Index: Ruby's Page Why Ruby Tuesday Layout of the vessel Equipment transferred from Mithril Some extras from the D40 list Other small additions Nav station Navigation and radio center Saving money via French registration Official Dufour figures Related web sites Problems experienced so far. Smaller issues so far.

Ruby Tuesday, or Ruby to her friends, is a "Dufour 40 Performance" sailing yacht. She is hull number 266 and she was built during the summer of 2005 at the Dufour facility in La Rochelle.

We first saw the demonstrator in La Minimes marina on a Tuesday and one week later we signed the order and wrote the cheque, also on a Tuesday. The following week we visited the factory where Ruby stood outside.  She had been built to meet an order but the buyer had finance problems so cancelled his order. Normally the lead time from order to delivery is 5 months but by acting quickly we secured 266 as ours. In fact Ruby's almost instant availability was one of the main reason for our buying her. Three weeks later, yes it was again a Tuesday, we took possession and commenced moving aboard.

OK so you have probably guessed where the name Tuesday comes from, Ruby is because she is a 40th anniversary model; this is Dufour's 40th year making yachts.

Interior layout

Bottom, left to right; large cockpit locker, shower, heads and chart table. Then comes the saloon proper and the forward cabin. Top, left to right; rear double cabin, galley, saloon and forward double cabin. A large locker is in the bows section.

Cockpit view The cockpit is slightly unusual as it is divided into two parts by the very large wheel. To the rear is where the sailing takes place and all sheets are handled there. The helming area  is covered by a bimini. Forward is the sociable area although reefing of the main sail takes place there. We've had the optional foot brace fitted as its spaciousness and width might have been a problem, anyway, we now find it safe at sea. It is completed by a spray hood and an in-harbour cockpit table.

Items transferred from Mithril

We kept a few "can't live without" things from Mithril, the major items being,

• Hydrovane wind steering as we know it to be a trusty and delightfully quiet performer on a long passage, and even though it needed new bracketry for the transom, and so reduced the space on the stern platform, we are glad to have it with us.
• asymmetric spinnaker + pole as it would be costly to replace, it might be a bit big though, we shall see,
• Seagull outboard because its a piece of history and I like it even if it is smelly and oily,
• Tinker Tramp because it rows well and again would be expensive to replace,
• ICOM-706 HF radio. It had loads of use in the Baltic tho' not so much this year.
• Sea-Me Radar Target Enhancer because its nice to be clearly seen on other radar screens such that their MARPA works on us.
• Link 10 battery condition indicator, it really does keep us in the picture regarding charge in the batteries.

Some of the extras we have chosen are,

• Fully battened main sail - it has better shape and doesn't flog, although in actual fact the battens do seem a bit limp in the wrist.
• 3rd reef point in mainsail.  Surprised the D40 has only 2 reefs. We've sailed dozens of times in Mithril and needed that 3rd reef too many times to even think of not having one on a new boat.
• Inner forestay - we have a Kevlar hank on Genoa from an earlier boat and it fits really well so will be our twin head sail when down wind.  We also want a heavy weather jib.
• Twin anchor rollers - the single one looks really flimsy.
• 1000W anchor windlass, 20Kg Delta anchor and 50m of 10mm chain
• 120A engine alternator - the standard 60A is too small for a liveaboard boat.
• Extra service battery - now its 2 x 110Ah and we'll most likely add more
• Spinaker handling kit - We've retained the Cruising chute and it works well.
• Bimini over the helm and an in-harbour cockpit sun cover
• Cockpit table -  because its the only sensible place to eat when the temperature rises.
• Foot brace - along the centre line of the rather wide cockpit.

Other small additions and changes are,

• Latex mattress - the standard mattress is crap, its seriously hard and didn't really fit.
• Harness points in cockpit - a single Wichard eye in the companionway is standard but now we have 2 further eyes to the rear of the cockpit.
• Large shelf in forward part of the fore cabin.  There is loads of space here but its not very usable as standard.
• Door handles - these fell off daily so have been engineered to now stay together.
• Air circulation fans - one in the saloon and one above the forward berth, hopefully helping to keep us cool.
• Split wash boards, the standard acrylic one is really heavy and unwieldy so we've made a 2 piece one, the lower in wood and the upper in thinner acrylic. The standard one now stows in the shower cubicle when we are on passage.
• Gas alarm and gas solenoid at the bottle - both give some additional degree of safety. Interestingly, all UK Dufour's have the solenoid as standard.
• Extra (extra) service battery - now its 3 x 110Ah..
• Complete cockpit cover/tent - essential winter kit but can only be fitted in harbour.
• Extra nav instrumentation - over the companion way, because the existing instruments can only be seen from the helm.
• Smaller light bulbs - as standard the saloon has 13 lights of 10W each, half of these now have 5W bulbs
• 65W solar panel - small in power I know but its as big as we can fit on deck.
• Shower pump delay - now, after pushing the pump button, the pump stays on for 30 seconds. It really was a pain having to hold a button in for 1 minute mid shower.

