Our beloved Sea Dog 1, Ginger, was diagnosed with cancer of the heart and liver today. She was a great friend, traveling companion and some times helped take care of family. When Julie had cancer, she was there with her taking care of her. When my brother had eye surgery, she was there with him until he healed. She lived a full life and was with us for 12 wonderful years. Our son, Charlie, grew up with her though she didn't totally trust him because he did something to her when she was little?

Julie and I went to the pet hospital this morning to tell her good bye and let her know we were with her now that she needs comfort. We will miss her, but know that she is in a better place now.

 

After our aborted trip to the US, we fixed the stabilizers and went back to Texas the next day so we would be home for Thanksgiving.  We spent Thanksgiving in Port Aransas, drove back to Austin and then the ranch so we could see the new longhorns and zebra for a day before driving to Fairhope, Alabama.  We needed to check out a marina that we could leave Just Believe for Christmas and link up with my brother Tony who was travelling with us to bring JB back.

 

 

We left Mobile last Wednesday at 6am, heading back to Grand Cayman to bring Just Believe back to the good ole USA. Since we had a weather window that might change from acceptable to not acceptable towards the last days of the transit, we decided to try to clear out of the island and get out of the North Sound before dark.

 

 

We left the Barcadere marina at 5pm Island time and exited the sound just as the sun was setting. Once out, we settled into a watch routine of 4 hours on and 8 hours off with Julie having the hours of 6-10:00 am and 10 - 6 am off so she could sleep as normal as possible. The first 24 hours the waves were 6-9 feet with an occasional 10 footer hitting us. We had 15 to 20 knot winds on our starboard beam at about 60 degrees.

 

The second day was a little better with waves between 5-7 feet. The wind continued the same until we passed the western tip of Cuba and headed directly to Mobile Bay.

 

 

Day three the waves increased to 6-9 feet and early in the night of the third da,y we had a wave that rolled us over 35 degrees to port causing a heel alarm on the stabilizers. Julie was on watch and woke me up.   I quickly reset the system to get the stabilizers working again. I also set the stabilizers to support a max beam sea and things settled down again for a while. Throughout the night, we had several large waves that rolled us over to port but then settled down again.

 

Friday, during Tony’s day shift a large container carrier, Maersk Iowa, which is 900 feet or so long and running 22 knots hailed us and asked our intentions. I told them that our intentions were to maintain speed and course since we had the right of way. Then they came back and said that our CPA was zero, which I knew -- but all they had to do was change course a few degrees to the left to pass behind us! They wouldn’t accept this and suggested that we turn right into the waves and pass them port to port -- which was nut!. I told them that we would slow dow,n so they could pass across our bow since they weren’t going to change course or speed. When you go to school they teach the rules of the road and test you accordingly. When you are at sea the biggest ship wins.  They are  trying to make money these days will not accept lost time or resources!

 

The Maersk Iowa crossing our bow!

 

Day four brought another day of 6-9 feet waves and winds from 15-28 knots. During Julie’s morning watch, a tug called her that was 10 miles North of us heading due West and told her he was towing cables that were 5 miles long with some floating and some under the water. He asked that we maintain at least 7 miles from him. He was to the East of us at the time so we turned to the right and plotted a course that would honor his wishes. I am really glad that these guys work with you because there’s no way you would know to stay away without them calling and telling you!

 

During my watch I looked up an email that another Nordhavn owner sent us when we were in Alaska and he had a heel alarm and read what he learned from the TRAC folks he called. Once you get the alarm the system shifts to safe mode where the stabilizers only work partially and you have to reprogram the system with a pass word to overcome the limited capability. Since that was over 3 years ago and since we were in the middle of the Gulf, I decided not to reprogram the system and wait until we were in port to mess with reprogramming.

Keep everything low so there's less room to fly.

A freeloading Flying Fish

 

Tony on watch doing his job.

