Electric Winch

In a recent text message my brother, Chris, commented that soon, I will know how to fix every system on Cambria. It makes sense. We have worked on a lot of Cambria’s systems. From sails and rigging to water systems to electronics, we’ve worked on them. You’d think we’d have things all figured out by now but unfortunately, we don’t. True, some things like changing the fuel filters seems routine but we are still learning. We keep breaking new things which give us a whole new set of skills to learn. Take our electric winch for example.

We have an electric winch in the cockpit. We use it to raise the mainsail, so it gets a lot of use. Our mainsail is big and heavy. We can pull it up about 3/4 of the way by hand but the last part–the hardest part–we push a button and use the electric winch to finish off the job. Lately, it’s been acting up. Actually lately, it hasn’t been working at all. It’s been acting up for a long time, but lately it has stopped working. For the last couple of months, we’ve been winching up the mainsail by hand. It’s big so it means I have to do the cranking which is fine most of the time but on passages when I’m off watch it would be good if Sharlene could raise and lower the sail on her own. Fixing the winch proved to be a challenge.

The winch is on the cabin roof. The winch’s electric motor extends down into the cabin and is accessed by removing some of the ceiling–the headliner. Exposing the electric motor was fairly easy. Once the headliner was off, we saw the motor looked good. It looked brand new. We couldn’t see anything wrong with it.

To trouble shoot the problem, we contacted the manufacturer. They were helpful. We had several emails back and forth with suggestions which we tried. Also, we spoke with a sailmaker here in Mexico and a rigger. Of course, we scoured internet websites and forums for answers too. All of this involved removing more of the headliner and tracing wires around the boat. It was a bit like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. We saw cables disappearing out of site behind something, but we couldn’t find where they re-emerged.

The manufacturer suggested testing the control unit. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the control unit. We guessed that it must be somewhere up under the headliner but the headliner is fiddly to work with, so we didn’t want to take down any more than we had to. Finally, Sharlene had the bright idea of removing one of our sound system’s ceiling mounted speakers and putting her iPhone up inside the hole to snap some photos. Sure enough, one of the photos showed the control unit. We removed two more sections of the headliner and we were able to access the control unit. In the end, we didn’t need to access the control unit. which means we didn’t need to remove the headliner. The problem wasn’t with the control unit or the electric motor. The problem was a thermal circuit breaker. The circuit breaker is located down near our batter bank. It’s easy to access, easy to remove and easy to replace. We would have saved ourselves hours of work had we tested the circuit breaker first. A faulty circuit breaker is easy to diagnose if you have the right skills.

Our friend Greg on Palomita has those skills. If you read our earlier post about heading to Santa Barbara when our alternator bracket broke, you’ll know that the cruiser community is very helpful. Greg was key in getting our alternator bracket repaired. He was more than key. It wouldn’t have happened without his help and expertise.

On this occasion, Greg and his wife, Lori, arrived at Banderas Bay just in time to help us with the electric winch. With some sleuthing with a multimeter, Greg ascertained that the problem was the circuit breaker. He even had a spare breaker onboard Palomita that we could have. We swapped out the breakers and the winch worked just fine! We were back in business! Greg to the rescue again and again. I wish I’d taken more shop classes in high school! One of these days I’ll fix a problem on my own but for now, like the Beatles, I get by with a little help from my friends.