Navigation and ham radio station

Navigation station equiptment. Raymarine C70 chart plotter. (wish we had the bigger one) ST6000+ pilot computer. ICS NAV6 Navtex. Link 10 battery condition monitor. Navman 7200 DSC VHF. 14" TV / PC display.

G8PK ham radio station equipment.

• ICOM IC-706 HF-VHF transceiver.
• ICOM AH-130E long wire ATU.
• Aerial is 16.5 metres of the yachts backstay, 30 degrees from vertical and bottom fed.
• Computer Software, SeaTTY and MMTTY.

Saving money by registering Ruby in France.

We found a strange option available to us when buying a vessel in France and it meant us saving about 10% of the purchase price; quite simply we have lease-purchased Ruby. This involved paying a maximum of 50% of the sale price and paying for the rest via a lease agreement with a bank. We chose the minimum period of 3 years for the lease and so we make 36 equal payments and then we own Ruby. Strangely 36 payments add up to a little over 40%, and during those 3 years we will have kept the money in a savings account in the UK, so overall then we expect to save about 10%. Oh yes there is a down side, we now sail under a French flag and we are subject to French bureaucracy. Can't say more as it might be treason. Return to top

Official figures Length over all - 12.32m Length water line - 10.75m Beam - 3.90m Displacement - 7800 Kg Ballast - 2815 Kg Draught - 1.65m Sail area - 82m² Engine - Volvo 2040 (39 hp) CE certification - category A

Problems experienced so far.

1. Leaking hatches. All 4 opening side windows leak. And why? I think its due to poor manufacturing consistency on the part of the hatch manufacturer. Each hatch is held closed by four catches and from a total of 16 catches 6 leaked, luckily the worst was in the heads where a little water is no problem. Each catch is assembled using thread-lock to stop it undoing but half of the catches were only finger tight, they either had no thread-lock applied or the threads were greasy when assembled so became loose in use. Of the catches 2 had the O-rings missing, 12 had them so badly crushed, well beyond the elastic limit of the rings, that they were largely ineffective and the final 2 had the bolts so long (or the blind  holes too shallow) that they could not be tightened at all. Its quite sad that Dufour have chosen a good hatch design but its manufacturer, for whatever reason, seems to be delivering shoddy goods.  They are now overhauled and, fingers crossed, will not leak.
   
   
2. Life raft stowage. At first sight the stowage location is superb, out of site, close to the centre of activities and seemingly easily deployed. Looking at it a second time: its out of sight but out of mind, its close to the activities but maybe 10 minutes from being deployable. All in all it is perhaps a real oversight by Dufour.
   If you read last years log you will know of the saga of choosing this 55 Kg monster of a life raft. Ours is in a valise and sits in a large chamber designed for it. The chamber is also the drain for the cockpit, so any debris; bread crumbs, biscuits, saw dust, Sahara sand from thunder storms, etc etc all gets washed into this chamber.  Luckily Dufour has designed a 38mm drain to empty it, unluckily the drain is beneath the life-raft and this happily sits over the drain and slowly filters any water. Two things result; if it rains the chamber starts to fill so the life-raft sits in cm's of dirty water, any cockpit debris remains in the chamber thus retaining water and debris in a soggy mass. Additionally the drain sits about 1 cm above the bottom surface of the chamber so at best 1 cm of water always remains. Ok so we've fitted a 50mm grid to lift the raft above these problems but down there its always dirty and damp and a breeding ground for mildew. So . . . . now to deployment.
   
   Above the raft 2 things need to be removed; first the rear cockpit seat which forms a drop down section to allow access to the rear bathing platform, and then the floor beneath the helm position.
   Maybe, originally, the 2 items did remove easily but as the design was finalised and introduced into production little additional brackets, hinges, catches, bolts and backstays all stole mm such that the thing is really difficult to access. Our backstay needs a firm foot against it to move it away so allowing some chance of removing the seat. WOW now I understand. If we are dismasted, and sinking because of it, the backstay is most likely completely absent so the whole job might take less than 5 minutes; that is if adrenalin creates sufficient strength for us to lift the 55 Kg.
   
