It's Been a Week (If it can go wrong, it will go wrong)!

I arrived at M.E. Yacht Restoration where our boat, Katahdin, spent the summer on the hard on Monday afternoon. Nate Lattimore, project manager, met me and we walked down to their marina on Lake Macatwa to see the boat--first time I'd seen her in the water since our pre-purchase sea trial at Hilton Head in early April. She looked great floating there. Inside, she was stuffed with a gillion more boxes of stuff--stuff we'd sent from Maine, stuff we'd ordered on Amazon, stuff we'd bought from marine suppliers--everything from cotton balls, toothpaste and kitty litter to fenders, fender holders, and a life sling. We could open a retail cosmetics shop but don't tell Jackie I said that. I spent Monday afternoon and the earliest part of Tuesday morning opening boxes and working out where to store stuff. There was just a bit of pressure as I was meeting Craig Tallberg, owner of Carolina Coastal Yachts, from whom we bought the boat for some captain coaching and a sea trial at 9:00 on Tuesday morning.

Craig and I met as planned, went over the boat and her systems, and then took her for a sea trial and fuel about five miles west on Lake Macatawa. It was a great morning! Though I had skippered sailboats roughly the length of Katahdin back when our kids were young, Katahdin is by far the heaviest, beamiest and, if I'm honest, longest boat I've every skippered. The gods smiled on me: there was no wind, no current and I managed to get Katahdin off the dock, down the five miles to the fuel dock, onto the fuel dock, and back onto the ME Yacht Restoration dock without incident. It actually looked like I knew what I was doing. A few glitches emerged on this short trip; the autopilot wasn't working, the vhf radio was not reading the GPS (critical because in an emergency, you can press one button on the radio and she transmits a MayDay and your exact location), and, the chartplotter wasn't reading any AIS (Automatic Identification Signals) from other boats.

But the real challenges started to emerge once we got back to the dock. Craig and Justin Hiemstra (another ME Yacht project manager) suggested that we test the Nautley dinghy davit system that had been installed over the summer. The inflatable dinghy with a 15hp outboard did go off the davits, albeit a bit roughly, but, try as we might, 28 year old hunky Justin and I could not get the dinghy back on. This system was clearly a non-starter for two crew in their eighth decades, one with a pretty bad back. Magic started to happen: Craig called Greg Vogel, co-owner of Freedom Lift. Yes they had a system at hand, yes they could deliver it this afternoon, yes they would come and observe the installation. Turns out Craig sells more Freedom Lifts than anyone anywhere and ME Yacht Restoration installs more than most. Before I knew it, the boat was back in the barn, the Nautley system was coming off, holes in the swim platform were being filled, and Bob Zwiers, the other Freedom Lift co-owner, arrived to take measurements to ensure the system could be mounted. It took some modifications to my stern thruster and some custom holes in their standard mounting plate but, the answer was yes.

By early Wednesday afternoon, with great work by the ME crew and coaching by Greg Vogel, the system was happily installed and working great. But wait, by late Wednesday afternoon, ever observant Justin noticed a slight drip of hydraulic fluid on the floor beneath the Lift. Hmm. He put an absorbent mat under each hydraulic cylinder and we went home for the night. Next morning it was obvious that one of the cylinders leaked. To his great credit, Greg showed back up with two new cylinders from a different manufacturer. The ME crew installed them and all was perfect. Well, not quite. Somehow in the process, the remote control unit on the pump failed. Greg made a round trip drive to his HQ north of Grand Rapids and came back with a new unit. A short while later, all was well and we were cleared to launch.

While all that was going on, it was discovered that the autopilot wires had become disconnected; they were reconnected and all seems well. The electronics gurus arrived and quickly observed that Katahdin had no AIS system. They arrived back on Friday after Katahdin was re-launched with a Garmin unit to install. As luck would have it, the air conditioning system developed an air lock while Katahdin was out of the water and we had the entire salon floor raised when they arrived. Will from ME showed me the two techniques for freeing the air lock, but, when we tried to put the salon floor back down, it was stuck. Another panic. We tested the switch; we traced wires and found the activator; we checked the hydraulics. Finally Will wiggled the whole darn thing and back down it went. Turns out, you can't put it up to the bitter end.

The electronics guys got to work installing the AIS--it works-- and connecting the VHF to the GPS. That also works.

There are a few other things but, enough's enough. I'm waiting for the fog to lift to get out on Lake Michigan today for a real sea trial. We've got two more biz days at ME Yacht Restoration next week if there are any final bugs. Then . . . well, we're on our own!