit it all into my boat’s small console was too good for him to pass up. He read all the specs in the manuals, drew up a schematic, and showed me how to properly connect and fuse everything. Besides cutting holes, driving screws and pulling wires—the things I knew how to do—Nabil would show me everything I was clueless about.
The first trick was to figure out how to fit the 9-inch Raymarine Axiom+ on top of my Zodiac’s small console. The MFD left little real estate for the wires, but we figured out how to get them down into the console where the VHF, the AIS and the busbar would live.
With the layout decided, we drove to Hamilton Marine in Rockland, where a knowledgeable and patient employee educated us. Two hours and $1,000 later, we were confident we had all the wires, switches, Starboard panels, connectors, bolts, screws, cable seals, heat shrinks, liquid electrical tape and other materials we needed. Later, I would spend another $1,000 at Hamilton Marine, West Marine and Defender, but by then I was in so deep I didn’t know how to quit.
Properly supplied, I felt ready to start drilling and cutting holes into the console. I quickly ran into trouble when the steering wheel, which had never been removed during my 14 years of ownership, wouldn’t come off. The wheel nut came off easily, but the wheel hub, the Woodruff key and the steering shaft had corroded together. I sprayed it all with WD-40, applied all the nasty chemicals designed to undo rusty bonds, and over a period of weeks banged the nut on the steering shaft nightly with a ball peen hammer. Still, the wheel just would not let go.
Finally, the carpenter who was helping me rebuild my house volunteered his boat mechanic son to get the wheel off. I assumed it would involve some delicate professional trick. I was wrong. A propane torch was fired up to heat the steering wheel hub and a hand sledge was employed to bang the living hell out of the nut on the steering shaft while we yanked on the wheel. Despite that, the 16-year-old white-vinyl-covered wheel, which over time had acquired a gross and unsightly brown patina, would not budge. My carpenter’s son had studiously avoided melting the plastic cover around the wheel hub, but because I’d always wanted a stainless-steel wheel with a suicide knob anyway, I told him to torch it. The extra heat melted the plastic. But finally, after some additional pounding, a couple of 2X4s for leverage, our knees on the console, and the two of us pulling with all our might, the wheel let go. I could now cut holes in the fiberglass behind it.
On the rare evenings when I had a couple of free hours I would climb inside the boat and cut holes on the front of the console for components. Eventually it became clear that the windshield would have to be removed so I could drill holes in the top of the console for the MFD bracket and all the wires that had to be fed down into the interior. After that was done, the console looked like Swiss cheese.
The plan had been to install everything over the winter of 2021-2022 but by now a year had passed. Due to my home renovation responsibilities and Nabil’s infrequent availability (he lived three hours away in Boston), the project dragged its way into 2023. I had already installed the second battery and the battery switch beneath the driver’s seat, but I spent that summer driving the boat with the old vinyl-covered wheel and navigating with my handheld GPS. By the winter of 2023-24, I was determined to get the install finished so I would have my new Raymarine system up and running for summer 2024.
It was now crystal clear that the console was too small to accommodate all the gadgets I had acquired. Because music would make my wife happy, I’d decided to also add a Clarion stereo head unit to the console and put two speakers in the bench seat. To accommodate the Clarion CMM-10, I replaced the flimsy ¼-inch flip-down console cover below the wheel with a piece of stiffer 1/2-inch King Starboard. It held the head unit, the bilge pump switch and the 6-position Blue Sea circuit breaker switch panel. The thicker Starboard required new hinges, so I drilled out the rivets for the old plastic cover and installed new stainless hinges for the Starboard one. The stereo meant more wires had to be run back to the bench seat where the Clarion CMS-651-CWB speakers would be installed, and then an Azek cover had to be constructed to protect the back of the speakers and the wires from the battery boxes.
Mission creep was everywhere. Things that seemed like they should take an hour would take days or weeks. I had to figure out which Shakespeare VHF antenna to purchase, what kind of mount to order, where to place it, and how to reinforce the back of the mount so it wouldn’t rip a hole in the console when the boat was banging up and down. I had to make sure that the antenna could be lowered inside the RIB so the boat could get into the garage. Protecting the VHF antenna wire so it wouldn’t get kinked was another challenge. Every piece took hours of research, sometimes weeks for the parts to arrive, and a lot of measuring, pondering and experimenting before I even drilled a hole. The same was the case for the Raymarine GA200 GPS antenna, which also had to be collapsible. Eventually I installed it behind the bench seat on an adjustable stainless-steel mount with an extension mast.
The old 1/4-inch plastic shelf inside the console had broken years before, so I made a new one out of King Starboard for the busbar and to hold down a lot of the wiring. I cut two pieces of ¾-inch Azek so one could hold the VHF unit to port and the other could house the AIS forward inside the console. Making things even more complicated was the 8- by 11-inch hole that everything had to go through. The Azek panels had to be small enough to diagonally pass through the opening but large enough to hold the components, the cables and the wiring.
The space inside the console was so small that I had to move things by mere millimeters so I could connect or disconnect the cables when necessary. I spent an inordinate amount of time laying on my back between the console and the bench seat with my legs over the tubes, contorting myself to get one arm inside the console. Often, I’d work blind, trying to get the tip of a screw into a tiny hole I’d drilled without being able to see inside the console.
But by now, I had collected another resource. Mike Garretson of Sea & Land Yacht Works in Rhode Island, whose DIY articles I was editing for the magazine. He offered to review Nabil’s schematic and approved it, but advocated for two additions, one of which we incorporated and another that I just didn’t have the energy to redo.
He recommended we install a Blue Sea 100-amp ANL fuse block to protect the 6-gauge feed wire, which I did because I didn’t want to burn my boat down. But his suggestion to replace the simple Perko battery selector switch that I’d already installed with a dual Automatic Charging Relay (ACR) switch was too much of a challenge for me to cope with. By now the project was way over budget and more than two years old. I wanted it done. I wanted to go boating.
By late spring 2024, I had all the components installed and all the wires and cables pulled. In two marathon days, Nabil and I wired everything together, soldered where necessary, heat-shrinked connections, and liquid taped the ones where heat shrinking would do more harm than good.
Seeing the MFD light up for the first time was almost as good as seeing my children being born. The incubation period had certainly been much longer. Frankly, I couldn’t believe nothing shorted out.
I’ve always loved my boat, but now I love it even more. Even at full throttle in waves I can read the chartplotter and see where we’re going. Having AIS provides a measure of safety, and I’m stunned to see how many boats in Maine actually report their positions. I now also keep my VHF on at all times because I don’t have to worry that the AA batteries in the handheld will die.
Meanwhile, Nabil thinks it’s hilarious that my little RIB has AIS and sidescan sonar. He now thinks I should replace the red inflatable tubes on my boat with black ones, so it looks more like a Navy Seal RIB.
The work is not completely done. The MOB, which I had to rotate 60 degrees from its horizontal position so the antenna wouldn’t get destroyed by the wheel’s worm screw, still needs to be connected. And I still have to read all the manuals to take full advantage of the boat’s new features.
Even though everything is properly grounded, screwed down and ziptied according to ABYC standards, the finished product inside the console is not nearly as clean as I wanted it to be. That’s what happens when you squeeze 20 pounds of stuff inside a 5-pound bag. Professionals might not approve of the look, but I think it might blow some technicians minds that I managed to get everything into such a tiny console.
Would I do my own install again? I acquired a ton of new skills and have a much better understanding of how marine electronics work. I also have newfound respect for the challenges technicians face while doing a custom install. But the next time I’ll do it on a boat with a much larger console, and instead of two years, I’d like to do it in two months.
December 2024
