Dirona Around The World: Rigging

We purchased Dirona, a Nordhavn 52, with a plan for world cruising and rigged the boat with that in mind.

- Jennifer and James Hamilaton

In the years before placing the order, we built a long list of desired equipment and functionality garnered through reading, attending boat shows, experience on our previous boat, and discussions with other cruisers. We equipped the boat with most of the gear on our list prior to leaving Seattle in 2012, have used almost everything since, and have made relatively few upgrades along the way. Of the few items on our list that we didn’t install, we later learned that some of these choices probably would have been a bad call.

This is the third article in a three-part series describing our trip around the world on Dirona. The first article (“56,000 Miles and Counting,” PassageMaker, April, 2017) covered trip planning and various aspects of being underway; the second (“Ducks in a Row,” PassageMaker, May/June, 2017) describes how we made the logistic complexities fade into the background so we could enjoy the trip; and this final installment covers how we rigged Dirona for the journey, with special emphasis on gear needed outside our home cruising territory of the Pacific Northwest.

ADAPTING

Dirona is a 60Hz boat. This utility power frequency is common in North America and some parts of Asia, but most other parts of the world use 50Hz. Operating equipment outside of its frequency range may damage it, so we designed the power system to be able to isolate the house electrical loads from shore. The boat has high capacity, frequency-invariant chargers and sufficient inverter capacity to run all the appliances. In 60-cycle countries, the shore power supplies the boat as usual. In 50-cycle countries, the shore power feeds the chargers and the house runs off the inverters. A detailed description of our power system is in the April 2016 issue of PassageMaker.