Have you got an On-Off switch in your boat??

I don’t have one aboard the Marblehead (weight!), but my K2 One Metre has a lovely shiny red one, located on a printed mount as part of the pot….looks great! It gives out a delicious “click” with a lovely “ding dong” when you press it! …And you don’t really need one….

All this came about because my One Metre did a sail-away on Sunday in stiff B Rig breezes. I’ve not been sailing all that long and this is already the second sail-away that I’ve had. The Marblehead went for a run in early 2024. I’m suddenly very focussed on this issue….

We were a few seconds into pre-start manoeuvres and suddenly “no control”. I guessed it was a power drop as failsafe didn’t seem to have time to kick in – off it went to the horizon. Datchet is pretty big.

The Datchet RIB team were great, but you can sail a long way there before you hit shore. I estimated the boat would make shore at Windsor Castle…. Anyway – the RIB team brought it back safely.

How to Diagnose and the Hot Tip

If you’ve had a power drop, you may have already read our “How to Diagnose” when the answer was a winch failure. You can find it elsewhere on this website.

On my sail-away yesterday, the amazing GH put on his Doctor Hetem outfit and got to this issue AND the repair very quickly. He took about two minutes – so embarrassing!!

1/ Check battery is up to charge and swap it anyway for a new one. Do all the connectors look secure on the receiver and anywhere else you can see or touch? The connectors were all good in our case. The boat was also dry inside.

2/ Dig the receiver out so you can see it, and activate the switch. On most receivers there should be a light to show power is there and probably that signal is being received. On a Futaba receiver, the red LED goes green…. As we prodded the switch, the green light would glimmer for a moment then extinguish. “Looks like we have a switch problem”, said Dr Hetem. It took about 30 seconds to get this far.

My brain was wondering about taking the boat home, extracting the switch, buying a new one, then the wiring, recabling and all sorts. The boat doctor simply said, “Let’s cable out the switch and isolate it…”

GH just quickly saw how to cable past the switch and seal up the old circuit in a closed loop. He quite simply swapped the XT plugs over – see the diagram above. That took around 20 seconds. The boat sprang into life immediately.

So no worries about removing or replacing the switch, and no downstream re-weighing by the measurer. Just leave everything in there sealed up but “no switch to go wrong”.

If I’d known that, I have done it straight away when I took delivery !!

Post Script :

Did you know that you can power the boat by plugging the battery directly on to the receiver? My Marblehead was originally cabled to take the battery to the winch and then power around the boat. We now take the battery into one of the spare channels on the receiver via a little cable with a futaba receiver connector on one end and an XT on the other. Everything is powered from there and it maximises the likelihood that the receiver keeps power. Very clean and simple.