Leaving the Yard and Heading North

 We arrived at Mack Yacht Services on Friday, June 9th at 3pm. It was a Friday, and I knew that the yard crew would be getting ready to leave for the weekend. I also knew that the owner, Colin Mack, had not been there. He took his Island Packet to the Bahamas for a much needed vacation. 

When we first stepped aboard SHIFT, it was clear that they were not done cleaning up after the major surgery. They had to grind out the old plates that were embedded in the fiberglass hull. That process creates an incredible amount of  very fine fiberglass dust. It goes everywhere. The V-berth looked very good, but the rest of the boat had not been completed. We had no place to go, so we had no choice, but to finish the cleaning and then unload the trailer back into the boat. I had tried to communicate with the foreman that I had been given as a point of contact, but he was fairly unresponsive. 

One of the first things I wanted to see were the chain plates that had been removed from the boat. I wanted to see how bad they were and know if a failure was eminent. 

You can see some corrosion on this plate around the welds. I don't think they were about ready to fail, but they definitely needed to be replaced.

They replaced a total of 10 plates. I was happy with the work they did on that portion of the job.

The real question is what was going on under the surface. I did not see any cracks.

As we did the clean up, I started making a list of all that was left undone. I ended up with a page long list of stuff that should have been done before we arrived. 

After Kim did the first cleaning to make the boat livable, we started unloading was was needed to sleep on the boat that first night. The main concern was the power cord. We don't normally plug into shore power, but we needed air conditioning in the Florida heat and humidity. I had been able to get the staff at Mack to turn on the refrigeration before we arrived, so we could make a run to the grocery store before we had to turn the car in. We went out for a nice dinner and then hit Walmart. That Friday started in Valdosta, Georgia before sunrise, and ended on the boat in bed after midnight.

On Saturday morning we were up early to keep the process moving. I had a turn in time for the car of 8 am. After driving the rent car to the agency office, I took an Uber back to the yard.

At that point I just started bringing as much stuff on the boat as possible. Kim focused on cleaning and putting things away. I was soaking wet from sweat in 15 minutes of work in the Florida heat and humidity. We amaze ourselves when we really go to work, how well we work as a team. By about 5 pm, we had the trailer emptied, and most of the stuff put away on the boat. I then started looking around the boat to see if I could see anything wrong. I did find one major issue with the furler for the genoa. They had removed it as part of the job, but had put it back on incorrectly. 

We had a visit from Josh from the yard. He did much of the work on the boat and stopped by to check on us. That was very nice of him. 

We spent all day Sunday cleaning and fixing some other problems we had found. 

On Monday morning I was up early to find the Foreman Paul to meet him and let him know that I could not leave until the furler was fixed and I wanted to make sure the rig was properly tensioned. I was expecting that would take much of the day, but by 8:30 I got a visit from a rigger from sister company Mack Sails and he told me the furler was fixed and the rig all was good to go. At about 9:00, we were asked to leave. They needed our spot as they had another boat coming in. We pulled out at about 9:30 and motored 7.5 miles to the Jensen Beach mooring field. We picked up a ball there.

While we were underway, I had noticed some noise and some strange feeling from the steering and autopilot. I wanted to take a look at that before we proceeded. I also had an issue with the transmission shifter that was very stiff. As it turned out the transmission was not a Mack issue. The linkage is right below the sea strainer and it got some salt water on it at some point and it had some rust on it. I lubricated it and it was good to go. 

This is the view of the mooring field at Jensen Beach. It is very open with very little protection, but that is nice in the summer to get some breeze to cool off the boat. Lots of space available this time of year. It is always full during the winter cruising season.

The bridge at Jensen Beach. Look, no dinghy on the back of the boat. 

When I opened up the steering compartment to check out the noise, this is what I found. All of that white dust is fiberglass. I had to clean it all up and lubricate the gears. I checked the autopilot. Mack had removed the shelf that the drive had been attached to and replaced it with a new one. I think it is now out adjustment. I did a recalibration to see if it would improve.  

Another look at the white powder. That stuff is very hard and will destroy a gear surface in short order. 

 We then decided to motor on to Vero Beach. That was about 25 more miles. We had a good weather day, so we took advantage of it and made the trip. We pulled into the marina fuel dock and topped off the fuel tank and filled our water. 

I will take a minute here and write about my experience with our Chain Plate Replacement. I am glad we had the job done. I feel much better knowing that our rig is solid. I feel confident that the main job was done correctly. I am disappointed about the clean up and the problem with the autopilot and steering. The attention to detail was just not there. Was that because Colin was not on site? Maybe. We spent more that $16K to do this job, and I was hoping for better. Will I contact them to let them know about my concerns? No. If they really want to know, they will contact me. I really don't know what they could do at this point anyway. This blog is not read by enough people to concern them, so I don't feel writing this will impact their business in any way.  

We had one major issue that we still needed to get resolved. We still did not have our dinghy. Offshore Rafting is located very close to Vero, so we would wait for it there. That was really OK with us. We were tired from the past few days and we like Vero. The only problem was how would we get to shore without a dinghy? We had a plan. I will tell you how that plan worked out in my next entry.