Wednesday, November 25, 2009
What a long day with very little achieved! I had grand plans of splashing Zanshin I, moving her to the docks and then getting the bimini up and the insides cleaned out. Unfortunately, the day didn’t quite pass that way. It all begin well enough, with the crew on land starting earlier than the planned 9:30 AM time frame. It was surprising how quickly they got going and removed the chocks and pulled the boat behind the tractor towards the Travelift, which would then move the boat to the dock and put her into the water. But we hit a major snag, which almost ended up in an altercation between the yardmaster and myself. As can be seen in the 3rd and 4th pictures, the wind generator doesn’t allow the Travelift to position the two hoisting straps correctly. The 3rd picture shows him up on the cherry picker looking at the clearance (none). He told me that I’d mounted the wind generator after being lifted out and I was just as adamant that the boat had been hauled with the wind generator already installed. We cooled down after a bit of back and forth and decided that we’d get on the picker and remove the wind generator An hour later all the screws were removed yet the wind generator refused to budge. I thought we could just remove the blades but 30 minutes of removing all the screws there showed us that I was in error. After over 3 hours of delay, they asked me if they could put the straps in a unmarked location aft of the marked hoist points to allow clearance. I acceded, since I figured that it must have been the only way to have the boat hauled in the first place, and if the boat didn’t snap in half upon haul out it wasn’t going to while going back into the water. The clearance was just a couple of inches, so I had had to get up on the boat and climb upon the aft railing to hold the wind generator away (look at picture 3 again, pretty high and the boat is just suspended on 2 big straps! I have no fear of heights and I was thinking to myself that in the USA this would have been a major disaster due to job safety regulations that wouldn’t have allowed anyone up there). At least I finally got splashed and, with the assistance of William the dock master, managed to get into a slip without getting a ding on the boat or the dock. But then we need almost an hour to get the power cord system fixed up and by the time I was finally ready to work on the boat it was past lunchtime and I’d already gotten my first sunburn and was bleeding from scraped knuckles, cuts on my fingers and some strange but painful laceration on my leg. It is now 19:30 and I haven’t done much inside the boat but just opened up my first Carib beer in 6 months and am feeling much better already.
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