 

On Sunday night after spending many hours at 4.8 knots, we increased speed to ensure that we would arrive in Mobile on Monday. There was another cold front coming and I wanted to make sure we were snug in the marina on Monday. Our onboard weather system was great to help us keep track of weather and sea state changes as we traveled the 809 miles across the gulf. At approximately 8 pm  (Julie was once again on watch),  we were hit by a very large rogue wave that hit the starboard side of the pilothouse soundind like we had hit another boat. Very loud noise and a significant roll to port. By now everything that was going to fly around the boat had already been airborne including the chairs in the salon,  so the clanging and rattling didn’t bother us much.  Monday morning, while getting all the lines and fenders out and in place, Julie discovers that the two large coolers that we had secured in the cockpit and the large USA flag that proudly flys from the stern of JB were MIA.  JB's cockpit had flooded during the rouge wave the coolers and fly are now floating south of Alabama in the Gulf.

 

 Around midnight the ship traffic increased significantly and we had to navigate our way into the Mobile Fairway so that we didn’t get run over by the ships coming South as we waited for the faster faster ships to pass us heading North at 15 knots. Once in the fairway things calmed down and we had several hours of nice calm 8 knot running. After the fairway, we needed to enter the Mobile ship channel with a large number of ships at anchor and others moving into and exiting the channel. I had originally planned to arrive at the entrance at daylight, but because we had increased speed we were about 2 hours early so we entered the ship channel about 4 am and headed for the Eastern Shore Marine marina. We arrived at the entrance to the marina at 9:40 am and approached it from the center of the channel and ran aground about 100 yards from the marina. We put both engines in reverse and increased speed until we broke free and moved to the right hand side of the entrance and made it into the marina. The slip that we had reserved ended up being too narrow for us as well as too shallow for our bow. We did pull in and tied up after taking down the first piling on the port side of the slip. It was rotten any way but I still felt bad. The marina manager told me that he was concerned that the cold front that was on it’s way would damage his dock since the boat was a lot bigger than he had expected. I had reminded him that when we reserved the slip we told him that JB was a 60 ton boat with an 18 foot beam and needed at least a 59 foot slip.  SO -- we had just tied up after a pretty rough trip and he wanted us to move. I told him I was going to have a large drink, get lunch and then take a nap. He didn’t have a place for us to move to any way until he moved a boat out of his most sheltered slip. The slip was under a 35 foot roo,f so now we have  to lower our VHF antennas to get into it.

 

Where we left JB

 

Early Tuesday morning Julie and I lowered and tied down the VHF antennas and prepared to move as the winds from the West began to pick up. We moved the boat with 4 guys on the dock to help us get into it without hitting the top. The bow of the boat was in the mud as we backed out of the slip to move in a wind that was going to be blowing against the port side of the boat. We got into the slip and between all of us we got her tied up nice and tight. This was good because last night the storm hit and we had gale force winds blowing against the port side of the boat. We both slept like babies! This morning we packed the truck in the rain and after breakfast with my brother and his wife Linda departed for Austin.

 

We have a lot of work to do while in Alabama since we have been out of the country for the last 14 months and have started on the long list.

 

This morning when we left

 

 This trip is another testament to the quality of the Nordhavn trawler. None of us were ever worried about our safety, though I would not let anyone outside of the boat. I only went out to reset the SPOT satellite tracker until the last day when things calmed down.

 

We will now firm up our schedule for the next few months, get all of the work done that we need done while in Alabama, and probably head for Florida mid-February.

 

Happy Holidays to all from  Just Believe and the Wade Crew (Jim, Julie and Tony)

Well we are now heading for Mobile Alabama. We drove there last Monday and found a slip for the boat and then flew to Grand Cayman today, cleared out and are on our way. We decided to bypass New Orleans since our aborted attempt last week. We are currently in some pretty good seas and have 15-25 knot winds on our starboard beam. We are making 6-6.4 knots over the ground. Expect to be in Mobile by Monday. Jim
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This is mostly technical stuff:

