We arrived back “home” in Opua late afternoon April 9, with the boat scheduled to get splashed the morning of April 11. That gave me a day to do all the “little things” on my standing list for when the boat is out of the water, as well as for Cindy and I to load all our “stuff” aboard that returned with us from Austin, and the “stuff” that went with us land touring. We also did a quick check of our “repaired” stbd motor to confirm that we had both Port and Stbd motors available for maneuvering. Late afternoon the Bluefix Boatworks staff came on-board for a whirlwind clean-up. The next morning when we arrived they were back at it, and the boat trailer was in place loading us up. As the boat pulled out of the shed, the water hoses came on for a quick wash down top to bottom. Because of the tight quarters the boat was backed the entire way to the boat ramp - no small feat! The launch went just the way you want it - no issues. FullCircle looks so much better in the water - where it belongs!

A quick check of the bilges showed that the water was where it was supposed to be - outside the boat. Before leaving the dock, there were several things I wanted to do. First I wanted to do the dock side test on the repaired motor, and I wanted to make sure the genset was operational. Our first “oops” occurred when I tried to run the genset without opening the fuel supply and return line. In my defense, I had never closed these valves before when we laid up the boat - but I must have this time! Apparently when the genset runs out of fuel the speed slows down to the point where the oil pressure falls and then the system turns off giving an oil pressure fault. I confirmed that we had oil and no leaks. I turned to the folks at SeaPower for help and as we talked through things I realized that while I had confirmed that the raw water valves were open, I had never checked the fuel lines! After bleeding air out of the fuel lines we did finally get the genset running again. I won’t do that again (at least not any time soon). The next oops came when we ran the repaired stbd motor up at the dock. What we found was that the two motors that comprise the one big motor were not working together - one was doing most all of the work. A quick check of the motor controllers showed that they were not set up the same, but we had been told that they were correct as sent from the vendor. After conferring with the System Integrator, we confirmed that both were suppose to be set the same (which they weren’t).

We were able to get off the dock at the launch ramp and over to our assigned berth on one of the new docks and get all settled in. This was a good thing because out to the NE Cyclone Cook was on its way to visit NZ. The rains arrived that night after Cindy had gone to bed. The good news is that in Opua, we only saw two days of rain, and no strong winds. The storm made landfall in the Coromandel Peninsula, well south of us, with 70kt winds and far more rain than what we saw. The only real bad news for us was that we missed our originally scheduled day to stand the mast. All in all things went very well thanks to the hard work from our good friends at BlueFix Boatworks! As they say, timing is everything and we got the boat back in the water the one day in the week when it didn’t rain.