Hauled Out

Does everyone feel a little anxious when their boat is going to be hauled out? Boats are meant for water, not land, right? 

Part of the commissioning process involves a haulout for several procedures which I will touch on below.

Okay this is the weirdest thing ever. I have watched plenty of boats being hauled out. It's different when it is your boat!

Looks like the stabilizer fins hold quite a bit of water.

It's kinda like parking cars. But there's a little more at stake.

Speaking of the stabilizers, here Jeff Owen of Yacht Systems NW gets ready to mount the kelp cutters. 

The props are being removed, to be sent to Seattle firm Kreuger, for balancing and anti-fouling treatment. 

Look at the size of the threads on this SeaTorque shaft. 

Jeff Fitzge of True Phase. Jeff is an incredible engineer, and his company specializes in vibration/rotation analysis. Anything that rotates, Jeff uses his test equipment to make sure it is perfectly aligned and everything is up to spec. And he does more than that. He almost has a sixth sense about everything mechanical. (I almost got that "beam of light" right on him, didn't I?) He travels with $60,000 of test equipment. 

He just became the West Coast service center for SeaTorque. Jeff can find things wrong with new boats that would not appear for a couple of years. And then would be mega-expensive to rectify. 

It says a lot about Hampton Yacht Group that they hire him to go over every build, verifying and correcting what the factory has turned out. He also visits the Shanghai factory regularly to help the Chinese technicians there build a better boat with each build. 

Today I asked him how long he would be there with Mahalo. "As long as it takes to everything under my control to be perfect."  When I left the boat he was removing the trash compactor in the lazarette so he could check the torque on shaft strut bolts.

​Gotta love that.