Our new hole in the boat

 

David attended the boat show in Annapolis of course.  We were here, so why not.  He was excited to visit all the vendor booths, now that we actually have a boat, and their products apply, rather than a “someday…”. 

We had talked last spring about maybe getting bow thrusters sometime, but it is a big addition and we had a lot of other additions in the budget so it wasn’t on our list of immediate things to do.  However with docking and the amount of it we have done this spring and fall, they would be nice to have.  In the past we have been cautious of the boats around us as we enter and leave docking.  And if there are some close by, I start to hyperventilate thinking about accidentally hitting one.  In the spring we had a couple of tricky times with the wind blowing us off the dock and struggling to attach lines.  So at the boat show, David spoke with all the bow thruster vendors and came back with info for consideration.  However one vendor kept calling him and offering a bit of a better deal.  He was a smaller vendor and not exactly who David wanted to go with.  After some discussion we decided, if they could meet our time crunch and price we would do it.  He called the vendor he liked, a larger vendor that travels to do the work onsite and got them to match the price of the vendor that kept calling him and they could do it in our time frame, so we have some new holes in our boat.  The 2 man team from Florida Bow thrusters, showed up at noon on a Monday, just as our boat was being hauled out of the water and power washed by the Marina.  They started early afternoon and were finished installing by Wednesday mid day.

The boat did not go back into the water until Thursday morn.  At that time, david tried out the thrusters to find that they kept blowing their breaker.  We called the company and they had another team out to us on Friday to fix the problem.  It took them awhile, everything appeared fine, but the breaker would blow.  They replaced the joy stick on the fly bridge and it worked, so they think there was a problem with that joystick.  We were impressed with the quick service from the company.

What is a bow thruster? It pushes the bow, or front of the boat side to side.  We can control the stern or back of the boat fairly well with the two engines, but the bow is a little hard to control, especially if we do not have any forward motion, and even then, with wind it can get difficult, so with docking in tight quarters, the thrusters will come in very useful.  We have used the thrusters only twice and they have been nice.

Since the boat was out of the water, I took the kids and Kylynn to stay at my brothers house—they sure are great to house us so often and let us invade their home and time.  David stayed on the boat to finish prepping the electrical panel for its new charger, inverter and mega battery.