Month: April 2016

Pura Vida got lots done to her at Cable Marine, It felt great to get back out on the water after being docked for so long.  The bridges on the New River don’t open for boats until 9AM so when I left at 7:30 i had the river to myself.  The bridges on the river are 18′ at mean high water with an extra 4′ at the center.  Pura Vida sits at 18′ tall so i could squeeze under all these bridges without needing a open.  My cruise this day took me from the South Fork of the New River to the ICW, I headed north once I hit the ICW and went through Pompano Beach, Deerfield Beach, Boca Raton, Delray Beach, Boynton Beach, Lake Worth and finally Palm Beach.  After I hit the ICW I had 20 bridges to go under, I only needed 8 to open for me offshoreblue.com is a great website for reading about the bridge times and heights.

Here is a picture of my new helm chair by Arrigoni Design

I arrived safely at Palm Beach Yacht Club just north of the Flagler bridge at 3:30 just in time for slack tide so docking was flawless and my friends from Sea Bird a Viking SportFish came over to give me a hand.  The Yacht Club is very nice and in a great location,  Sunfest is going on this weekend in West Palm so I was lucky to get a spot at the Club

Below is a 2016 Hatteras GT 70 brand new still belongs to the factory its called Hattitude has a 21′ beam 2 x 2600-hp MTUs and is a nice battle wagon.  I didn’t get many pictures yesterday, running solo is tricky to get to do everything you want.  You have to pay a lot of attention inside the narrow ICW with the million dollar +++ homes on each side and lots of boat traffic its fun but you have to pay attention.

Being out at night on your boat is really nice, you can see the stars so clearly and making crossings  in open water at night is very peaceful.  One item I was lacking to make night travel safer and easier was a remote spotlight.  The most popular brand is ACR and thats why i went with this one.  Voyager Marine Electronics in Ft. Lauderdale has been great to work with, Dave and Rick both took great care to see what I requested of them was done correctly.  I changed out one of my GPS’s to a more modern c140 that works with my E90,  once rick got into my flybridge wiring he saw a lot of wiring problems so he straightened up all the wires in there and got everything hooked up, this took a couple days but was well worth it and important to have done.  The ACR  spotlight control pad is mounted close and out of the way and will really be great for locating aids to navigation at night.  Cable marine had to make the mounting wedge so the spotlight could be mounted flush to my slanted brow.  As soon as my flybridge enclosure is finished and my new bench seat is installed ill be on my way again, I know this has been a long layover in Ft. Lauderdale

Dave made me a mounting block out of solid teak, after he got the angels correct he sealed it with West System epoxy and sent to the painter so they could match it to the boat

Doing the mounting wedge in solid white might have looked funny so Dave had the painters Richard and Brandon from Yacht Styles incorporate my black stripe into the piece for a clean factory look, hard to believe it started from a solid piece of teak

Sheri from Cable Marine sanded and revarnished my faded name boards.  On the exterior of a boat having wood is a lot of work  I am happy that i have very few wood things on the outside of mine, although wood looks great sanding and varnishing is a never ending process you have to keep up with

This is a discharge pump Cable Marine also installed for me, it allows me to empty my holding tank while offshore where its legal to do so.  not the coolest thing to talk about but for live aboard boaters its very nice to have

Pura Vida has two turbocharged 3208T Caterpillar Marine engines, these engines use raw water to cool a radiator called a “heat exchanger” in the marine world.  Every 5 or so years on a salt water boat you need to service the raw water components, my engines power twin disk transmissions that have a gear oil cooler that uses raw water to cool the transmission fluid.  My gear oil coolers were showing signs of age and a little water seepage around the sensors I knew it was time to re stack them.  Cable Marine removed these gave them a acid bath, inspected them and rebuilt them with new gaskets and reinstalled on my transmissions.  You can see the housing in the photos below, its thick brass and the cooling bundles are aluminum with brass fittings.  the brass housing has zincs at both ends that help protect the metals, the way we counteract galvanic corrosion is to add a third metal into the circuit, one that is quicker than the other two to give up its electrons. This piece of metal is called a sacrificial anode, and most often it is zinc. In fact, most boaters refer to sacrificial anodes simply as zincs.

Anything metal on the boat that is in contact with the salt water has  Zinc installed, like propeller shafts, trim tabs, rudders, and engine cooling components

old zinc vs. new

Gear Oil Coolers reinstalled