he hull is painted with 2 layers of transparent PU paint. In this tropical weather, paint dries so fast, after about 3 or 4 hours, I can start the various deck fittings: mounting the forward hatch with compass on top (and compass light). The electric wires (housing inside a plastic tube) supplying power to the compass light also serves as a holding line, just in the rare case that the hatch could fall out.

The signal light is done the same way, connect the electric wires, seal them inside tube with silicone glue, test if the reed switch work. Until now, all 3 reed switches works well, I shouldn’t worry much about them, as reed switches, though tiny in size (less than 3 mm in diameter), are in fact very durable (rated at 100 000 times of turning on / off). In the silent night, I can hear the click, click sound of them turning on / off 😀.

Fitting the bungee cords is quite straight forward. The anchor points (made from wood) work well enough, I just pull a thread through easily, don’t have to “prime” with a small steel wire like before. The forward bungee cords also run through 2 wooden blocks (see the third image), each house a magnet inside. I use the NdFeB (rare earth) magnets, which are really strong, they could turn on the reed switch 2 or 3 cm away.

Next, I would fit the rudder pedals, run the rudder control lines and see how all things works. Then comes the bilge pump, with the water hose, then the solar panel. The ugly thing is that you just don’t know how much power left in your battery, or if the solar panel is doing its job. So I ordered a “12V battery fuel gauge” from Amazon to read out the current capacity of my SLA battery. Below: a short video to show how the reed switches work!