Hurry up and wait….. (a perspective from the first mate)

First mate log entry 3:  1-April-2014

  

Our timeline looked a little something like this.  Wal would go to France a week earlier with his mom and supervise the boat commissioning before I arrived.  I would arrive on Friday the 28^th of March, our shipment of goods from Norway on Monday and we would be leaving the harbor by April first.  I was picturing a vessel complete with all our equipment and installations, provisions, and smiling faces to welcome me with a glass of champagne to our new buoyant apartment.  All I had to do was slather on a bit of sunscreen and start relaxing....not a chance!  

Delays from the factory meant that we were now over a week behind schedule and so the commissioning could not even start until April 2^nd .  For those of you who aren’t familiar with what goes into commissioning a boat, its not like a car where you are handed the keys and drive off the lot.  To prepare the boat for blue water cruising (sailing in greater than 250 nm from shore) we had the following work to either do ourselves or assist in supervising a crew of French boat mechanics.

• Install VHF antennae, test, enter mmsi into VHF
• Install navigation system complete with wireless network connection to our PC’s and tablets
• Install radar, link to navigation system
• Install extra batteries
• Install new gypsy on the windlass for our special 7mm anchor chain
• Mark and load 100 meters of anchor chain into the storage locker
• Attach a 40kg anchor and hoist it onto the boat
• Set up a gennekar
• Install a desalinator (water maker) and test
• Boat graphics
• Install wind and weather guagues and link to navigation system
• Fold and store a Jordan drogue (35 kg sea anchor)
• Install attachment points for the drogue.
• Install a rope electric generator
• Install long range WIFI
• Inflate dinghy, attach outboard motor, load onto the boat
• Load secondary anchor and anchor chain into the anchor locker
• Install depth guage
• Install solar panels
• Calibrate instruments
• Clear shipment from Norway through customs and supervise delivery
• Unpack and organize all your items and catalog their location on the boat
• Test all systems

In France, the working hours are not as we are used to in America.  The French arrive at work at 9AM, have their 30 minutes of coffee, croissant and realistically start working between 930 and 10AM.  2 hours at noon everything shuts down until 2PM for lunch.  The day is over at 6PM.  This doesn’t leave much room for inefficiencies in a busy 6 hour work day.  These sort of complex boat installations didn’t happen overnight leaving us to do much of the work ourselves.  And like any big project, unless the owner/investor does enough research into how things should be done and work properly there is even more room for mistakes and delays.  Thankfully Walbert has been a devoted project manager and has not missed a step along the way.  He has done an extraordinary amount of research into this project which has already served us tremendously.  Given the delays and pace of work, we will have almost 3 weeks of commissioning.  Our biggest problem was our own hurried timeline and the expectations that went with it.  Time to start getting comfortable being stuck in port.