Thursday, February 28, 2013

First night on the hard


We are on the hard at Thunderbolt Marine in Thunderbolt, Georgia.  I'd love to post a map link, but I need to come up with some new way to generate them -- the ones I used to post from the bus came from the GPS built into our satellite Internet system.  For those new to marine terminology, "on the hard" means the boat is out of the water, sitting on a combination of wood blocks and what look like oversized automotive jack stands.  The blocks take the boat's weight, by way of the keel, while the stands keep it from toppling  over on either side.  To get on and off the boat we climb eight feet up a ladder to the swim platform.



The boat was on the hard when we started the survey process back in December.  But last night was our first night living aboard in this condition.  We have a 50-amp shore cord connected, but one consequence of being out of the water is that the heat, which comes from reverse-cycle air conditioners, does not work.  We have our one little household electric space heater that we've been moving around the boat with us, and fortunately that's been sufficient.  Better this, I suppose, than being on the hard in the heat of summer.

After all the work I did on the phone Friday to get the thruster parts, we were dismayed to open the package Monday afternoon to find they had sent the wrong thing.  Now, mind, you, this was not just the three-pound part we needed, but an entire 50-pound thruster system that had been sent next-day.  The surplus place in Florida was very apologetic, and when we told him we had a haulout scheduled for Tuesday morning, he agree to send the parts we needed (the drive leg and the propellers) by priority overnight, for a 10:30am delivery, with the rest of the system via ground that, at this distance, showed up later than same afternoon.  The correct system, incidentally, was much heavier than 50 pounds, so they had undercharged me for the shipping to begin with.

Although we had the parts in hand in time, it turned out to be far too windy to haul the boat out Tuesday.  Just getting the boat over to the lift in those conditions with no thruster would have been a real challenge, but the winds were too high to sling us even if we could.  So we had to sit out another day, which I used to get some more projects done around the boat.  Today marks a full week that we've been at the yard, and at over a C-note per day, we're spending a fortune for the privilege.



The drive leg went right in yesterday with no trouble.  We had to transfer the coupler from the old unit, because the new one uses a different coupling system, but otherwise it all just fit.  The old drive leg is definitely toast; at some point I will open it up to see what happened.  There is no damage to the props, so it was not foreign-object ingestion.  After installation they had to prime and paint the leg and the props with antifouling, and as long as we had the boat out of the water we are having them touch up the bottom paint wherever needed, including where we wore it down to bare metal when we grounded.  It will take another day for the paint to dry, so we will be on the hard again tonight and splash the boat tomorrow.  We'll try to make Hilton Head on Saturday.


As long as the yard had to take some of the wiring off the thruster to get the motor out of the way, I took the opportunity, after the motor was back in place, to clean up some of the wiring down there.  It was amateur hour wherever it was installed, possible self-wired by the first owner of the boat.  Without the ability to "check my work" (the thruster can not be operated with the boat out of the water), I was loathe to make too many changes, such as replacing the tired reversing contactor, which is 24-volt, with the fresh one from the replacement thruster, which is 12-volt.


 But I have my work cut out for me, and last night I drew out the circuit diagram for a wholesale rewire down there which will get the new contactor in place, remove some unnecessary wires (including a pair of massive 2/0 locomotive cables), and properly connect the whole assembly to the control breaker at the helm, which is currently bypassed.  I'll do this after we splash, but before we put the forward stateroom back together in guest-ready condition.



We are once again in expensive company.  I was not comfortable bringing the boat to the lift myself, so I asked Kevin to drive; right after we were in the air he had to run off to take lines for the 160', $17m yacht that came up to the dock right after us, Karima.  I heard from one of the yard guys that she'll be here for months.  Also in the water nearby are superyachts Mary A. (formerly Northern Light), Daybreak, Seascape, and the aforementioned Feadship Beija-Flor.  The beautiful 172' ketch Tamsen is with us on the hard; her masts are so tall that they need to keep the red masthead lights on at night as FAA tower lights.  We are such small potatoes in this yard; the thrusters on some of these other yachts have bigger propellers than does our main engine. As Karima docked, Louise saw two of the crew pointing at Vector in the slings and making the international hand gesture for "tiny." She called up to them, "Hey! That's my boat you're talking about!" In his heavy French accent one of them said, "It looks like a big boat that shrank."



