While we were away the Xquisite Service Manager did a great job keeping us up to date on the progress of the various items we had left for him to address. I think he was able to get to all but one thing addressed that was sort of a wish list item anyway... The boat needed new bottom paint and I was hoping that that they might be able to strip the old stuff off and apply Copper Coat. Unfortunately they did not have time to take that item on... Oh well maybe we can find a yard to do it this winter when we haul the boat. Unfortunately he also identified another item he did not have time to fix as the item would need to be sent over to Fort Lauderdale for repairs. It seemed our generator was not passing power to our batteries and would not provide AC to the boat. This would mean we would have to rely on our wind and solar to power everything we needed while underway. What this meant we really didn't know as we did not get a hand off from the previous owner so really had no clue if the wind and solar could keep up with all the systems on the boat? Guess we will learn soon enough :)
So now that our engines had all new fluids in them, the sail drives had got new seals, our dive compressor was working as well as a bunch of other little items we were hopefully ready to bring the boat back to the US. Our insurance company told us we needed to have the boat north of Cumberland Island, SC before July 1. So that was our mission. I had been watching the weather and it seems like we should have a good weather window for 3-5 days of sailing North West. We were originally thinking of challenging ourselves a bit with our first long passage and going straight to Charleston, SC. This would take us about three days and would be the longest continuous trip we have ever done. It seemed like a big inlet with several large marinas that could accommodate our boat. Unfortunately there were three things we were not very excited about 1. The large tide swings of about 6ft they have while being on a fixed dock. 2. The traffic 3. Turns out it's expensive to stay there and it seemed availability might be an issue if we got stuck there over the 4th of July due to weather or something else. Note we needed to leave the boat somewhere for the month of July most of which we needed to be back home for. So we decided to get even more ambitious and take the boat into the Cape Fear inlet to visit Southport, NC. This trip would take us 4 days and the marina was about 1/3 of the cost. We consulted with Travis our training captain. He confirmed it was a good plan and we had a good weather window.
Next step.. Provisioning... Buying anything in the Bahamas is expensive. We had not purchased much to bring the boat over and much of the food we had was given away before we left the boat for three weeks. The question became what do we really need, what can we cook in our one skillet, and what can we fit in our backpacks to get from the closest store. Luckily Xquisite has some bikes we could borrow which extended our range a bit. We picked up some basics like lunch meat, bread, pasta, some fruit, and even attempted some ice cream bars figuring we only needed to have enough for a week or so should something go wrong or take longer then expected. After a couple of bike rides to the store we were all stocked up and ready. I was even able to get a couple of packs of Goombay Punch and some local rum :)
Before we left I really wanted to get our dinghy working. When we did the survey it was noted the steering was frozen up. When we purchased the boat I had tried playing with the steering cable a bit to lubricate it and validate it was really the problem. The captain that we had in Fort Lauderdale attempted to play with it a bit and ended up breaking the cable so I spent half a day driving around Fort Lauderdale trying to get my hands on what appeared to be the only one in stock in the area. Prior to leaving the boat at the Xquisite center I had started the process of replacing it but didn't have a wire brush or anything to really clean out the channel it goes in within the outboard. So now that we were back I had brought the wire brush I use to clean my shotguns. It worked pretty well now the trick seemed to be how to run the cable under the floor of the dinghy and up to the console. After a full day of all three of us attempting various methods we finally figured it out and got the dumb thing working. Long story short as nice as this dinghy is and as clean as it looks.. it is a PIA to work on. I don't think I would buy the sport version given my experience so far. Not to mention it's really too heavy for the boat. But I'm sure it will be fun to run around with! It was almost dark but Max and I felt like we needed to take it out for a test run. Everything ran great, the lights work, the boat is fast, and seems to have a lot of torque which should allow us to pull a tube or maybe even a wake boarder. I am looking forward to using this boat quite a bit one day but for now we had a working dingy should we not find a dock and need to anchor which would allow us to get into shore somewhere.
When arriving in the Bahamas we only had a window of 12 days to get the boat to a place we could leave it for the month of July and that place needed to be north of Cumberland Island. We really had no idea what kind of weather window we might get or where we might end up or if we would have the confidence to be at sea for multiple nights. One possibility was to simply sail back to Florida and do day sails up the coast hoping we would make it out of the hurricane zone. After spending two days at the Xquisite center it seemed we had our weather window, we had a plan to go straight to Southport, and planned to leave at high tide the next day.
