Its quite surprising how many people have decided to get rid of gas on board. It may be the boat safety scheme has prompted a few to change, who knows. I loathe and distrust gas aboard a boat and have witnessed several incidents on well-maintained craft and distrust even new installations. My own boat is all electric with a domestic cooker which works fine on her own moorings but once away from base 240v 32 amp supplies are rare which means running a 16kw. diesel generator if I want to boil an egg. It’s very safe and foolproof but the environmental cost as well as the financial one makes our efforts to be green elsewhere a bit pointless.

We have fitted a few diesel fired ceramic hobs and diesel fan assisted ovens to customers craft, very efficient they are too. After many debates we decided to take this route but we needed to redesign the galley. This has created more space enabling us to build in a small deep freeze and refrigerator which due to the massive insulation can now be run most of the time on solar panels assuming I have done my sums correctly.

LED lighting has advanced in leaps and bounds; you can now fit much softer illumination suitable for general lighting. As an experiment we are replacing the saloon and galley areas with LED lighting. We still have some tungsten and fluorescent lamps for backup but in the main we plan to use LED, the power reduction is considerable. Again I hope we can power these from storage batteries charged from solar panels. We enjoy swinging to an anchor and relaxing on remote moorings, our presence will now be less intrusive, if it all works? I will be kept quite busy monitoring and measuring no doubt

The news that a new company called Moonraker Boats Ltd has purchased the Moonraker 36 mould tools has caused great interest about the boatshed. Its no secret that we have a soft spot for the marque, for a design that’s over thirty years old they wear the years better than most and still turn heads with their crisp styling. I understand they will be built at Newark and that the superstructure is going to be redesigned. How you improve the Classic lines of Robert Tucker I know not but it will be fascinating to watch the developments.