Andrew Fraser of San Jose, CA, asks:

Could you tell us about the gear that had to be repaired or that you had problems with? You have a lot of boats out there with the same type of gear and it would help to know the type of spare parts one might need to bring along for a trip like yours. I understand you brought lots of spare parts, and also had to have some shipped. What kind of parts would you have brought with you now that you have done it?

Jim Leishman responds:

The problems we have had are as follows:

1. Oil hoses on main engine (for remote mount of the oil filter) - we believe that these hoses were defectively swaged when manufactured. We have a new set on now and there is no sign of trouble. We've never had trouble with these hoses before on over 100 of the 668 Luggers.

2. The secondary alternator on the main engine failed - we had a spare alternator and belt.

3. The pins which secure the Naiad hydraulic rams to the stabilizer shaft yoke wore and began to click and rattle during operation. We replaced two pins and rod ends (a job which takes about 30 minutes per side). We had the spare parts aboard.

4. We had a Naiad gyro fail which had to be replaced. We did not expect this to be a problem and did not have the spare part. During our extensive experience with Naiad - we have never had a gyro problem. The fix was very easy - remove two hydraulic hoses and four mounting bolts. The job took no more than 30 minutes.

5. The cooling pump used for the Naiad hydraulic fluid is a Jabsco commercial duty water puppy. This is a 12 volt pump and from experience we know they are suspect after about 1,000 hours of operation. Ours failed at 1,800 hours and we had three replacements (we're on the second one now). We recommend our Naiad equipped boats have a spare pump fitted with the necessary elbows to be easily replaced when at sea.

6. There have been two failures of the engine room blower which is a metal case Dayton 12 volt unit. From experience we know that these fail after about 500 hours of use and we have not been able to locate a better continuous-duty 12 volt blower. Our plan now is to begin using continuous duty Dayton 110 volt blowers - which will run off the inverter and should give thousands of hours of service - for future boats.

7. Numerous 12 volt bulbs have failed. We've gone through some running light bulbs and dome light bulbs in the engine room. We generally run with AC fluorescent lights and DC incandescent lights on in the engine room 100% of the time.

8. We've gone through only three sets of fuel filters on the main Racor 900 2 micron as primary and then one set of the 2 micron John Deere filters mounted on the main engine. We have about 3,300 hours on the main.

9. Until arriving in Greece we had not changed the generator fuel filters. Incredibly, we ran 1,500 hours of generator time on one set. When we arrived in Athens, we realized that the generator filters we had aboard were the wrong ones so had to locate a new set of spares.

10. We've run through about 4 sets of watermaker feed pump filters. Amazingly, those are the only problems the boat has experienced so far.

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