Monday May 8th to Wednesday May 10th in Dana Point – We handed over our final payment and they handed us the keys! Yay! But not quite time to celebrate yet — we had additional business to take care of. Our insurance required us to be certified by a captain before we could operate the boat on our own. This meant being tested on our new boat, and not passing would be bad.

Thing is, waiting over two years to get this boat means lots of time to study and learn about it. So when we went through pages and pages of checklists the captain figured out pretty quick that we had been doing our homework. Then we did a short sea trial with various maneuvers and docking. Kosmos is even easier to handle than our last boat, so this all went over without any problems. We passed the test.

Our last boat had a single propeller, which is harder to maneuver than twin propellers that many boats have. This was good practice for Kosmos which also has single propeller. But Kosmos also has a bow thruster. What is a bow thruster you ask? We like to call it the “cheating”, as in “cheat left” or “cheat right”. Let us explain: A bow thruster is a small propeller mounted at the front of the boat. It has a controller lever next to the steering wheel you can move left or right. As you may guess when you move it left or right the front of the boat moves left or right. So if you are off by a little bit on a turn for docking you tap the bow thruster to move the boat exactly where you want. It really feels like cheating after all those years without one.

We brought two car loads of stuff. Kosmos easily absorbed everything, and there is still tons of storage left over. It really felt like our boat once we were able to get a few of our things aboard. We spent the night on the boat each day, and it was every bit as comfortable as our house.

We went over various checklists, labeled things, tried various systems, and double checked things.

We wanted to be sure everything was right, because on Thursday the plan is to make a trip to the island of Catalina, about 35 miles away.