Lucky Find

The inspection went well. Spent about an hour on board looking mostly at the equipment. I was lucky enough to find a box of 5 folders and several hundred pages of manuals. They at the complete set of electrical system manuals for everything on board, including the printed circuit board layouts. Its quite a find. Its all there, wiring diagrams, diagnostics, cable runs, the lot. Absolute god send.

The down side of being left in the ship is that they were completely wet through and all stuck together. A long weekend of drying though has recovered nearly all of it. The only thing missing was 3 or 4 drawings which were blank as the CAD drawings were not printed on the same paper and ink as the rest of the manuals.

What is interesting is what was originally on board.

The whole ship functioned from radio signals. It had a GPS system, a modem, a CPU board run from Motorola 6808. The ship still has an intruder detection system and a fire suppression system (gas). All automated. All the fog horn and lamp systems appear to be on board still and the windlass motors are all still there. Pretty much its a functioning light ship.

Its all crude old fashioned technology. Fascinating stuff. Even the generators ran automatically.

Can't wait to get on board and start putting it all back together.


Fog horn controls


Fire suppression controls



Power systems


All the pipes in the ship are coloured to make them easier to trace through the ship.