Our Catalina 36 came with a windlass in front of the anchor locker doors, it was a Sprint 1000 made by Simpson-Lawrence. It was dead on delivery, we knew it didn’t work, but were hoping it was just an issue with the deck socket. We tried jumping the connections but it didn’t work, we called a marine technician, he ran some tests, and declared it dead.

I pulled out the windlass, we looked into our options… our first option was to buy a replacement simpson-lawrence motor, but I wasn’t overly happy with the installation that had been done in the first place.

As you can see in the picture, even with the bow sprit, the shank of the anchor is quite close to the windlass, it’s actually so close that the anchor cannot be pulled straight back when properly securing it. The Sprint 1000 was also underpowered for our anchor/chain combination (35# anchor, and 200 feet of 5/16 chain).

We looked around for awhile and after weighing the pros and cons of various brands, we ended up with a Lewmar V2. The deciding factors were 1) a high working load2) Included a chain gypsy and capstan (which my wife and friends agree is awfully nice for hauling me up the mast), 3) The 12V model “Only” draws 80 amps, which for the power is very low, and made it theoretically possible to use the existing 4awg wires

4) It has a chain pipe, so the anchor rode just drops straight into the anchor locker, no need to open the anchor locker, kick chain forward when we’re raising the anchor, or worry about chipping the gelcoat.

5) the price point was good. We ended up buying from the Binnacle, and were really happy with the price, and they were very helpful in answering my questions.

So windlass purchased, it was time to figure out where to mount it. I read the many postings on the C36 website, forum, various other sites on the Internet, and ran all my thoughts past my wife, and my dad. This project could have gone sideways without Dad’s help, after bringing a J30 and a J35 back from the dead, he’s learnt a lot and was a huge help. I’d also like to thank Chuck Sonquist and drdanj. Chuck provided great input that helped steer me to the final installation (including pictures), and drdanj’s solution was pretty close to what we did.

We decided we really wanted the windlass motor to drop into the forward cabin, we’d have easy access for maintenance, it would be protected from the elements, and we’d be able to tell if anything as leaking.

The trickiest part (and there were a few tricky parts) was determining exactly where to drill the hole for the windlass to connect to it's motor (you want it as far back as possible). But once that was done it was a pretty straightforward installation. DOUBLE CHECK THE LEWMAR MOUNTING TEMPLATE. The size for the holes is ok, but the position of the bolts on the template does not match the actual windlass, which is borderline unacceptable if you ask me!

Once we were confident with the measurements, we made the cuts and mounted it. The windlass is mounted on top of a sheet of 1/4" stainless steel that sits on top of the deck and has a large wooden backing plate. The built in “chain pipe” is as far back in the anchor locker as possible, and the windlass motor is at the front of the forward cabin (and it just fits, with 1-2” of clearance between the motor and the forward bulkhead).

The stainless steel plate has a couple of purposes, 1st, the underside of the V2 is not flat, so I thought it would be difficult to get a good seal between it and the deck (2 non-flat surfaces). And, between it and the wooden backing plate, I think the whole deck is sandwiched and flattened, which helps spread the load, prevent gelcoat cracking, and keeps the whole thing waterproof. Everything’s sealed with the Compass Marine Butyl Tape, and after 9 months not a single drip.

You can see that the windlass and the stainless steel plate overlap with the anchor locker doors. We cut the corners with a jigsaw and then sanded them smooth with the largest drum sander we could find.

The chain falls directly into the locker as shown in the following two pictures.

With the topside complete it was time to move onto the wiring. The V2 has three wires running from the solenoid to the windlass, one hot lead, and two grounds. (Other windlass solenoids work with just a hot lead and a ground, so the placement of the solenoid does not have as great of an impact on the total wires to be purchased). With that in mind, we installed the solenoid beside the windlass to reduce the total length of wire we needed to buy.

The wires were run along the starboard side of the hull, straight into the small cabinet above the hanging locker., then through the bulkhead and into the locker above the drawers in the main saloon. From there they make a 90 degree turn, run along the bulkhead, and down behind the drawers. If you do this route with the wires don’t cut the hole on directly in the corner of the locker, there’s a large piece of fiberglass back there (as we learnt). Thankfully the hole saw left us with a plug that fit right back into that hole! I’m not crazy about this wiring run, I would have preferred to leave the wires out of the locker above the chest of drawers, but this cut 5-10 feet of the total wire run, and we’ll cover them up somehow this year.

The wires then run though the battery boxes back to the engine battery, with the positive attaching to a circuit breaker that is installed on in the battery box under the games table

With the holes cut, and pieces fitted in place, we then ran the wires, marked exactly where they needed to be cut, and pulled them out. After measuring everything, we were at ~45 feet of wiring when all connections were taken into consideration, which is 5 feet under the manufacturers specifications for our 4awg wiring.Now onto wiring up the windlass remote. Lewmar’s wiring diagram was wrong, the solenoid that came with our model had a different part number then was specified in the manual. Thankfully their website had the correct diagram (If you’re looking for this, Lewmar actually calls them split field duel direction contractors).

We wired the switches in two places. The first is a basic rocker switch and we put it beside electrical panel. We decided to do this after seeing the water damage on the socket for the old system It’s treated as the “emergency” switch” in case our remote ever fails. I figure that we can slowly pull the anchor up, with one of us sticking our head through the hatch yelling instructions if need be.

Our primary control is a wired remote, that has a plug in the forward cabin (just on top of the hanging locker).

The downside of this is that the forward hatch needs to be open (even if just slightly) to operate the windlass, it’s never let any rain in, but in an emergency I’d rather be able to leave the forward hatch closed. We may get a wireless remote in a few years, but the boat came with the wired remote, it works, and the socket is always dry.

There were a few frustrations in this project, the biggest of which was Lewmar. Their wiring diagram included in the manual was either wrong or left huge amounts of info out. And the mounting template that comes with the windlass has the wrong bolt pattern (this was determined after having the stainless steel plate made).

I’m really happy with how the project turned out, the motor is in our nice dry forward cabin, and the chain drops into our chain locker, with no real concern of wear and tear on the gelcoat. The V2 has performed flawlessly, and while we always motor forward and avoid using the windlass to pull up the boat forward, but it’s powerful enough that we don’t have to be overly concerned about this, so our communication is never “intense.”

After writing this out it sounds so simple, but it was about 5 days worth of work.