We left Grand Cayman early on the 17th and were hoping for a good trip to New Orleans. When we were about 4 hours out from the North Sound where the marina was, our stabilizers stopped working. At the time we were taking 5-7 foot waves on the starboard beam and the stabilizers were working hard and doing their job until the control panel blanked out and the stabilizers quit working. We called the boat builder (Dave Harlow) and he called the TRAC folks that built the stabilizer system. They told me that we should be able to turn off the stabilizers and keep going. I decided to keep going since we were well on our way and that ended up being a bad decision. As we continued on the trip the temperature on the stabilizer reservoir and the hydraulic pumps continued to get hotter and hotter. I called the boat builder back when the reservoir temperature reached 225 degrees. I actually talked to 2 different TRAC engineers as well as the Nordhavn program manager. They all told me to cool the system down somehow so I hung a fan off the halon seafire system that was blowing on the oil reservoir to cool it. The reservoir has a sight gage on it that has a plastic top and bottom and it would melt at some point and dump really hot oil all over the engine room. When I was hanging the fan I measured the temperature on the seafire system and it was 180 degrees. The seafire system will deploy at 185 degrees and this would have shut down all of the engines including the generator and things would have gotten a lot worse. The only way to truly solve the overheating problem when this happens is to pull the hydraulic pumps off the back of both engines and put the plates that are provided with the boat on the back of the engine PTO. Of course, we didn't have the plates onboard and have never seen them so that was not possibel.

We had a couple of options; one was to continue to Cancun and find a marina, another was to return to Grand Cayman. Personally, I am tired of being in Mexico and at least the folks on Cayman speak english and have a lot of capabilities to work on boats including a UPS shipping system that works. So we turned around and slowed down to 4.7 knots, opened the engine room door so we had air conditioning entering through the door and I started measuring the temperature every hour to made sure that the reservoir and pumps never reached 200 degrees again. It took us 17 hours to get back to the Barcadere marina. All the way back we had 5-7 foot seas on our port bow with an occasional 10 footer. We were rolling up to 35 degrees and anything that wasn't tied down was moving or breaking.

I called the Barcadere marina and told then we were limping back in and could they get customs to clear us back in at the marina. They arranged this and were standing by to help us tie up when we finally got back. 

The white tank on the right is the reservoir for the stabilizer oil and the red bottle on the left is the seafire fire extinguisher system.

The 2 black hydraulic hoses in this picture run into the stabilizer heat exchangers outboard of each engine. The coolant hoses that provide cooling to the heat exchanger come up from under the engines and are glued with black crap the Chinese used to seal the fittings. Working on these are next to impossible!

Once we were back in the marina we all took showers had a few drinks, went out for a quick dinner and went to bed. We were totally exhausted.

The next morning Doug and I started taking all the coolant system apart starting with the stabalizer heat exchangers. We disconnected the input side of the exchanger and I rodded it out with a stainless rod I bought that fits the core holes. Then we propped them up and poured vinegar into the heat exchangers and left it for over night. Since these weren't a problem we then took apart the transmission heat exchanger and rodded them both out but again there wasn't any big issue with them.

Stabilizer heat exchanger

Transmission and Engine Heat Exchanger

Since we hadn't found any problems we started taking all of the hoses off on both engines and found some blockage in the output port of both transmission exchangers.

These are the 2 pipes that were partially plugged with salt, we cleaned them out and put everything back together this morning.

The boys at work!

This afternoon we received the new control panel for the stabilizers and installed the new panel. After we installed the new panel we fired up each engine one at a time and the system worked and then ran both engines to heat up the system. Everything worked fine. I believe that the control panel caused all of the pain but will not know for sure until we come back to Grand Cayman next week and I will re-install the old panel and test the system to prove that the panel caused the issue.

The TRAC panel that caused the problem is at the bottom of the picture and the new fully functional panel is above mounted in the console.

Our new plan is to by-pass New Orleans now and head straight to Mobile Bay. We have Glenn Trumbower looking at the weather and will decide based on weather when we will come back to bring Just Believe back to the USA.

Tomorrow we head back to Texas for Thanksgiving with the family.

Jim & Julie

We have really enjoyed our stay in Grand Cayman Island and for the last several days have had Julie's brother and sister-in-law onboard. As soon as we can we will get underway today for New Orleans. This will be a 5-day 890 mile trip and should be interesting. Thanks to Glenn Trumbower (again) for helping us with a weather window and recommendation - which basically is "leave early". So we need to clear out of the island, get 400 gallons of very expensive fuel, navigate the North Sound and head directly for the western side of Cuba (33 hrs) where we will turn to a direct path to New Orleans.

