FORT LAUDERDALE, FL USA
I got up Tuesday and just like any other day in Ft. Lauderdale (or anywhere else for that matter) and was ready for another hectic day. I feel like my journal entries are starting to get a bit repetitive. "Today I got up and got to work." "Another busy day." Well I guess I am working a full time, and then some, job. The owner and I both got up on the wrong side of the bed and there was a bit of tension all day. I had one worker after another coming on board and all I wanted to do was to keep everyone organized and on task. The day went by so slow and by the end of it, I needed time off of the boat. I had to get away for awhile. All of you Monday through Friday workers get the weekend to get away from your boss...I don't. Not at five o'clock, not at seven o'clock, not for breakfast, not even for lunch or dinner, not on Saturday and not on Sunday. Seven days a week 24 hours a day I am assumed to be ready to work. My "on-call" schedule for all you doctors out there...24/7 regardless. Am I complaining? No. Maybe a little but not really. I have seen so much and get to do so many cool things it is worth it at the end of the day. Even more so when people text me and say it is one degree in Chicago and its 70 here...and thats cold for us!
All in all we got a ton of stuff done on the boat Tuesday, everyone needed to go take a breather and relax.
Wednesday I got up ready for a sea trial for our auto pilot. The owner and I were the first ones up and both knew that the day before couldn't happen again. We both sat down and had a great conversation. Its not that there was any bickering at all the day before, we both just knew that there was tension in the air. The conversation lasted five minutes and that was it...everyone was happy again. In the end nothing was wrong. There was a little bit of miscommunication on motives from the day before and it felt so good to sit down, spit everything out on the table to each other, hold nothing back, shake hands and get right back to work. The rest of the day ran so smoothly...well almost.
Our sea trial was as good as a sea trial can get. The auto pilot is so spot on now that I think it may even be able to dock the boat on its own. (I'm only kidding). We came back to the dock and as we were spinning the boat in the fairway to line up the slip WHACK!!!! Something hit, and it hit hard. We got the boat in the slip and talked about it. The water was plenty deep and being that there are much bigger yachts in the slips all around us we ruled out a grounding. I grabbed my mask and fins and jumped in to the nasty brown water. Everything looked kind of O.K. but not perfect. A bracket that holds our spurs in place around the shaft busted and sheared a decent sized bolt right off. We still don't know what we hit.
Go figure...fix one thing and bam another thing breaks. Welcome to yachting.
The rest of the day went great. We are on schedule to receive our new fly bridge hatch from the machine shop, one of the pilot house wing doors is in the machine shop for the new hardware and the other right behind it. I used a dremel and some sandpaper to make our sliding tracks perfect. We replaced all of the rollers for the doors and put in new felt weather tracks. I even got around to giving the bow a freshwater rinse down.
I'm hoping to go visit my grandparents here for a few days, and I think it is going to be possible. It will be the time away from the boat that I needed on Tuesday, but after that talk I don't need the time off so much as it will simply be nice to see my grandparents.
Sound Waves Out
No comments:
Post a Comment