I’m in Canada now eh! So I for sure had to go up on the roof and hoist the courtesy flag when we crossed the border……… eh!…….. yeah, for sure!
Here’s a prettier shot (ie without me!)
As you can plainly see; the water & the weather & the view is “aight” 
We were scheduled to leave a week ago, but there have been some problems with vendors/workers getting the boat ready, and yesterday Portland had “record setting” winds. (45 knots!) so for one reason or another we haven’t been able to get going & everybody is getting anxious.
It was opening day in Portland, and every minute we waited, more and more boats and boaters showed up. It was a little unnerving having an audience watching your every move moving a large boat for the very first time.
We were using thrusters in the fairway, but as soon as we got into the river things got interesting real-quick! We had no rudder, and the current started to spin us toward shore. It didn’t help that there was a Coast Guard Aux boat ANCHORED right in the middle of the channel watching the boat parade.
After a bit of futzing (and a LOT of thruster action!) we regained control, likely an air bubble in the hydraulics.
We negotiated a path through this and then turned and headed downriver:
So there we are, a 100 ton 3 story tall 68′ steel trawler, in a channel, travelling downriver with a 4 knot current, approaching a drawbridge, and some yahoo off to our starboard (right) decides to make a 90 degree left turn right in front of us!
As we were preparing to take evasive action they finally thought better of the maneuver and came to a full stop, but then as we passed the woman at the helm flipped us the bird. That’s some primo opening day etiquette right there 
I gotta give them props for having the best boat name ever: “knot logical” Yeah, no shit.
We only made it 10 miles to the boat yard today, but it’s 10 miles closer to Alaska baby! It feels good to at least be making a little progress. The next few days are sposed to be nice, and hopefully we can finish off some of these projects and get goin!
I’ve been given a tremendous opportunity to help run a yacht this summer on a cruise up to Alaska aboard the 68′ Malokai Straight Expedition Trawler: Nu Explorer
So I’ve been a bit remiss in updating this blog, mostly because I have not done any updates to Oceana herself. I put her on the hard in Seattle, quit my job @ West Marine Tacoma yesterday, today I leased my building (at least I think I did! and drove down to Portland.
This will be my new home for the next several months:
It’s going to be a tough few months: I’m going to have to learn how to use the Satellite TV, Phone and Internet, and somehow figure out to get around on a RIB with only 50 horsepower, and worst of all; in order to navigate I have to reach across not one but two seventeen inch Simrad displays! It’s really far! I’m sure your first reaction is to feel badly for me, but fear not! I will muddle through somehow!:)
I mean really! Just look at this mess! I already feel right at home!
So anyway, stay tuned… It should be interesting to cruise on a boat that is the exact opposite of Oceana. In fact today as I was exploring the boat, it occurred to me that nearly every single component of this little ship: leather captain’s seat, steering wheel, FLIR camera, Dinghy, heck… even each door probably cost more than my entire boat! It may completely ruin me:)
Today I did a little bit of poking around the boat.
My truck is way out of fuel, so I used the transfer pump to ‘transfer’ about 7 gallons to a can to my van 
Hey, I figured I ought to get it out of the boat anyway… right?
next up I decided to tackle the head thru-hulls. Anybody know what happens when you combine dissimilar metals with salt water?
They were BEYOND stubborn. Heat, bang, cool, torque and grunt and repeat. Eventually I got them all off, at which point I started to wonder if a boat built in 1938 in Holland might not have metric threads on the thru hulls.
I also disconnected one of the two macerator pumps. (why two??) and a 1′ x 1.5″ hose full of three year old black water leapt out and jumped all over me. Hey… anybody know why they call it ‘black’ water?
Since the boat is out of the water, I decided I better finish up the power inlet project that I started a month ago and welded a couple weeks back.
The old inlet was a bit rusty, and positioned too high, so the smartplug hinge hit the lip at the top.
I didn’t get too far before the batteries died. Note to self: I have a steel boat now, I probably need a monster 1/2″ drill
I had to wait about an hour for a battery to charge enough to finish the job, at which time it was raining pretty hard, so I just sprayed the cut steel with wd 40 and left it til morning. Looks pretty fancy-schmancy though
The next day; I cleaned it with acetone and then applied a couple coats of rustlok primer. I applied Tef-Gel to the threads, and a little bit of butyl tape around the bolt holes.