Our good friend, Doug Reed, arrived last night and will be a part of the crew for this trip.

These guys mow the grass here at the marina

Julie and Beth on our fishing trip

Trahy reeling in a cuda

Last Evening

See you in New Orleans!

Love,

Julie and Jim

We spent the day cleaning the inside and outside of the boat. Tomorrow Beth and Trahy Hurst arrive for a few days to play and enjoy the island.

Friday night, we had dinner at the Wharf restaurant and we were seated next to theTarpon feeding station. As the evening progressed more and more tarpons (4-5' in length) gatheedr for the feeding at 9pm. Pretty cool and all of the kids there have to come see the fish. There were 4 wedding receptions there and a lot of beautiful and happy people.

We are all set to leave this Thursday as long as we get a green light from the weather guru's (come on Glenn and Bob!). Right now it looks pretty rough, but it is supposed to get better by Thursday. The problem is that we need 5 days to get to the Orleans Marina (on Lake Pontchartrain) that is 890 miles from here and a lot can happen in 5 days. Another Nordhavn owner, Jerry Reynolds on New Frontier, talked me through the route into Lake Ponchatrain and the marina. Really nice to have all those other owners out there to help you out. We will get a weather report Tuesday from Omni Bob and from our friend Glenn Trumbower, hopefully on Monday and on.Glenn made a lot of our family happy by keeping them up to date on where we were and what the weather was like on our trip from Panama to here.  The route takes us around the western tip of Cuba where I was careful to make sure we are 13 miles off their coast. Our crew, Doug Reed, will take off from his very busy job and help us get the boat to New Orleans. He arrives on Wednesday if the weather is a go. I have pumped fuel aft to the point where we will only need to take on 400 gallons of fuel at the outrageous price of $5.75 a gallon. We will fill up on the way out so that we can get duty free fuel.

Yesterday we were downtown taking in all the pirate activities since this is the biggest event of the year and they celebrate for the whole week. The pirates come ashore and attack the island where there are a few gallant forces to fight them off. The whole town was full of pirates and there was a parade that we missed since we left (and it was over an hour late getting started) and got back to the boat in time for a fireworks display.

 

Another job I had was to check the TV dish for the model number so we can get US Direct TV when we get back to the states. Of couse the model number of the dish wasn't on the dish, so it was a waste of time.

This afternoon we colored Julie's hair. I am getting pretty good at this and can always use it as a new career if we need it. The father of the manager of the marina drove by and told me that I got him in trouble and he was going to have to do his wifes hair from now on. I should have just told her to come on down!

A few boat statistics-we have traveled 11,848 miles, and have 1740 hours on each engine. We have burned 10,262 gallons of fuel not including the generator since commissioning.

 

Jim & Julie

 

We have been on the island now for close to a week and are really enjoying it. We have gone to the beach, drove around the island (did I tell you that they drive on the other side of the road), went on a submarine trip, went out on a snorkeling trip today - AND played with the stingray!! (more on that later). We have visited a number of the resturants here and had some very good meals. One of the best was at the Lighthouse on the South side of the island (an actual old lighthouse).

Boatwise we have changed the oil in the generator, cleaned the strainers, checked the pencil zincs and cleaned both of the holding tank sensors so that they will read correctly. We are polishing fuel now and will need to put another 400 gallons of fuel onboard before we leave. You can buy duty free fuel, but have to buy it after clearing out of the Islands. So we will clear out, take on fuel and leave for New Orleans hopefully on the night of the 17th. The price of diesel here is $5.75 a gallon. The rebate is 70 cents a gallon. We have started to check the weather for our departure and it is pretty nasty out there now with waves as high as 14 feet. (Julie says "no way" if that is the case next week!)  We will have been information on Monday and will start our final planning at that time.

