After a month at the dock In Glen Cove, New York working with another Amel owner to install a new C-drive in his boat, and do some other assorted repairs and upgrades, our time is our own for a while. This morning we headed out of the marina in Glen Cove, and moved about 25 miles east to Port Jefferson. A nice little tourist town and a harbor full of moorings available for $75/night, and that includes launch service from your mooring to downtown. From here, our plan is to jump to Cuttyhunk Island for a day or two, then up the Cape Cod Canal toward the coast of Maine with possible stops along the way.

The C-Drive Installation.

The Amel C-drive is a very reliable piece of machinery, but everything is subject to failures eventually. I have now replaced two of these and in both cases the cause for failure could not be clearly identified.

The gearboxes used in these units came from two different French manufacturers. There are external differences bewteen the two supplier’s units. I do not know i the internals are identical or not. Amel can supply a replacement of the entire drive system for about €32,000.

Amel has a contractor who installs the lower unit in a bespoke fiberglass housing, The problem is that these housings are not drop-in replacements. The housing as supplied today requires modification to fit. It has to be made larger in some areas, and smaller in others. I suspect that each boat model will require somewhat different tweaks to get the fit and alignment as perfect as it needs to be.

The overall process to install one of these is tiem consuming, fussy, and difficult. The modifications need to be done to a fairly high level of precision so the alignment comes out correctly. The engine then needs to be aligned with precision to the new drive system.