Commissioning Continues

I’ve heard from several people lately wondering where we are and how things are going with Blossom.  The short answer is that we’re still in Stuart, commissioning the boat.

Our original impression was that it would be a two to three month process.  We find ourselves wrapping up week 19 now, with altered expectations and nebulous plans. 

At some point, in July we hope, we'll take ownership, move aboard and I'll pick up the blog once again.  For gear-heads and techies, Martin may have some future entries on some of the systems on Blossom (like our very cool Maretron system.)

For now, we are enjoying living in Stuart, have begun doing some scuba diving in the area and we visit Blossom almost daily.  We’re also taking advantage of this time to do some traveling and visit with family.  

Happy Easter!

Last week was another productive week.  Installation of the Maretron system is almost complete. Martin worked with them to start the last stage of verifying that all the sensors are working correctly.  Yachtsign came and installed our boat name on the port & starboard side of the fly bridge and on her stern. The signs on the fly bridge are lit, more than plenty of “bling” J  We were very excited to see her name up in lights!  The name on the stern shows off the complete logo (thank you Cecilia!)

It's really satisfying to see her with her name, we're so close to calling her "home".

Martin has plenty to keep him occupied on the boat while the electrics and maretron systems continue to be installed. I'm working on other miscellaneous tasks, many of which involve organizing. This weekend I started tackling the manuals.  Borrowing a system from Bernie, I began putting everything into binders. It's a weekend project since the guys need them during the week. I'm off to a good start with the semi-complete binders (about 11 of them so far) back on the boat first thing this morning. 

I’ve also been putting together a binder of recipes for the boat. I'm thinking that it will be easier to experiment now when I have easy access to a grocery store and Asian market.  I’ve been experimenting with Thai recipes for the past couple of months and am starting to get the hang of it. All the necessary ingredients have been added to our provisioning list and am looking forward to our expanded menu aboard Blossom.

All the cooking inspired me to plant a few herbs last week. We have cilantro, sweet basil, Thai basil and mint. I'm amazed at how quickly things grow in Florida. I already have enough to harvest!

On the social front, we bid a sad farewell to our friends, Sean & Louise who left Stuart on Friday, heading south for Fort Lauderdale. I accompanied them down to West Palm Beach where Martin met up with us and we had a “see you in a few weeks” good-bye dinner.  It will feel strange to be in Stuart without them! 

We also had a lovely Easter brunch with new friends that we met in Stuart. We enjoyed watching a spirited Easter egg hunt, a tasty brunch and talking with lovely fellow boaters and their friends.  Life in Stuart has been very good to us!

Getting things done

Work on Blossom is coming right along with the end in sight for several installations.  Brian and Troy from Celtic Marine Electronics should have our electronics finished within a couple of weeks and Maz Ocean will be finished installing the maretron monitoring system in about a week.  These are the biggest installs we are doing and require the most man hours, the majority of which are running hundreds of wires through the boat. Here’s what Blossom has looked like for that past 6 weeks or so:

Tasks completed:

V-Kool has been installed on our salon and pilot house windows. This is a film that purports to cut UV by 98% and heat by 55%.  We’ve heard some mixed reviews about window films but decided to give it a try. 

We’ve been working with Buck from Safety First to set up our scuba gear. He and Joe came out to get compressor and fill station sorted (we can fill 4 tanks at a time) and install our scuba tank holders.

Marquip has also installed the hardware for our “step across” and cockpit stairs:

Commissioning has now begun in earnest as well.  Yesterday, Steelhead was here fixing the davit (it wasn’t working and needed a new part), ABT was here fixing the stabilizers (also requires a replacement part), and Rob & Chris were commissioning the chilled water system.  Martin got into the game, successfully transferring fuel between fuel tanks. 

It feels great to see so much getting done.  The company line is that it takes “6-8 weeks to commission an N60” (as a salesman told some prospective buyers that were visiting Blossom last week). We’re 10 weeks into commissioning now but work really only started a couple weeks ago once the boat next to ours started wrapping up.  We’re hoping to take possession of the boat about 5 weeks from now.

In the meantime we're also enjoying the local wildlife!

And last but far from least, Happy Birthday Mom!!!

How do you spend your days?

We’ve had several friends ask us a variation on this question and I usually respond something to the effect:  “I’m not really sure but we’re extremely busy doing whatever we’re doing!” So putting some thought in to it, I realized that it’s a question worth thinking about and might be informative for others who may go through this, or a similar commissioning process, themselves.

We were very fortunate to be in a position to move to Stuart and be here for the full commissioning. As we progress through it, I couldn’t imagine not being here.