I did decide to cheap out a little bit and use a small houshold extension cord to make a simple adapter. It didn’t seem to make much sense to run a 30 amp cable to a 20 amp plug. Eventually I’ll buy a proper cord, but for now, hey it’s even color matched
Well Damn,
I didn’t want to buy a boat, much less an old boat, much less a steel boat, much less a ‘project’ boat, much, much, much less an old steel project boat! When I found Oceana, I looked at it as a parts purchase more than anything. I never surveyed the hull, cuz what would be the point? from the start I was pretty sure there would be a fatal flaw that I could not deal with.
As a rule, I know right from wrong, good from bad. I almost always identify the best course of action, and then do the ‘other.’ Purchasing Oceana was no different. I mean I didn’t want a boat at all, I know they are a hit to the finances, and mine were RREALLLYY stretched already. I know that you need to have a place to put the boat, before you buy it, instead I struggled finding a slip after the fact. Frikken EVERYBODY knows you don’t go buying a 73 year old steel boat unless you REALLY know what you are doing, and I don’t know a damned thing about steel boats. At the very least you really should haul and survey a boat prior to buying it, but instead I paid six month’s slip fees and then hauled it, and then only reluctantly.
See, I was pretty sure I’d find a fatal flaw under there and have to scrap the boat. And I like this boat… I didn’t really want to know. I wanted to have our short time together to be fun, before she succumbed to the cancer that we all know she has eventually gets her. But now it’s even worse; I’d prepared myself for parting ways with her, but when I hauled her out, she is AMAZING. I mean really, really good! Now I have to keep her, and fix her up, and… Damn.
Anyhow, here’s some pix: When I got to the marina, the guys were busy making it all come together.
We had some time restrictions due to the tides, and so the first problem was that some asshat decided to park his truck on the launch ramp.
The have some brutal rush-hour traffic round here:
Here’s the awsome trailer they used to pluck Oceana from the water
Also; I decided that I really don’t like driving a full keel sailboat with a single prop and wicked prop-walk… in “river” rivers. Just FYI.;)
Chad got to work pressure washing the hull.
Damn! That was a lot of work to end up with exactly what I had before!. 
Oh Well, hopefully it will stop leaking, and it’s nice knowing it’s done ‘sorta’ right, but I won’t take bets on how long my crappy welds last before they rust out!
Steel is sure cool though! I still don’t really have a clue what I’m doing, and the repairs look way better than anything I’ve EVER done in fiberglass, and should be pretty damned strong too. Oh, and WAY cheaper as well :
I did have to spend a bit of time cleaning all the shavings off the boat, and I had to scrub it with some oxolic acid to get rid of the rust stains. But aside from that, it’s nice :)
Ever had that dream where go to work and you don’t have pants? It happened to me yesterday. :)
I’d planned on staying on the boat the next couple of days, and so naturally I forgot to bring any jeans when I went to work yesterday, and I figured that grinding and welding in my work clothes might be a bad idea.
Driving all the way back to the house would have cost me about $15 in gas, so instead I decided to just go to sportco and buy some new work jeans. It is bizzare to wear brand new jeans to get totally grungy though.
I had a productive day today, I figured out the noise in the engine was a loose belt, and tightened that up, and then changed the oil. As I was doing that it began to rain, and as I was waiting for the oil pump thingy to do its magic I noticed that the main port above the reefer was leaking. Well, I mean I ‘re’ noticed it.
This was a pretty low priority project since the PO had already fit a new stainless port, but I decided to pull the port and see if I could figure out why it was leaking.
The leak was simply a matter of not enough butyl tape. But When I got in there I saw another of these crazy fixit repairs: The PO had ground out the rust, then sandwiched a hunk of stainless with epoxy and then a screw through the whole thing. These repairs drive me sorta mental. Well, I mean more than my normal batshit level of mental so I decided to rip the thing out. I had lots of other more important things to acomplish, but welding seemed like more fun!!!