Our laz hatch motor switch broke and we took the piston off the mount for now. I looked all over the island but they do not have a DPDT 3 position switch here. We have asked PAE to get one for us and believe that Dave Harlow is bringing one back from China for us. I will also look for one when we get back to the states. Our direct TV stopped working when we got to the marina. Turns out that the Puerto Rica Direct TV satellite does not cover this area of the Caribbean. I also believe that our starboard lugger battery is on it's way out, so we will need to have it load tested when we get back to the states.

We went down on the dock next to us last Sunday to see what they were catching. Looks like Dorado, Wahoo and a blonde? 

And then we went to hell!

Mama Chicken at hell, the little devils...

The lighthouse restaurant

Submarine trip, after spending close to 5 years on a nuclear submarine, you would think I wouldn't be interested in this!

Swimming with the stingrays, yes we did it.

Female Stingray, every kiss is good luck for 7 years.

Trahy and Beth (Julie's Bro and Sis-in law) will be arriving next Monday and we are scheduling up some fun things to do with them while they are here. Then Doug Reed, from Austin, will be here on Wednesday night to help crew back to the states. Today I found another Nordhavn owner that has spent time in New Orleans during the holidays last year.  I will be talking to him in the morning about the ways in and out of Lake Pontchartrain. 

Jim and Julie

Barcadere Marina, Grand Cayman Island

We had a great trip North to the Islands. The first 3 days the weather was pretty darn nice, the last day was really choppy - but okay (Julie may not agree).

 On day 2 a US Navy Warship pulled up within a mile of us and hailed us on the radio as we were passing a Columbian Island on the port side. They asked a lot of questions about the boat. The captain filled out the necessary forms and moved on. The ship had grayed out their name and number of the ship and were not flying a US flag as far as I could tell. They were on patrol looking for drug runners and I am glad they are there. I picked them up on radar many miles away from us with no AIS and watched them until I could see that they were a warship. I don't think that there's any other country in this part of the world that could afford the fuel this ship burns. It felt good to talk to the Navy and I told them to "have a fine Navy day". I often think (and dream) of my Navy Submarine days and have few regrets for serving in the Navy. It was a great experience and I learned that I could truly do anything while serving. I don't know how I could have gained the experience any other way.

US Warship on patrol

 

We made excellent time on the trip and actually slowed down several times, because we were going to arrive in the middle of the night. We had arranged with the marina to clear customs there, but when we called the port security office they told us to come to Georgetown for the clear-in process.  We made another night time entry into a strange place and dropped anchor about 3am just North of the customs dock per the port security direction. There were 3 very large cruise ships coming in at daybreak and they had customs priority.

One of 3 Cruise ships that came in at daylight

At daybreak, a harbor security boat came by and told us to get the anchor up and that we could clear in at the marina. They also said that we could get fined for anchoring out?? I knew this was possible from reading all the cruise guide info, but felt safe with the port security direction. Bottom line is don't anchor here unless you know you are in sand!

We raised anchor and took off for the North sound to make our way through the coral to the Barcadere marina at LOW tide because the security boat told us it was deep enough. We entered the channel and followed the suggested waypoints as best as one could. Several times we only had .4 feet of water under our hull!! The wind was blowing at 15-18 knots, but our auto pilot tracked right down the route and we never touched bottom.

 

When we arrived at the marina we were surprised to see that we had to actually travel through the whole marina and pull in behind a huge catamaran. This was a challenging spot to get into, but I just used the twins and manuevered into the spot with Colin and Julie both telling me where to go. The marina manager told me that we were lucky to get in here at low tide with the high winds.

They drive on the other side of the road here!

 

The slip we are in is great, because the wind blows us up to the dock and the boat never really moves. We took the tender off today so we can play while we are here. I don't see us moving this boat except to pump out and to fuel up on the way out to New Orleans.

George Town

Garbage Barge

Pirates week starts next week

There are Chickens Everywhere here!

We have a weather window and will depart Panama at 5pm today. Glenn Trumbower (USN Retired) says that we should leave today based on his weather analysis and we are ready. (A special thank you to Glenn for his weather analysis and providing us with reports to use over the next 4.5 days)  We installed the storm windows on the starboard side of the salon, loaded the gotta have satphone numbers into the sat phone, and checked out of the marina.

