At the end of last season our ST 4000 wheelpilot was not behaving well, and our ST60 echo sounder stopped working. A secondhand display/ transmitter unit fixed the echo sounder, the transducer being ok. We replaced the wheel pilot with the Raymarine EV 200 linear drive which is as good as it is expensive. Unbelievably good. And reliable. But it did need a custom quadrant to be made. We had a series of fuel starvation issues and after changing filters many times , turned out to be a gauze filter in the top of the fuel pump on the Di-30. Not all engines have this gauze filter, it appears to never have been opened in the life of the engine- unbelievable tight- but after cleaning, engine performance once more reliable. Water appearing in the bilge has been an annoyance for years. 2 soft neoprene plugs in the manual and automatic bilge outlets in the stern stopped this. The issue of keeping up with rapidly changing buoyage and channel changes, particularly in the Dutch and German Frisian islands, we hope is addressed by the Navionics app which when the update button is used, , can give up to the minute chart corrections, when connected to the internet, according to their helpline statement. Lastly, this is not a boat issue but more a change of understanding of boat construction methodology. Through articles here on the Forum, and my own observations, it appears that that in our 1997 J & J 38, the fiberglass observed between the frames is not the hull moulding. It may be the frames are glassed into a separate inner moulding that is dropped into the hull moulding and what we see is this inner moulding. Not the hull itself. This should of course be perfectly glassed or glued in to the hull so should be one unit with the hull, and accounts for the very deep apparent hull thickness.
