Survey and Sea Trial Success!

Hi y'all!
We're back from Kemah and our SECOND survey and sea trial. This one went much better than the last, though the weather was not nearly as nice. The majority of the survey was on Sunday.  We got there about 8:30 and Lou, the surveyor, had been on the boat for more than an hour. It was not a pretty day. It was cold, rainy and windy. The high was 43 on Sunday. Fortunately we spent most of the day below deck checking out all the stuff there.

There were a few small things here and there that needed to be fixed but there were also a couple of major things that it was good we found before we own the boat. Issue #1 was the batteries wouldn't hold a charge so we weren't able to start either the engine or diesel generator until the starter battery was replaced. The owner had a representative / manager on the boat so he replaced the starter battery that day. The house batteries were to be replaced by 12/31 but a spare set was on board Monday morning so we could do the sea trial and test out all the electronics. Once we were able to get the engine and generator started we quickly discovered the raw (sea) water pump for the generator was leaking.

This boat has the "stateroom" forward. Aft there is a cabin with a bed and where another cabin would usually be is an office with desk and chair (and an apple computer!) In the office is also a clothes washer and dryer (one unit). From the looks of it, the washer / dryer has never been used. We weren't able to get it to work but it may have been user error.

The owner is paying to replace the batteries. We asked for a price concession in order to cover the cost of having the water pump replaced, though we'll probably do that work ourselves. We will cover the cost of the washer / dryer and a few small repairs like replacing one hose, a couple of hose clamps and a couple of lights.

Monday morning we left the marina at 8:30 to take the boat to the boat yard and have it hauled out so everything normally under water could be inspected. Same thing as last time, the boat looks BIG sitting in the water but it is ginormus when it is hanging up in the air. Not the same as last time, we didn't find much wrong. At this point it was pretty obvious we were going to buy this boat so while it was out of the water we had the zincs replaced. Time for a lesson.

I don't really understand this completely myself but here's my layman term explanation (with lots of help from Susan).  To protect the propeller (expensive and important), pieces of zinc are attached to the propeller shaft. Here is a description I found online that may help.

A natural phenomenon is that two different metals immersed in sea water, or any electrolyte, develop voltage and current. The metal that is most active electrically (more positive) will deteriorate while protecting the metal that is less positive. If both of these metals are important to us, we can attach another metal, more positive than the other two, which will deteriorate first and protect the more important metals. This sacrificial metal (in this case zinc) will erode first, protecting the boat metal. The propeller on this boat is bronze and it is attached to a stainless steel shaft. Left "unprotected" the propeller will change from a pretty golden color to pink and then eventually red due to a loss of metal. At the stage where the propeller has turned red, it is brittle and very easily broken. The zinc will deteriorate over time. That time will be between one and several months, depending on other conditions. In the case of this boat there are "zincs" attached to the main propeller shaft as well as to the propeller shafts of the bow thruster. All that to say, we had the zincs replaced while the boat was out of the water. The recommendations I've seen say you should replace the zincs once they have deteriorated to 50% of their original size. In most cases it will be less expensive to pay a diver (Susan) to go underwater and replace your zincs for you but if the boat is already out of the water it makes sense to get it done then.

Once we were finished at the boat yard the boat was put back in the water and we took it out into Galveston Bay to sail it for a bit and make sure all the sails, running rigging, auto pilot, electronics and winches worked properly. Running rigging are the ropes that are used to move various things related to the sails. Those ropes, or lines, go by different names. Halyards are the lines that pull the sail up (mainsails up the mast, staysails up to the top of the forward stay), sheets are the lines that are used to trim the sails so they have the best position in relation to the wind in order to get the most speed.

Everything worked! And no sails fell down! Monday was a whopping 3 degrees warmer than Sunday with no rain and very little wind. We did not make great speed on our sea trial but it all worked well. I took the helm for a while but it doesn't take much effort to sail a boat in as light a wind as we had Monday. When we were satisfied that we had tested everything we headed back to the marina.

That pretty much covers the survey and sea trial. Once we finished up at the boat Susan and I went back to the bar and grill at the marina for a late lunch for the second day in a row. Though the food was good, that wasn't what brought us back. They have a fireplace and both days we sat as close as we could so we could put our feet in the fire and thaw them. Brrrr it was cold!

We've signed an offer with the few contingencies that need to be addressed for us to buy the boat, all of which we fully expect to be accepted by the owner. So in the next week or so we expect to close on this boat and start the next chapter of this adventure. I'm smiling at the thought of it. We're buying a sailboat!

Brian