I swear one day SOON we will have so much more to share than silly boat projects. I am anxiously awaiting the opportunity to start photographing gorgeous islands, white sand beaches, and crystal clear turquoise water! Gah! I can hardly wait.
In the meantime, we are wrapping up our very last few boat projects so we can actually get going on this boat of ours. One of the final projects on our list before we set sail was hauling out the boat so we could replace our transducer and replace a broken seacock (that we broke back in October, but waited until now to replace…nice, right?).
About two weeks ago, we got our name on the waiting list over at Molly’s Marine here in Naples. Molly’s is just a quick and easy two-minute jump up the way from the Naples City Dock off Naples Bay. Last Tuesday, we motored over in the afternoon for our scheduled haul out.
Aside from the (boat) traffic jam at the entrance of Molly’s (thanks massive power boaters for your manners in letting us come in, NOT!), all went super smooth. Jereme has definitely become a pro at maneuvering this boat of ours.
We watched the team at Molly’s carefully haul out our baby (and luckily, we had just recently organized all of our original boat manuals and had our “strap location diagram” on hand for quick reference).
We started with the transducer replacement first.
Let me back up just a hair. The transducer is what senses the depth under the boat, using sonar, and sends a signal to the instrument up in the cockpit. Our existing depth instrument still works; however, the screen is basically a very old 1-inch-tall, black and white screen that is located too far away from the helm to really see much. (And our other two instruments on the boat — wind and boat speed — do not work.) So, we decided to purchase new depth and wind instruments, and remove the speed one altogether. Unfortunately, there are no “new” depth screens available on the market these days that will work with our existing transducer (which was only compatible with our old Datamarine instruments), so we had to replace the transducer. Hence, the haul out. (Our new Ray Marine (formerly Tacktick) wind instrument is wireless.)
Back to the replacement.
In this particular boat yard, boat owner’s are not allowed to do their own work. It’s not a “DIY” kind of yard. So, we brought in an electrician to help us with the transducer replacement (however in the future we would most definitely do this project ourselves because of how ridiculously easy this job was).
Our electrical guy, Rob hammered out the old transducer. And our new transducer was the exact same size as the old one, so it was literally a super easy switch out. No fiberglass work needed. Jereme has been working since on routing the necessary wires through the boat and building a panel for our new instruments (blog post coming soon!).
^^Interestingly enough, just earlier that same morning our boat had gotten a bottom cleaning at the dock, so we were interested to see how good of a job it really was, if you know what I mean.^^
We also used the haul out as an opportunity to visually check our sacrificial zinc anode on the propellor shaft, and immediately noted the need for a fresh replacement before setting sail. Based on the looks of things…we added that to the mix while we were at Molly’s. Needless to say, we have a new zinc anode now.
The seacock replacement was a little bit harder than the transducer replacement since the old bolt pattern on the seacock was different than the new one. At the end of the day, it required some fiberglass work to fill our old bolt holes.
After the seacock was replaced, Jereme made sure to ask for our old Groco one back so that he could take it apart to figure out how it works since we have at least five more of these on our boat (such the engineer! always thinking). We’re working on a separate blog post about these original Groco seacocks, particularly how they work and even more importantly how they can fail to help others out in the future.
^^And why not use the haul out as an opportunity for a close-up photo of our cool wood nameplates. 😉 You can read about how we chose the name “LAHO” here. It’s super special to us.^^
Now that the haul out is complete, we only have one or two more things to finish on the boat before we are ready to leave!!!
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Kinda surprised that you didn’t have the yard power wash the slime off the bottom when you hauled. A 15 minute job and you’d be starting your grand adventure with a perfect bottom.