Matt,
Congratulations on your new 52! We should
trade emails so we can stay in touch as we have issues / ideas etc. Oh, and I’d love to hear why you chose a 52s…. Anyway…
We've had the boat for a little over a year now. It was delivered to
Florida on its own bottom in early June 2016. We then had it brought to
Annapolis where we flew out several times (we're from California) and spent time in the Chesapeake. In the fall we had it brought to
Fort Lauderdale where we spent Thanksgiving in the Keys and made three different trips out to the
Bahamas between December and March '17. In January 2017 I retired so we could move onto the boat full time and go for an extended
cruise. In May, I sailed the boat from Ft. Lauderdale up to
Newport, RI which is where we are starting our big adventure. We have two young girls (13 and 5) who we will be homeschooling for the next few years. Now that you've got the backstory, here are some of the teething problems / things to look out for....
Overall, we really haven't had too many major problems. However, warranty and
service is slow and you really need to stay on them. Here are some of the problems that we've had:
1.
Condensation from the water chilling system would drip down the
mast in the
salon. This was especially bad during the hot summer in
Annapolis. The way the system is supposed to
work is that
condensation is supposed to collect near the
mast in a collection box and then is pumped to the
bilge. The
pump wasn’t robust enough and the collection box wasn’t adequate. We had more condensation than usual because they did not insulate the hoses tightly enough. We had a bigger
pump installed and a bigger collection box and that
solved the problem
2. The Scheiber
electrical control system stopped working. We had them replace the controllers and that
solved the problem. Recently, the display at the nav station is having a problem where for the house system it doesn’t show that the
shore power is working but in reality it is (as you check the
electrical panel). This problem is unsolved.
3. We’ve had to replace our
solar panels twice because of cracking in the
panels. I think it’s the quality of the
panels they are using. They are working right now but this is annoying.
4. The house
battery banks get hot. Not sure if this is a real issue but it’s something that I’m watching carefully.
5. We had some cracks in the
fiberglass near the
fuel intake areas. We had them dig them out and repaired. Seemed to be mainly cosemetic.
6. The
davits are barely strong enough to pull the
dinghy all the way out of the water. We have a 12’4”
fiberglass dinghy with a 40 HP
motor which is near the weight limit of the davits. In order to make the system more efficient, we added paddies to the dinghy in specific spots to make sure the davits pull as straight up as possible. That’s seemed to have generally solved the problem but I’ve been thinking about getting a bigger
motor for the davits. I was thinking of a smaller dinghy to save weight but we really like the space and
power of the bigger dinghy.
7. We had a leak in the starboard sail drive so we had to pull the boat and have it resealed. They didn’t cover this in warranty.
Overall, these problems really aren’t that bad and the boat seems to sail much better than I thought it would. There is plenty of space for all of us and we are having a blast. If you want to know more about the boat, and what upgrades I’ve done, send me an
email and I’ll shoot you another note.
christian@sailsummerkai.com