We went into town this morning and got last minute supplies.  This meant we had to cross the locks when the ships are out of the way. Going we waitied for 10 minutes, returnning we waited for 45 minutes. Our taxi from Colon was interesting. We were on our way back when the driver took a detour to get fuel and we drove several miles out of the way. He had to leave the car running when fueling because it wouldn't start if he shut it off. As we were driving, the trunk lid poped up when we hit a bump. All the taxi drivers here must have their music on full blast or they can't seem to function?

I took some pictures of the marina area and they are below;

Julie wanted to go paddle boarding here and I talked her out of it.  This was our neighor around dinner time last night.

 

Other Nordhavns here.

The way out to the open ocean.

 

The trip will take from 3.5 to 4.5 days depending on sea conditions. The trip is a 608 miles and our route is as below.

Talk to you on the other side! Our spot tracker is already on.

Jim, Julie and Colin

I thought I would recap the canal transit using both the pictures we took as well as the picture that was taken in Texas for us.

Departure from Flamenco marina: we were up at 5am and had everything ready when the line handlers showed up at around 6:15. We already had the 125 foot 7/8 inch lines on board to use in the locks. We left the marina and moved to buoy 6 to wait for the pilot (actually he is an advisor, pilots are required for the big ships and advisors are in training). We were monitoring channels 12 and 16 on our radios. The canal authority uses channel 12. At 7:45 our advisor, Freddie, was dropped off by a pilot boat. we were told that we were 29C (29Charlie).  We found this interesting since our son's bday is the 29th and his name is Charlie (Hopefully a good omen!) We would be following a huge car carrier called 29A and that we had to wait for the carrier to raise anchor and enter the channel. 

Our pilot "Freddie" coming onboard

Car Carrier "Heroic Leader" that we were to follow into the Miraflores Lock

Going under the "Bridge of Americas"

Miraflores Locks: We would follow her to the locks and once she was in the lock, we would maneuver in behind her and tie up to a large tug that would ride the lock wall and keep us tight to her. There are actually 3 ways to go through the locks; 1. Center chamber where the line handlers hold the boat in the center of the lock as the water is flooded or drained,  2. Sidewall where the boat is held next to the lock wall as the water is flooded or drained, and 3. Tied alongside an ACP tug to keep the boat off the wall. At Miraflores lock we were tied up next to an ACP tug. The only issues we had in this lock was the current as we were entering the lock kept pushing us around so you had to speed up to keep the boat straight. As the lock was flooded there was no issue. After the lock was flooded, the gates were opened and the large car carrier in front of us nailed us with her prop wash that pushed Just Believe into the tug. There was no damage as we had fenders out all along the starboard side of the boat. The line handlers were really good at moving the fenders as required to keep the boat safe. The second lock was much easier to get into and the pilot made sure that we were tied up tighter to the tug and he told the ship in front of us not to use their prop until they were out of the lock. This made everything a lot better for us. After we left the second lock the car carrier, Heroic Leader, left us and went to a dockage to the left of the channel.

JB entering first Miraflores Lock

Rafting to Tug so she can scrape the side wall and protect us

Heading into the second lock at Miraflores

Miraflores Cheering section

The third lock is the Pedro Miguel lock and we were going to be the only boat in the lock. We went into the lock with no trouble and did a center lock tie up with Just Believe in the center of the lock with 4 lines holding us to the sides of the lock. Our line handlers tightened the lines as water was flooded into the lock. At one point the boat was turning to starboard in the flood but the bow thruster helped the line handlers get her back straight. We exited the lock with no problems and headed out to cross the Gatun lake. The locks raised us up 84 feet so we could enter the man-made lake.