   
3. Sail-drive anodes and prop anodes.  It seems that modern Volvo folding props have 3 anodes fitted in a ring around the prop. Well, after 8 months ours were about 60% gone so I assumed they must be changed annually; not an expense we'd planned for. Unfortunately they were not noticed until Ruby was in the slings and about to be launched so I hastily concocted a plan to change them under water some weeks hence. Then,  3 weeks later in Gijon, we discovered a 1 hour lift out was only 100 Euros so ideal for a quick anodes change. Out came Ruby, but then, what a surprise! The sail-drive anode, now in the form of 2 semi circles which bolt together, was hanging loose. The top bolt was long gone and the lower one on its last few threads so the pair of semi circles of zinc were vibrating on the bolt causing it in turn to rattle in the alloy casing of the sail-drive.  The sail-drive hole is now much enlarged.  I replaced the missing bolt and tightened the whole assembly, this time using locktite on the bolts. Its disappointing that the problem occurred in the first place but why were the loose bolts not spotted by Dufour or Cap-Atlantic and the sales team. 
   
   
4. Fresh water leak. Not simply a leak, we had 190 litres in the bilges. Most of the fresh water installation uses Whale push-fit connectors and they are very effective but, as with the pipe also, does not like to see a bending load together with high water pressures and temperatures near boiling point.  Printed on the pipe is a spec saying 60 degrees C and 10 bars. 
   
   
   Hot water cylinder

   Dufour therefore uses only straight pipes or shallow bends and resorts to elbow fittings for true bends; with one exception, and it was on the most likely fitting to fail. When running the engine the domestic hot water is heated to circa 90 degrees C and this causes increased pressure within the water system particularly if you have previously been at anchor and so the hot tank is quite cold. The fitting at the outlet of the hot water tank sits in this near boiling water as does about 6" of pipe, and the now heat-softened pipe expands and distorts due to the pressure and bending force. Before long (actually giving it some credit, it did take 1 year) the distorted pipe starts to leak as the barbs in the connector push through the, now thin walled, plastic pipe. Trouble then is that the pipe, originally 15 mm o/d, is now 17 mm and so a new fitting also requires new pipe, more trouble, the pipes do not take apart as Whale fittings are not (I believe) removable.

   I measured the pipe along its length until I found a 15 mm section, chopped off the pipe, fitted an elbow and new outlet fitting. Daft thing was, a new Whale item was 20 Euros and a brass compression fitting 10 Euros. I bought the brass one.

   Other relevant comments;
   
   a) the domestic water pump is one of the new really quiet variable speed pumps, so a leak causes the pump to /only run slowly and so very quietly, thus we didn't hear it running.
   b) 200 litres puts water everywhere, a real mess and an auto bilge pump would have saved the day.
   c) the first time the bilges are flooded all of Dufour's manufacturing crap gets swilled into the sump and the strum box / filter clogs totally. Its quite surprising the volume of fibreglass and foam swarf created, I'd guess we got nearly a pint of the wet soggy stuff.

   
   
   
5. Roller furling system, the Furlex RS260 fitted to Ruby is a stupidly flawed design. Fundamentally the headsail, in our case a bi-radial genoa, needs to be able to be reefed by rolling if around a luff foil and usually the foil is of constant section for the length of the sail's luff. This gives rise to a poor reef as the sail gets baggier as it is rolled, but by and large we have all come to accept this weakness in roller furling headsails. But the Furlex is not even that good! The lower 300mm of the luff foil is about 3x the circumference of the remained of the foil.  This means the first 5 turns at the foot of the sail are rolled away in great hands full giving a very tight foot, whereas, the rest of the sail remains extremely baggy. Try going to windward in 25+ knots with that sail. Its maybe OK for the racing guys who never reef, but for us cruisers its crap. Good job we have an inner forestay. Presumably this applies to other marques who also use the furlex. Do note, the more horizontal the foot of the sail is the worse the effect.
   
   
6. Rust patches on keel. I'm not pleased about these but as yet they are small so I'll wait until next lift out.
   
   
7. Autohelm failure. We have a Raymarine 6000+ autohelm with a Lewmar steering system and Lewmar drive motor/gearbox.  After a total of 1300 miles of passage distance, most of which the 6000+ steered for us, the Lewmar motor/gearbox combination ceased to work.  The Raymarine agents here in Lagos sent the lump back to Raymarine in Lisbon who promptly posted it to Lewmar in the UK. It has been repaired and refitted but not tested at sea yet. This is pretty poor performance for a unit which has yet to steer in anything above a F5 wind. But I will admit that for most of the 1300 miles its performance was superb.

Smaller issues

We should have found the following and complained about them in La Rochelle where, I'm sure the guys at Cap Atlantic would have fixed them, but we are only now finding them and we have no wish to return to LR this year.  So be warned, sort things early.

1. Anchor chain should have been 50m, it is only 47m.  I've just now found this as I paint in 5m marks.
2. Spinlock XTS triple jammer is an 8mm size, it has 2 x 10mm and 1 x 12mm ropes in it.
3. Spinaker system has no pole up-haul, I have to use the staysail halyard. This means a  twin headsail cannot be poled out, and using an second headsail was the reason we had the inner forestay fitted.
4. All ropes at the mast are fed back to the cockpit, except the topping lift.  Why?

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