Moving onto the Boat…
Dec 11-18
This whole week has been spent doing nothing but cleaning, bringing boxes on board, unloading, storing, and just getting used to where things go in the boat. John had a mechanic come over and help change out a bad engine overheat sensor that was identified in the survey. At the same time he had them test the batteries. We determined that they needed to be replaced.
We spent the first two nights at River Forest, and then moved the boat over to Turtle Creek and tied up to LaVern’s McCurdy’s dock. LaVern is a friend of a friend. He has a house with a large dock less than a quarter mile away from River Forest. This was a wonderful place to unload the boxes from both of the vans. We have much shorter distance to walk, and the boat is sitting in a great location. We can’t thank LaVern enough for letting us use his dock while we did this process.
We should have taken a picture of the boat on this dock…
Our first night on board. A toast to our new life.
Only the good stuff when you make this kind of leap.
The good thing about this boat is the amount of storage space that we have. There are lots of little cubbyholes and places to store things. As we were looking in the cubbyholes we found lots of boxes of cereal, and about 5 gallons of water. Since this boat hasn’t been used for two years, we decided that these things were a little too old and we had to throw them out. The nice thing about this boat is the storage but the bad thing is having to clean all the storage spaces.
While we were at River Forest we also put in six new big big batteries. It was interesting watching the guys take the floor of the salon apart and drop batteries down into the engine room. After loading the boat, we moved back to River Forest for a pump out and water. We determined that our stiff shifting problem was due to bent shifter cables in the engine room. River Forest was able to quickly replace them before we had to leave for the Owl Creek Boatyard. Due to having to get the cables fixed we were one day late for leaving for Owl Creek.
Dec 19th
This morning, after engine checks and getting the chart plotter fired up we pulled out of the River Forest Marina and headed for Owl Creek.
Left River Forest around 9:30 Friday morning.
Very narrow canal leaving River Forest.
This is the view leaving River Forest
Pam’s first time driving this boat… A little different than the houseboat!!!!
Went through two locks. Steering and shifters were working a lot better. John saw an alligator as we are making our way towards Owl Creek in Alva.
As we kept cruising we ran into a down pour. Really not a terrible thing but it really rained hard and the wind was blowing. We were driving from the upper helm, and started getting wet because one antenna was laid forward and forced us to leave that panel of isinglass open. We decided to move to the lower helm down below for better visibility. It worked out great. We used the windshield wipers and could stay dry and see where we were going. We felt kinda bad when we called a bridge and they had to come out with an umbrella and open for us. It was a narrow opening and a downpour. Actually, it was very nice down there in a big rain. See the video below…
Got to Owl Creek around 2:30 PM. They we’re expecting a large boat that hit something to come in before us, but we beat them, so we tied up to another dock for a couple of hours. After they lifted the beautiful large boat, they let us tie up in the lift well for the next few days while they waited for parts to come in for the boat that was in the straps.
Large beautiful boat that broke a cone on their pod drive. A fix like this could cost between $6,000-12.000. We had to wait for this boat to be fixed before we could be lifted out.
We sat in the lift well for days waiting for our boat to be fixed.
This is your basic boat yard, and our temporary home as we pack and get ready for our trip to Arizona for Christmas. We thought that they were going to start working on our boat before Christmas but they changed their work schedule and gave their employees off two weeks instead of one for Christmas. We found out that they won’t be starting to work on our boat until January 4th and it would take them at least 10 working days to fix the boat.