STUART ( Nordhavn Commissioning Facility)

Knotty Dog

Knotty Dog, is a brand new 57 foot Nordhavn, with two staterooms.  She’s a hardy, strong boat.  She did us well and held up under several beatings along the way.  Considering she was brand spanking new and as with all new boats, there are always a few shake down problems, but she did us well and never gave Larry any problems that he couldn’t fix.  The most serious of problems occurred in Belize when the stabilizers went out.  With the rough seas of the Caribbean, this was a bummer.

I’ve come to the conclusion that you have to almost be a mechanical engineer to run a boat like this.  Without Larry’s amazing quick comprehension and deductive reasoning, we would not have had a smooth trouble free journey as we experienced.  I was never concerned when a problem came up because I had total confidence in his ability to sort and fix the problem.  He was able to take each situation, no matter how complex, figure out what the problem was and then amazingly fix it!  In this day and age, with all the complex electronics, sometimes it’s harder to find the problem than to fix it.

Here is a list of some of the things Larry dealt with as I understand it:

1. Crossing the Sea of Cortez, Larry thought the fuel filters were getting dirty.  He switched to the spare fuel filter by turning the valve.  Apparently the spare fuel filter was installed wrong and it sucked air into the diesel and shut the engines off!  We had to rely on the wing engine while Larry had to bleed the engine to get it running again.  This may seem like a common thing to happen but being a new boat it made for a  tense 20 minutes for all of us.
2. Throughout the trip, we frequently had problems with the chart plotter program.  Sometimes we’d look on our chart and find ourselves crossing the continent of South Africa!  I guess there was a glitch in the software.  Larry would be on the satellite phone or radio email communicating and sorting the glitch out with the mfgr.  Larry was able to somehow down load the new version which fixed that. 
3. Our other software problem (and we still don’t know why it does it), is that the chart screen will go black and we lose it.  Sometimes at sea it doesn’t matter for the few minutes that it takes Larry to get it back but other times when negotiating a tricky area in bad weather IT DOES!  He always keeps his cool and gets things under control.
4. Sometimes the GPS would just lose itself and we would lose positioning without even knowing that it happened.  We had to keep watching to make sure our position was changing as we traveled and if not we would have to switch to the  spare GPS program. 
5. One day at dock in Puerto Vallarta, the ceiling in the salon started to rain.  Apparently the air conditioning water pan was not draining properly.  Larry had to reroute the drainage hose.
6. Also, crossing the Sea of Cortez, the water maker went out!  It was two days before Larry was able to sort the problem out.  The high pressure switch was tripping when there wasn’t high pressure.  Larry had to jumper it out.
7. Waiting to go through the Panama Canal, the stabilizer display panel alarm went off.  The control panel failed.  Larry had to have a new panel Fed Ex’d and installed the new panel. 
8. As we were in the Caribbean, the engine room was heating up.  We clocked the front wall at 130 degrees.  Larry installed a fan which cooled the temperature by 5 degrees.
9. We then noticed a hydraulic leak on the main tank in Bocas so then Larry had to continually add hydraulic oil throughout the rest of the trip.  Fortunately,  Larry had an additional 5 gallons which got us home.
10. We found some seepage in the holding tank.
11. In Ambergris, the stabilizers, flat went out.  Apparently, the brain failed.  Larry would have been able to fix it by having a new brain sent but the hassles of dealing with an expensive part in Belize was not worth it.  We heard several horror stories from a captain next to us and decided it was safer to continue on without.

Nothing major, like the boat sinking or the engine failing,  but these were things that Larry was dealing with on the trip.  Now we were going to get them fixed at the Stuart Boat Yard, and also get the engine tuned and serviced.

We decided to stay on the boat while it was being service.  If you can imagine living in your house while it’s being remodeled, this is similar.  Fortunately, none of the repairs had to be done in the living quarters.  Larry wanted to be on hand to see the repairs, and not to question their work but to be involved.  This boat needs a full understanding of the systems so I thought it was a great idea for him to be there

We also, had the teak stripped and varnished and the boat was cleaned, polished and buffed from head to toe.  The only thing we didn’t get done on the list was to have her hauled out to see the bottom.  As we slightly scraped bottom on a reef in Roatan, and then as I mentioned, went aground north of Miami Beach, we were curious to see the bottom but the Stuart Boat Yard can’t haul out a boat of our size and it would have meant going somewhere else.  By the time the boat was done we were ready to head on up the road and decided we’d do it somewhere else.

There’s a migration that sets in in Florida at this time and I don’t only mean the birds.  A majority of the boaters are all heading north to escape insurance restrictions due to the hurricane weather, and escape the hot humid season.  We felt that urge to.