Even here among the Travel Lift crowd (the big boys have to be hauled out with the much larger Syncrolift), we are outgunned by the sleek Sunseeker to our starboard or the swoopy Hatteras sportfish two boats to our port.  Only the little trawler between us and the Hatteras is smaller.  As a side note, the Hatteras' hull is a gorgeous powder blue.


Winds as I am typing are whipping through here and we are rocking in the cradles.  I hope we have calmer weather tomorrow for the splash, and if all goes well we should be underway Saturday morning around 9:30 for Hilton Head.  I'm sure the marina staff there will be relieved to see us, as our packages have been stacking up in the office for a week.

For those who are wondering about how the cats are settling in, here are a couple photos of their first trip circumnavigating the walk-around decks while we were still at the dock:



(Louise adds: Even though the wind whipping through the yard is chilly, the French crew seem oblivious to the cold as they work outside on Karima. Sean says one of the guys wearing long pants dropped them right on deck to change into his shorts, revealing red briefs briefly. I'm sorry I didn't have the opportunity to point at him and make the international hand gesture for "tiny.")


15 comments:

  1. Very interesting. Thanks for posting mechanical / electrical details for us land lubber fellow "gear heads".

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  2. This is interesting and I have always enjoyed reading your blog. Growing up on the Mississippi river and boating my whole life in small boats I had no idea how hard it was to drive a boat of your size.

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  3. Will you two continue working Red Cross emergencies now that you are living on the boat?

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    1. We are still working out how we can continue to help the Red Cross in this new mode of living. Stay tuned.

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  4. Having owned over 8 different boats, and having over 25,000 miles at sea, I can say I am glad it is now you and not me! I'm sure you know the saying, "The 2 best days in a boat owners life...!" Now that I am a "retired" boat owner, I am enjoying life on the ranch!

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  5. Replies
    1. The bus is right here with us at Thunderbolt Marine. I went back over to Hogan's on the scooter after we lowered it from the deck, got the bus ready to go, stowed the scooter in the bay, and drove it here. It's in the secured parking area for the marina, under the watchful eyes of the security guys at the gate. We've arranged fairly close storage for it when we are in Hilton Head, since we are still going back and forth to wrap things up. When we get a couple of free days, we also need to clean it up for the for-sale photos.

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    2. Has there been any real interest in the bus, in the form of offers at all?

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    3. Sorry, I missed this one somehow. No, we have not had any offers, although I did get two "inquiries." Of course, we have not yet cleaned it up, photographed everything, and gotten it listed anyplace, so only folks who have heard about it anecdotally would even know it was for sale.

      In due time we will get it ready and list it, and I had figured that to happen here, in Hilton Head. However, we now have plans to move back into the bus in May while the boat is in the yard, so it has fallen a few notches on the priority list. Of course, if I get a real offer on the bus before May, we will make other living arrangements at the boatyard.

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  6. Will this help with your coordinates ?
    http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html

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    1. Not really -- I am looking for a way to automate it. See below...

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  7. Hand-held GPS units are relatively cheap. You can take the coordinates, put them (comma-separated) into Google Maps, then embed or link the map into your blog. You can also do similar embedding by just entering the address/location into maps. I am sure the same is true for Bing Maps, Mapquest etc.

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    1. I was, perhaps, not entirely clear. Long-time readers will remember early iterations of this on the bus, many years ago.

      I do know how to generate a map link by hand-entering the coordinates on a web site, and, on very rare occasions, I have had to do exactly that on the bus. We have no need of another hand-held receiver -- we live on a boat, where we have no fewer than five GPS receivers on board. But if I have to fetch the coordinates from a receiver and then hand-enter them on the computer each time, I probably won't bother for most posts.

      On the bus I used a program that fetched the exact coordinates from the GPS in the Datastorm satellite system, logged them on a web site, and then generated a link to our position on Google Maps, all with just two clicks (three if you count launching the program in the first place). It is that functionality that I am seeking to replace.

      I know there are Android apps to do this, but even that involves more steps than I'm willing to take, because I don't blog from my phone, I blog from my laptop.

      I am exploring the possibility of using a USB "puck" to get the coordinates into the laptop, and then trying to find (or make) some kind of app to pull them and generate the link. If anyone knows of such an app (I've been looking) I'd love to hear about it.

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  8. I'm interested in the map locator too as our Datastorm finally died for the last time and we now use a Verizon jet pack for internet. I sure did like the little datastorm map program that Don Bradner wrote for the forum. Sounds like you are getting the thruster problem under control and ready for splash down!! Steve

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  9. Looks like the cats are having fun exploring.

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