Unfortunately, if you are making a living delivering boats you need to be ready to go with little notice. On top of that, you have to be ready to go when the weather is not ideal and head in the direction that is the least comfortable. It is no mystery then that some brokerages only refer captains to the deliveries that their staff would never touch. I don’t think I’ve had an uneventful delivery referral from (a certain brokerage that will be unnamed) in the past 15 years they’ve been passing on my number. This delivery at least was a short one and I’m less nieve than I used to be so I hired a very skilled hand to help. Rick of the Salty Boys to the rescue again.
We arrive at the boat to find the house bank and start bank was dead. After turning on the generator and charging the batteries we ran into members of the yacht club that were familiar with the charging issue on the dock that the “as is where is” boat had been left. Big boats like this require big power and the little marina was just not equipped to accommodate it. Once the batteries charged we had to figure out why the starboard engine wouldn’t start. After jiggling wires to see if we had a loose terminal we became acquainted with a concerning amount of both deferred maintenance and hack job wiring. Cut wires were hanging down from the engine room ceiling and auto part store battery chargers and jumper cables were strung about with tools and parts everywhere. The owner who was joining had mobility issues so he had never been in the engine room. He was also technologically challenged so he had only sent the last and first pages of the survey to me with his camera phone prior so this and the fact that the boat “cant stay here” all presented frustrating pressure to get the boat that we were now seeing was barely seaworthy off the dock ASAP. After an hour of wire chasing we jumped the relay on the starter and the big Cummins came to life.
Unfortunately, this was not soon enough to allow us to dock the boat in its new berth in Bremerton in the daylight and the owner who was joining us did not remember where the slip he had been assigned was.
After some jockeying in a very tight marina and talking with Rick with my headphones as comms, we squeezed the boat in between two very rickety wood fingers in Suldan Marina.
Fortunately for the owner, the boat is close to the Salty Boys headquarters and the boat is already being cleaned up and fixed as I write this 4 days later.