Commissioning

Blossom at the commissioning dock.

We've been in Stuart almost a month and commissioning has been ongoing. Unless you've had the fortune to buy a new boat, you'll probably have no idea what commissioning is all about.

Allow me to explain :-)

For us, here at the Nordhavn commissioning dock, the process has been an immeasurable number of tasks that can be grouped into a few main categories:

Checking and Fixing

Like any complicated product made of many moving parts and assembled by a large team, there's going to be things wrong. Some the yard knew about but didn't want to hold up shipping until completed. Some the yard just plain missed. Nordhavn have a thorough commissioning process and part of the process is going through the boat checking that everything is correct and fixing that which isn't.

A good example of this would be the Charles dual alternator regulator. The commissioning guys found that this was wired incorrectly and have since corrected the wiring. Now we're getting a nice 9kw charge to the house banks when we run the main engine.

Identifying missing construction

There's always something missing. Hopefully small and hopefully easy to add. As Chris, one of the commissioning guys, said "We're pretty handy guys." Finding the missing stuff is going to be an exercise and a half! There are 11 pages of standard specifications. To that we added and modified to the tune of 13 additional pages plus 6 architectural diagrams. If that wasn't enough, we further added, modified and deleted to the tune of another couple of hundred lines.

These all need to be checked. For anything not according to the contract a decision needs to be made. Do we leave as-is and then negotiate a refund (the boat is 95% paid for at this point) ?; Do we get the item added or corrected?; or is there some middle ground to be found?

Adding new stuff

This has been the bulk of our work so far. As almost everything we want to add to Blossom involves finding the right vendor to supply the equipment and, in many cases, install it. A short list of the things we've been working on:

• Electronics (navigation and audio/video)
• Electronics (monitoring)
• Canvas
• Tender
• Kayaks and SUPs
• Boarding ladders and steps
• Boat name signs
• Diving equipment (tanks and filling stations)
• Window treatments (blinds and curtains, maybe even UV cutting film)
• Helm chairs
• Mattresses

It seems like a day doesn't go by without us identifying yet another thing we need to call somebody about!

Equipping the boat

I separated this section out from the previous one using one main criteria. Do we need to drill or cut a hole in the boat? All the items in the earlier section require some form of installation. Even the kayaks are going to need something to tie them onto and that will need mounting. All the stuff in this section doesn't. Stuff like:

• Furniture
• Plates, silverware, glassware
• Lines and fenders
• Cookware
• Bedding

We've barely begun thinking about this kind of stuff. The approach we've taken has been to equip our apartment with the least amount of stuff we can get away with and, wherever possible, only buy stuff we intend to bring aboard Blossom.

Steph's headed down to Boca (or somewhere) with Louise to go get a selection of containers we can use inside drawers and lockers to help organize things once we're aboard. She spent the last few days measuring the insides of everything!