The wheelhouse has good visibility in all four directions. Four of the windows open. It's two steps down to the bridge wings on either side. The bronze engine telegraph to starboard of the wheel is actually directly connected to the engine and gearbox - an engineer below is not required to change speed or direction.
The deckhouse forward was built in 1998 to carry about 60 people. The posts holding up the deck are coming out in favor of more steel in the overhead. The hatch to the #2 hold is visible forward of the post on the port side. The photographer is standing in the new galley. The dining table will be to starboard, greenhouse and stairs down to port, and the saloon at the forward end of the space.
The existing galley is, well, basic. Originally there was a dining table where the photographer is standing, but it was moved to the aft cabin in 1998 because the space here was needed for access to the newly separated gear room.
This area was originally the sleeping cabin for the four crew members. In the 1998 conversion it became the crew lounge. It will be combined with the galley to be a double cabin.
The #1 hold will be crew quarters with a double bunk, the laundry area, and reserve pantry, including a freezer. The blue plates are access to the 1,000 US gallon freshwater tank.
The #2 hold is eighteen feet square and nine feet high. It originally had a double width staircase down to carry 100 people. In the 1998 conversion the stairs were removed and the hole plated over. The framing for the original large deck hatch is still in place overhead - the new stairs will come down inside it. It will have a guest cabin to port and the owners' cabin to starboard. Although nine foot headroom would be nice in a boat this size, we'll take the bottom foot for fuel bunkers. The piping is for bilge pumping, freshwater supply, and forward ballast.
The Mirrlees Blackstone ES4 MGR is a wonderful beast. It's rock solid dependable, torquey, and authentic, producing 330 hp at 750 rpm with a 2:1 gear. It's the epitome of redundancy, with mechanical and electric oil pumps running either wet sump or dry sump; mechanical on engine, mechanical off engine, and electric water pumps; the ability to run with a cylinder shut down; gravity fuel feed from the day tank which can be pumped up either electrically or by hand; and so forth. It's just had a major rebuild from Serco-Denholm, it's all there, and everything works. According to one expert, it's the smoothest Fleet Tender engine in the fleet.
Unfortunately, it's also four huge pistons producing serious vibration solidly bolted to the boat, complicated to maintain and run, and requires manual intervention in the engine room to start. While we love it as a piece of machinery, we don't want to live with it on a regular basis and can imagine the future laughs when we try to sell the boat in the United States with it still in place.
A Cat 3406 is scheduled to replace it. The Cat weighs a third as much and is roughly half the size in each dimension. For those who worry about dependability, note that at a little over 4,000 pounds with its 4.5:1 gear producing 365 hp at 1,800 rpm (continuous rating), the Cat is no lightweight. The Cat will drive the shaft through an Aquadrive CV joint and thrust bearing, allowing very soft mounts for minimum vibration.
The six separate bilges can all be pumped from here. In addition to the engine driven pump here and hand pumps in each bilge, there is a Hatz/Desmi one cylinder diesel pump behind the photographer.
As part of the conversion to MCA rules in 1998, Fintry's original twenty foot long (twelve frames long) engine room was divided into five frames aft and seven forward to reduce the size of the largest single compartment. The aft room, shown here, holds the gearbox, the pumping systems and the harbor genset. The aqua box in the middle behind the manifold is the gearbox. The genset is barely visible in the middle left background. The large beige box in the back right is a 4kw 220VDC to 220VAC 50Hz inverter put in in 1998 to supply the refrigerator and galley stove.
The pumping systems also can be used to fill and empty the seawater ballast tanks and pressurize the fire main. Behind the manifold are the two aft seawater ballast tanks which hold a total of 26,000 pounds of water. Normally kept full, they can be pumped out to reduce draft to about seven feet in protected waters. The forward ballast tank, in the bow forward of the collision bulkhead, holds 23,000 pounds of water. The new bow thruster will probably go in the bottom of the tank, so we'll replace the water with a combination of lead in the bow and moving the existing iron ballast forward from the the #2 hold into the #1 hold. The whole plumbing system had a major testing and overhaul when the boat was rebuilt in 1998.
Thanks to James Little of Fintry's sister, Dornoch, for the original drawings of the maze of pipes.