We had planned a major refit with Yacht Tech, a Nordhavn specialist. Yacht Tech provides full service, and they are also a major broker of used Nordies on the East Coast. We counted over a dozen boats in the marina, from an N40 up to an N86. Most of the boats were N47’s and N50’s. We had maintenance, repairs, and upgrades planned.

1. Re-plumb washer/dryer for direct overboard discharge. It was going in to the grey water tank, which would really overwhelm the pump. There was no reason for this, and we had overboard discharges that could be used.
2. Change the sanitation hoses. We were pretty sure that the hoses for the heads and black water tank were original, and over time they become brittle and take on a, shall we say, peculiar odor.
3. Add one more house battery – there was a space for it in the forward battery compartment near the bow thruster. This would bring our house bank up to six 8-D batteries.
4. Replace the battery charger and inverter. We had been having some issues with the Xantrex charger – it would frequently stop charging, requiring us to reset the charge function. We wanted to upgrade the charging capacity. Since Xantrex doesn’t make a high power modified sine wave inverter, we wanted to go with the Magnum 3.2kW inverter / 140A charger model.
5. Replace wind instrument. The vane had broken off in Belize, and before that, the speed sensor stopped working. We wanted to upgrade this to a Furuno instrument.
6. Replace the speakers in the flying bridge. We had some Bose speakers that had minimal volume and lousy sound.
7. Replace the VHF radio in the flying bridge. The speaker in the radio had died while we were in Shelter Bay, and we wanted to add AIS functionality to that radio.
8. Replace the master head. The original electric Raritan fresh water head simply didn’t flush very well, even after some maintenance. We were thinking about going with a Masterflush unit.
9. Add forced air ventilation to the engine room. We wanted to add some fans to force air into the engine room. Hopefully lowering the ambient temperature.
10. Repair the window frames. A common problem on Nordhavn boats is corrosion on the aluminum window frames. This first shows up as bubbling under the paint, and then the aluminum starts to wear away. The procedure to repair it is to chip out the paint, grind out the corroded material, fill it with something link marine Bondo, and then resurface with paint and gelcoat.
11. Replace oil hoses and transmission cooling hoses on the main engine
12. Valve adjustments on both the main engine and the generator
13. Re-pack the stuffing box for the main engine shaft
14. Add relay for starting the wing engine. We had been having problems with this from day one. Sometimes there just wasn’t enough voltage to start it up. By adding a 5V relay directly to the battery line, we could solve this problem.
15. Add solar panels to the charging system. We hoped to add enough to run the refrigerators, but we weren’t sure what was available, the payback cost, the fit, etc.
16. Add a deck fill for the saddle water tanks. We have a 180 gallon tank underneath the master berth, and two 60 gallon tanks at the front on the engine room. There is only one deck fill, and the side tanks are filled when the main tank is full, forcing water into them. The problem is that when the main tank is full, it actually swells, forcing up the floorboards and preventing the drawers underneath the berth from opening. We hoped to add a separate fill system for those tanks.
17. Change the NAIAD stabilizer potentiometer on the port side. We had the part, but I didn’t have the ability or desire to twist my hands up to replace it. The access to the port side is far worse than the starboard side, and that was bad enough.
18. Some miscellaneous fiberglass and gelcoat repairs