The first day on the boat, after the previous owner left, I did nothing but declutter. I threw away everything left behind that didn’t have a purpose. I knew nothing about maintenance, but I knew that cleaning up the boat would make me (and the boat) feel better.
We paid the previous owner a little extra just for his time, so he could show us how to use and maintain the boat; not to mention all of the weird quirks we needed to know about it. Well he had a lot on his plate, and not enough time to tackle everything after his spur of the moment trip to the Dominican Republic.
So, after his return, he told us that he’d be leaving in a couple days instead of staying the next couple months like we agreed. To top this all off, each day we attempted to meet with him to go over the boat, he was busy. We thought we had covered all bases that would ever leave us in a situation where we would own a massive boat and know nothing about it, but despite our best effort, that is exactly the situation we ended up in.
When I say I knew nothing, I literally knew nothing. I was scared of touching any switches on the control panel, because all I could envision was explosions and sinking.
Each visit, I took it upon myself to learn something new. Learning how to flush the toilet, turn on the water, and turn the AC on were just some of my monumental discoveries during my first few days on the boat. That was also when I discovered that the aft air conditioning was no longer working. I asked the previous owner about it, and he said “The inlet needed to be cleaned. Go 3 boats down and ask Mike to show you how to do it.”
So the search for Mike began, I was told to look for a loud mouth guy sitting in his hammock, smoking a cigar. Well after a day with no luck I called an AC tech out. Craig from VIP Marine Services spent hours going over a lot of the systems with me. He was so full of knowledge that he couldn’t get it all out fast enough. So the day started with one working AC, and two inoperable AC units. Well it ended with three working AC’s, and the best part is we were told by the previous owner that the middle AC would need to be replaced. Well it turns out it only needed to be recharged.
As you can tell, our first few days of taking possession were fun, but we have barely scratched the surface.
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