On Saturday, May 24, the three of us flew to San Diego. The flight was uneventful. We got a great shot of the Lake Worth Inlet and the southern portion of Lake Worth from the plane.
On Saturday, May 31, after an incredibly busy week, Eric flew back to Palm Beach so he could take Kosmos into the boat yard and oversee the work being done. Christi and Keith opted to stay in San Diego until Kosmos was back in the water. Here was twilight in Palm Beach.
Eric spent Sunday getting Kosmos ready to be worked on. One of the things he was anxious about was untying from the pylons. We’d had neighbors who had tried to leave and simply could not get one of the lines disconnected. A marina staff member had to assist, and after a difficult struggle, the three of them managed to free the boat. We did not want the same thing to happen to Kosmos. Eric spent a fair amount of time retying the lines to ensure a quick release.
On Monday, Johnny arrived at about 0730 to help Eric take Kosmos into Seminole boat yard. They untied at 0745. Fortunately, a neighbor helped, so neither of them had to get off the boat. The current was strong and was pushing Kosmos backwards towards the concrete dock. Kosmos got a little too close to the dock for comfort, but fortunately, she didn’t hit anything.
On this map, Seminole Boat Yard is in the upper left corner, marked by a small blue dot. Ignore the big blue dot for now; that location comes into the story later.
While there was a channel from Havn leading north under the Blue Heron Blvd. bridge, it wasn’t deep enough for Kosmos. Eric had to navigate south to the Lake Worth inlet and go around to the west side of Peanut Island to get under the bridge. The west side of the channel had a boatyard and marina for large boats. The channel was very narrow and felt constrained; it was unbelievable that those large boats could get in and out of there via this tiny channel.
Looking back at the Blue Heron Blvd bridge.
The view of Singer Island from the ICW wasn’t much different than from the road: a line of towers with homes/small condos/small shopping centers around them.
The mainland side was more eclectic. While downtown West Palm Beach was mostly towers, north of it, the towers were few and far between. There were a lot of low-rise condo complexes, quite a few private homes (most with their own private dock), some other commercial developments, and several marinas.
This was where the ICW split off from Lake Worth.
After the ICW split, there were two draw bridges that they had to go through. They waited about 10-minutes and station kept until the first bridge opened.
The boat yard staff was waiting for Kosmos. The boat lift was empty, so Eric could pull right in. At this point, it was supposed to be slack tide, but the current was still stronger than expected. The current made pulling into the lift a bit challenging. He can’t imagine how much tougher it would have been at the peak current.
The yard lifted Kosmos up just enough that they were able to climb off the bow of the boat. Once they were off, Kosmos was pulled the rest of the way out of the water.
They power washed and used a scraper tool on the bottom to remove all of the growth.
Once she was done being washed, she was moved to a spot and situated. Part of “situated” was putting down protective covering to help keep the boat clean as workers came aboard.
Steve picked up Eric and Johnny and took them back to Havn so they could retrieve their cars. Eric immediately went back to the yard and had a meeting with the staff to discuss what to work on in which order. Eric wanted to begin with replacing the port side fuel hose, which we’d recently noticed had begun leaking ever so slightly during fuel-ups. He spent a long time emptying out the engine room and lazarette so that the workers could access the hose.
Seminole boat yard does not allow people to stay on their boats while it is on the hard, so once the work day was over, Eric checked into a nearby hotel.