The big news of the week is that the boat showed up on Wednesday December 28th. I had exchanged texts with Gary, the driver who brought the boat from Michigan. He left Michigan on Wednesday the 21st but stopped in Indiana almost immediately to wait out the weather. He left Indiana on Christmas Day and reports that he missed most of the bad weather between Michigan and Seattle.
Honestly the timing was perfect. CSR Marine, the boatyard in Seattle, was closed from noon on the Friday before Christmas until the Tuesday after Christmas, so I was in no rush to get the boat into Seattle. They are super busy anyhow, so not much was going to happen last week.
My top priority was getting the boat out of Port Salinac as fast as possible—mostly to get the thing wrapped and on a truck before the snow came, but also because every minute that the boat was in Michigan created a new opportunity for the service department there to charge me more money.
Gary had figured that he would arrive at CSR Marine around 8, so I picked up my friend Jeff around 7:25 AM and figured we would be there in time to see the boat come off the truck. As it happened, Gary got there a bit early and I got a bit lost in the weird roads around the Ballard Bridge, so we missed the offload.
The good news is that Gary shot a video for me that you can see here.
The other good news is that the wrap on the boat held up well despite everyone telling me that it would blow off as soon as the trailer got about 60 MPH and that it wasn’t worth doing. I am really glad I pushed for it. As I noted earlier, I had seen many boats at the local Cobalt dealer arrive with wrap intact and as I learned this is mostly a function of using the right wrap and having the right installer. Paul did a fantastic job of wrapping the boat and it was 100% in place when the boat arrived.
CSR offered to let Jeff and me take the wrap off. Honestly, I think they were a little busy, but it was kind of fun to get to unwrap the boat like the present it was. One of the things I love about CSR is that let you have access to your boat and to do little things in their yard.
We started by cutting a little space for me to crawl into and I started cutting from below. The wrap was both taped at the bottom and shrink wrapped around the top so it was quite a project to get it all off.
Since Jeff is quite a bit taller than I am, he had the somewhat harder job of pealing the tape off on the side of the hull from the ground, while I mostly slashed the film off around the stanchions, the pushpit and the pulpit.
The hull of the boat is in really great shape as reported, which was why I spent $2000 wrapping it and I am glad I did.
We were also super lucky to have 90 minutes of relatively rain free time to get the process done, which was honestly more work than I expected, and more than Jeff signed up for when I said, “hey wanna come down and see my new boat?”
My sense is that it will be 3-4 weeks to get big projects done by CSR. Top things they will do include:
- Stepping the mast
- Dealing with the water in the rudder
- Adding shore power and a second battery (I want a house battery, so I don’t get stuck on the lake without an engine)
- Fixing a few minor dings in the gelcoat
- Painting the bottom
- Installing a rocking stereo (more about that later)
- Installing a stack pack (more on that later as well)
I was considering an under the hull auto pilot, but apparently that would require some structural modification to the connection between the rudder and the tiller which would likely impact the integrity of the whole system. For now I am going to use the tiller pusher-type autopilot that is already on the boat.
Overall, very exciting.
SV Twenty Questions 
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