So Knotty Dog, held up well on this trip.  She got us safely home and we were comfortable the whole trip.  Larry estimates the trip to be about 5000 + miles.  We felt safe with what ever Mother Nature threw us as long as we could keep the engine system in good running order, the charts working, and the people from panicking.  She’s a good safe hardy boat and can really take it.  We’re grateful to her for a wonderful safe adventure.

Now we’re anxious to head north and see the East Coast of the United States.  There is lots to see that’s for sure.  Larry is even talking about going back through the Panama Canal again after we see the east coast!  Anything is possible with this boat.  If we want, we can put her on a freighter and cruise the Med.  Somehow the idea of only 3 months of cruising weather in the Med doesn’t sound as appealing.  We think we’ve got plenty of adventure a head of us here in the US for the summer.

click on  Life on the river Gallery  to view (It will bring you back to this page.)

Knotty Dog was poked and prodded in every crevice.  Everything that needed it, was tightened, repaired, replaced, stripped, cleaned or polished.  There were at least 4-5 people on the boat working and sometimes 10.  It was an amazing site.  It was non stop  for two weeks.

We rented a small red economy car and I think I explored every strip mall in the Stuart area.  There wasn’t a Nordstrom’s nearby but I was happy any way.  I was in heaven with K Mart, Target, Home Depot, etc. There were several Publix’s which is the Floridian counterpart for our Safeway.  Besides strip malls, I’m sorry to say there was nothing much of interest to me in Stuart.

The river, on the other hand, was a source of constant activity and interest.  We’d spend our first cup of coffee in the morning sitting on the fly bridge just watching nature at its best.  Right in our back door was the best nature watching you could hope for.  We had a couple alligators that lived nearby.  One big one regularly came by at dusk while Larry would be BBQ’ing.  There were two babies (about 4 feet long) that we would see watching us from the foliage on the river’s edge.  One day we were lucky enough to see one of them sunning itself on a log.

The river was filled with turtles, big and small.  The water was so murky that it was hard to see anything below the surface but we began to get good at identifying activity by the type of swirls on the water.  The alligators made a serpentine, snakelike image as they swam under the water.  The turtles on the other hand created more circular swirls.  They would only expose their little bald heads to get a peek at what we were doing.  They loved it when we threw bits of bread in the water.  Some would lazily hang out at one spot on the river and as the current went by, so would the bits of bread and they didn’t even have to move to get their snack.  The current just brought the tasty tidbits right by where they were sitting and all they had to do was stretch their little necks and gulp down a tasty morsel.

The rhythm of the river became part of you.  Things came to life as the current went out and the waters became slack.  The muddy under bottom was exposed, (and smelled), but that’s when the herons and ibis came to pick out little bits of things to eat from the muck.  One day we were surprised to see a raccoon on the muddy shore across from us.  He was busy digging around in the mud getting some tasty bites

All throughout Florida we had noticed the signs to protect the manatee but never saw one.  We later learned that they head north in the winter to warmer waters and none were here at this time.  We thought we’d probably cross paths as we headed north and as they headed south.  I almost fell out of the helm’s chair one day as I heard something strong tugging at some green leafy foliage across the river on the bank.  I noticed a huge grey mass in the water and then a large round, soft head surfaced to munch on the green branch.  It was a manatee!  He or she was very shy and kept concealed under the foliage at the river’s edge as it munched on it’s goodies.  After dinner it headed up the river and I could only see the large round boil in the water it left as it swam up the inlet.

It was an amazing place.  At night we would shine our flashlight out into the darkness on the river band and see the red eyes of the local alligator watching us.  It became a part of our daily activity to watch as the tide and current came in and went out.  Life in the river reacted accordingly.  When the current went one way,  the alligator got a free ride in that direction to see what was to eat at that end I suppose.  When the current came back, he took advantage of that.   Some animals, swam when it was slack, as it was easier to go the direction they wanted then, particularly the ducks

One day, we had a huge afternoon squall.  We were just coming back from the store and actually had to sit in the car for quite awhile to let it to pass.  The lighting was loud and bright.  We saw the lighting bolts nearby and I was afraid to get out of the car.  The rains came down in buckets and the winds blew the heck out of everything.  After 30 minutes, it was all over with and everyone just goes about their work again as if nothing ever happened.  This happens about 3:30 every afternoon.

We enjoyed our stay at the Nordhavn boat yard.  The crew was great and worked hard.  They were always very polite and considerate of us staying on the boat. 

Now on to Georgia