Yup, The Mind Is Lost...

[jmrecord]

The wife is due July 4 th 2011 second boy no good.I'm gonna need a sat phone ..Great read!

[giggyfish]

Anxiously awaiting part two. Please include tips on convincing wife on the purchase of said downeast boat. Any help is appreciated.

[clt_capt]

I'm now in a full blown panic because my wife is 9 months pregnant and I've promised to take at least a month off.

I realize that this is an old thread, but to quote the old joke, "You're not getting any this weekend, might as well go fishing"

[CaptainCJ35]

I'm straight-up cackling in my office cubicle re-reading this post... Can't wait for Chapter II!

[amarshall]

excuse any grammar and typos... trying to do this and work at the same time.

Chapter 2 buying a boat in Maine from an outside perspective.

For the past 2+ years a family friend has been building a 38 Northern Bay. Our friend is a builder on Cape Cod with no kids. This should answer all the question as to how one affords a battleship such as this (lesson learned for the next life).

Our friend has been commercially fishing for bluefin with my dad since the 60s and was the first person to put me on a monster fish. I pissed a lot of people off with this post several years ago because I admitted we killed a fish. I wished the end result was a picture of this fish hanging on a dock but unfortunately that was not the case...

http://www.reel-time.com/forum/showt...hlight=grander

(hooked up with a slob on his old 36 Fortier, you can see the other guy fishing with a broken leg. They're nuts.)



Having had his boat in P-town for the last several years he's watched the fishing shift from PH and Stellwagen to Chatham and George's. He also is worried about a shut down on BFT so he built the boat with canyon fishing in mind. The boat is a 38 Northern Bay with an 800 hp Iveco diesel. He spared no expense in the electronics and it's really a signature boat for the electronics installer. They want a showpiece of their work and want to be able to show off the capabilities of the state of the art electronics.

The boat was scheduled to be finished in September 2010 but it was going to be rushed to make it happen. So rather than have the boat rushed he decided to wait out the winter for warranty purposes on the engine and to make sure the boat was completely finished. (aka let's work on other projects and wait until the last possible minute to finish the boat)

Building a custom boat is like building a house. You have the general contractor or foreman in charge of the overall project and you have the subs that the GC hires. Some of the subs are master craftsman. They are into the yacht finishes, the teak and the unbelievable wood working. These guys are gems. They've been building downeast boats their entire lives and are a wealth of knowledge and are true artists. On the other hand, you have some of the subs are wanna-be craftsmen. They've been building boats wrong their entire lives, think they are gods gift to boat building and can make a mess of a project. You also need to consider the environment in which they live. Downeast Maine is not the easiest place to live. You have outside factors that can move deadlines and cause people to flat out disappear, end up in jail or catch their wife in bed with two other guys (more on this later). Downeast Maine is like the Jamaica of the north. They're on "island time". Rushing them gets you nowhere. Yelling and screaming gets you nowhere. The project will get done on their time and only their time.

All winter long I've been bugging my friend about boat progress and he kept saying "almost done". Mind you, the boat should have been finished in September. Finally last week he got the ok from the builder that it was done and he could come and pick it up in Penobscot. He coordinated with the electronics installer who would make the run down to Portland with them.

On Thursday they left Penbobscot in what turns out to be a lucky break: the run down to Portland was a 4 hour slugfest into 6 fters. They averaged 17 knots but they got beat up and discovered some "punch list" problems. On the way down they called the builder and arranged to have a team meet them in Portland to fix the issues on Friday. Thursday night I took the Amtrak downeaster out of Boston to Portland and would meet them to drive the boat down to P-town. We had 130s on the boat and planned to fish Jeffrey's and possibly the NWC on the way down if we saw or marked any fish.

Friday morning we get up early, had a delicious breakfast at Becky's diner in downtown Portland. We picked up the electronics installer and headed for the boat. We were going to fine tune the autopilot and fix a problem with the 200 khz setting on the Furuno FCV 1150. We took the boat out and the autopilot is point and click. You set waypoints on the Furuno Navnet with the cursor and it drives to the boat to where you click.... so cool. The installer still couldn't get the 200 khz setting to work so we went back and grabbed another unit. After testing that one... still no luck. So now you're looking at a transducer problem. The transducer was the top of the line $2,500 model that the builder made a really cool recessed housing for in the hull. It prevents the transducer from causing too much drag on the hull. The only problem is that to get at it you need to haul the boat... woops. Big problem #1.

Meanwhile the guys from Penobscot are nowhere to be found. Phone calls are going to voicemail. Now they're 1 hr late....2 hrs late.....3 hrs late. Finally one of the guys shows up at Hamilton Marine. We ask them where the others are....(maine accent) ahhhhh yup Steve caught his old lady in bed last night with two other guys. He's a mess and won't be coming down" holy sh$t.

What do you say to this.....

So we head back to the boat. The major issue they found the day prior is that half of the windows were leaking. That was priority number one with a ton of expensive electronics. We open up the paneling on the windows and find that they have been caulked with 3M 5200. You don't seal them in with permanent caulk! You'll never get the windows out again. They didn't even seal them well. They used half of the caulk needed. So the only solution was to continue on sealing them with the non permanent caulk and go over the missing areas.

Then the wash down pump was mounted above the waterline and wouldn't prime correctly. Then the macerator pumps weren't working correctly and this and that. All of these silly issues had sprung up and they all came back to one of the subs on the job. One person had made this boat delivery a mess. The rest of the boat is in impeccable shape and one guy was half-asser. I also personally would never do business with a well known safety company up there after he gave me a hard time about a missing painter clip on a $5k raft.

We actually knocked out a ton of issues but we still had the transducer issue that would require us to haul the boat. We called around to several yards and finally Port Harbor Marine was able to accommodate us if we could get over to them in about 10 minutes. So we raced over to the marina and hauled the boat and there it sits this morning waiting to get the transducer fixed.

When we hauled the boat, we discovered they bottom painted the transducer. Fantastic. You can see in the picture where 3k watts has actually burnt the paint. The housing it sits in is so slick.



Then we found that the two bolts on the prop that the rear bolt had come loose. They don't know if the 1000 ft lbs of torque did it or someone didn't tighten it enough. That was beyond scary. If that prop had sheared off mid trip you could have shot it up into the hull and been testing that brand new life raft.

So after all of this nonsense and a long day of stress and hard work, I ended up getting a ride home with a friend in his car that was heading to the Cape.

So....

The boat is unbelievable. I've never felt a boat with that amount of torque. It literally goes from 0 to 20 knots in seconds. The build quality for 97% of the boat is incredible. One person who was a sub-contractor made a bunch of mistakes and thus created a bunch of headaches for all involved. I don't think he will be at this company much longer. It was a huge lesson on how to build a boat and be involved.

So lessons learned from this:

1. Be very very very involved in the build at the final stages.

2. Be prepared for a punch list of issues.

3. Don't get worked up, it won't help anything. Especially in Maine.

4. Don't have set dates in stone.

5. Don't rush anything. I would have tried to get that boat home on Friday and may have caused a ton more issues.

6. 800 hp diesels are like sex.





discovering the transducer had been bottom painted

[aloop]

What were those 5 pics in the reel-time link?

[amarshall]

It was a long Tuesday night....glad I had to work. They still have no idea what happened. Complete electrical shutdown.

http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/in...me-har?blog=53

[chathamblue30]

Must be a real happy new boat owner,hope he does not own a firearm.

[HarborRd]

It was a long Tuesday night....glad I had to work. They still have no idea what happened. Complete electrical shutdown.

http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/in...me-har?blog=53

Yyyyyeahhhhh, who finished this boat again??????