While PAE is commissioning Blossom (a separate blog post that Martin will address!) we have our own commissioning tasks to do. There’s a lot of work that can be done now, even if some of the actual installation takes place post PAE commissioning. So far, most of our time has been spent finding, contacting and vetting various vendors. Then we set up a meeting, explain what we need and get an estimate for the job. In most cases we go ahead and work with them. A few times, we’ve continued to look and repeated the process until we found a vendor we’re comfortable with. I was surprised how much is involved with some of these decisions, requiring several visits and much deliberation. (Not at all helped by the fact that I tend to over-think most everything…) The work that we’re contracting out to be done includes:

·       Electronics installation (we chose to have this done state-side)

·       Maretron system installation (monitoring system)

·       Window treatments (shades & curtains)

·       Window coating (UV protection)

·       Canvas work (outside window shades, table and kayak covers)

·       Carpentry (systems to secure dishes & glasses, changing hinges, adding hanging bars)

·       Steel work (to mount kayaks and flopper stopper fish to the boat deck)

·       Scuba set-up and installation

·       Custom beds

·       Steps for getting on and off the boat

The other major activity is shopping!  Equipping Blossom is the same as furnishing a new home from scratch. Luckily we have a storage unit to house it all!  A short list of what we’ve been researching and buying includes:

·       Kitchenware (dishes, glasses, pots & pans)

·       Kitchen appliances

·       Bedding

·       Office supplies

·       Lamps

·       Tender

·       Fenders and lines

·       Life raft

·       Ditch bag and contents

·       Tools

·       Boat cleaning and maintenance supplies

·       Kayaks

·       SUPs

·       Bikes

·       Various containers to organize the refrigerator, drawers, closets and lockers

And lastly, there are some miscellaneous tasks that need to be done like filling out the warranty cards from all the equipment on the boat, verifying the “as built” boat against our order, organizing boat manuals, making a snubber, making a cover for our electric grill, figuring out how to mount our bikes to the boat deck, etc.  We’ll be going on another shopping spree next week after we meet again with Bernie Francis, our training captain and consultant, who is helping us to equip and outfit the boat.

So that’s a summary of the “work” that we’ve been up to.  We’ve also been hard at play. We’ve attended the Miami boat show, Trawler Fest (aboard our friends boat!), and the Palm Beach boat show. We’ve been having a wonderful time with our friends Sean & Louise who are here with us until mid-April and with whom we’ll be cruising once we’ve finished in Stuart. Together, we’ve been exploring the area and cooking for each other, building up our go-to recipes for our upcoming cruising days together. We’ve had a great time meeting some other Nordhavn owners who have come by the Nordhavn dock including the folks from Silver Spray, Summer Star and SimBil. We’ve been visiting with friends who live down in Delray and my Dad and step-Mom who are snow birding in Cocoa Beach. We’ve had several visitors including Martin’s Mom and her partner, Michael, my Aunt and Uncle from up north and family friends from England. And the list goes on!

So our day to day lives have been very full and we’ve been surprised at how relatively little down time we have. When we do have free time, we have lots of options for filling it - the weather has been gorgeous for walking and biking, there's a weekend farmers market in town with live music, and there's much more to explore in the area.  And of course, we always have the blog we should be keeping up to date J

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!

Goodbye to our dear George, RIP

The past week has been a difficult one and so we haven’t been very involved with Blossom. Our 16 ½ year old cat, the ever handsome George, took an abrupt turn for the worse last weekend. After several non-invasive tests, we discovered that he had metastatic carcinoma effecting several organs throughout his digestive system. In true cat fashion, he was a trouper and showed few signs of distress until the end.

It was a heartbreaking decision, but we let George go on Friday so he wouldn’t suffer any more. George came to me at about 5 days old, eyes still closed, found by a neighbor up in the Berkeley hills. Bottle-fed, spoiled and immensely loved, he has been my faithful friend and companion for a third of my life.  He quickly stole Martin’s heart and, along with his sister, Bean, we made quite the happy family. We hope he’s happy, eating heartily, pain-free and has found Bean. She may not be so happy about it, but he’ll be thrilled to stalk and annoy her once again.

We’re so grateful to our friends Sean & Louise for helping us through this transition. They’ve been a great emotional support, providing love & hugs and engaging distractions when needed.

I keep hearing his bell and expecting to see his bright green eyes watching me expectantly. It’s going to take time to adjust to his absence and the empty house. We will miss George more than words can describe.  RIP my sweet pumpkin… 

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words...

Back in ’09 we kept a “pic of day” Picassa album linked to our blog (thank you Judy for such a great idea!)  The idea was to post 1 photograph every day for the year we would be living aboard I Got Lucky.  In practice, there were days when I had nothing of interest to post and more often, ended up posting multiple photos for a day.   I wanted to share our experiences with family and friends and thought that it would be cool to have a visual as well as written blog.  It turned out to be the best keepsake we could possibly have from that year.

Once we were back home, we used the album as a screen saver for the computer in our main living area.  Over the next four years, we enjoyed those photographs randomly popping up throughout the day, every day.  We revisited friends and places and relived amazing memories.  It both motivated and encouraged us as we planned our next adventure aboard Blossom.

I’ve been anticipating starting up a new “Pic of Day”, and it’s time!  We’ve added a link to our main blog page. I’ll be uploading photos as often as I can, with the goal of capturing at least one photo a day.  I’ve all ready missed some prime opportunities for photo opts. I have to get back into the habit of taking pictures!