Center ChamberPedro Miguel lock

Gatun Lake: The lake is approximately 20 miles long and we wanted to do better than 8 knots to see if we could make it through the canal in 1 day, but that wasn’t to be. We would have had to be one of the first in - which we weren't.  We were told on the way that we were going to stay overnight and would tie up to a mooring very close to the Atlantic locks. You can just imagine all the large ships that were passing heading this way. As we were passing a large ship that was being pushed by a tug, the tugs prop wash caused a really bad roll on Just Believe and everything that wasn’t tied down went flying. No breakage just a mess, this time. (The Admiral was fixing lunch for all our crew in the galley and everything went flying!  Thank goodness the lids on all the pickles, etc. hadn't been removed yet!)   It took us a little over 3 hours to get to the mooring and a huge rain storm chased us all the way across the lake. There was one lightning strike that scared us all as it was just to the starboard of our boat. We arrived and tied up to the mooring and in a few minutes a pilot boat came by to pick up Freddie to take him to shore, so he could catch a bus home.  We were told then that we would not get a new pilot until the next day at 1:30 pm.

Mooring where we spent the night  on Gatun lake

Getting ready for the BYU game on the Canal

Line Handlers having chow in lake Gatun

Gatun Locks: We called the traffic control folks at noon and they told us that the pilot wouldn’t be at our boat until 2:30pm which was depressing. The pilot showed up at 1:30 and told us he was trying to get us through early. After leaving the mooring and heading for the locks, we were told that we were going to be delayed until a large car carrier got to the lock. We had to wait for the ship for an hour and 20 minutes. This time on the Atlantic side of the canal, we would be in front of the ship.  We maneuvered into the lock and tied up to a very large tug. To empty this lock, you have to pump out 26 million gallons of water. Once the lock was down to the right level, the pilot told me to back away from the tug and stay in the center of the lock. The lines on the tug were not released as they should have been and the tug had to wait several minutes before it could move. When it did move they were moving all out where the prop wash pushed us against the right hand side of the lock. We were using the thrusters to keep us off the wall when the stern thruster stopped working.  We had to use both of our engines to keep the boat off the wall. There was smoke coming out of the exhaust as I forced us off the wall. Electric thrusters will over heat when used too much in a short period of time and will automatically do a thermal shut down. This usually happens when you most need them!  A lot of Nordhavns have hydraulic thrusters thatl stay on and not shut down on you.  We opted for the electric thrusters for Just Believe. Also, our able line handlers were on the ready with fenders to protect the boat even if we had hit the wall. In the second lock the stern thruster had cooled enough to work again and the tug was instructed to move slower to keep from causing us problems. The third lock went as well or better and once the lock was drained we took off into the Caribbean for the first time in Just Believe. JB was feeling good and making 9.7 knots as we headed for the flats outside the locks.

Our new lockmate "Century Highway 2" 

On the wall waiting for the tug

 

Free at Last "the Caribbean"

Shelter Bay: We dropped off the pilot on a pilot boat and then headed for the marina at Shelter Bay. We called the marina several times on the radio, but they never answered so we pulled into the marina and took the best spot they had for our boat. We had dinner and got back to watch the TCU game on ESPN.

Dropping off our second pilot "Ivan" 

Lessons Learned: The pilots and tug operators do not understand trawlers and are used to dealing with huge ships that are pulled along the locks with 4-6 train engines. They are always in a hurry, because time here is truly money. Some of these ships pay as much as $300k to transit, we paid $900.  We are not their priority. Nordhavn owners need to discuss this with the pilots and quickly become good friends with the tug drivers so they will not force you into problems like the ones we had. Our twin engines were invaluable in keeping us off the wall when the thruster shut down. I would never do this without using an agent and I would never do this without canal experienced line handlers that understand the pilots need and directions. The large round fenders that we had were great for the transit. Our standard fenders would not have worked for this trip. I believe that the best transit mode for our type of boat is a center chamber where you don’t have to deal with a tug and be locked down if the ship is ahead of you and hits you with prop wash. You may have to wait for a while to go through, but yor boat will be safer. Sailboats need to really fender up all the way around to protect the boat.

Get BIG fenders!

 

Just Believe flying the TCU flag in the Gatun locks-Go Frogs!

Next Trip: We changed the oil Saturday, cleaned the strainers as required and will install the storm covers for the salon windows on the starboard side of the boat since if we have really large waves they will most likely come from the east. We received a weather report that will cause us to hold here at least until this next Tuesday. 

Picture from a sail boat friend of ours that watched us come through;

 And this came from Texas