Recap of Kosmos’s Two Weeks in Seminole Boat Yard, Palm Beach Gardens, Floria, USA

Seminole Boatyard was responsible for hauling us out, pressure washing/scraping the bottom, and giving Kosmos a space to be worked on with power and water. For the actual work, we’d hired a company called Yacht Tech, who specializes in Nordhavns. Yesterday, when we’d said that Eric had met with “the staff,” we’d meant Yacht Tech.

The primary purpose for hauling out was to get new bottom paint. Usually, they’ll do spot sanding where needed and, wherever the paint is fine, will simply put another coat over the existing coats. But it was time to sand off all of the old paint and start fresh. The sanding took a couple of days. They waited to paint the bottom until the rest of the work on the hull had been completed, so the paint didn’t get done until the second week.

It was also time to balance the propellor. The propellor was removed and taken to a machine shop for balancing. One of the blades was off balance and had to be adjusted. It took four days before the propellor was put back on.

Propellor removed

We’d requested that Kosmos’s hull be compounded (old wax removed) and waxed. In yesterday’s post, we’d failed to mention that as soon as she was situated in her spot, they’d started working on the compounding/waxing along the waterline. We decided to go with compounding this time because, being out of the water, they had leverage that they simply cannot get when the boat is in the water (and normally the boat is in the water during waxing).

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Hauling Out in Seminole Boat Yard, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida USA

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.

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Welcome to Palm Beach Shores/Singer Island, Florida, USA

Sun just about to poke over the horizon on Monday, May 19

As we were doing our morning chores, Eric noticed that the water quality being produced by our water maker was not good. He was worried that something in the dirty water here had damaged the membrane, so he shut off the water maker. He also didn’t want to try using the DC water maker, for fear that the same thing would happen to the DC unit. The reality was that it wasn’t viable to stay in an anchorage long without being able to make water, so Eric immediately started trying to find a slip in a marina. 

Eric checked marina pricing and availability online. It looked like the best deal was at a marina named Havn. We felt like that was meant to be. He made an online reservation, then did some calculations. Due to the shallowness of the channels and the difficulty docking in the strong current, we needed to get there at high slack tide. We also needed to be cognizant that the bridge only opened at 15 after and 45 after. He determined that we needed to pull up anchor at 1230 to make the bridge opening at 1245 and then make it to the marina at high slack tide. 

Since we had some time to kill, we went to shore and had lunch at a burger place called Lindburgers. It was good and relatively quick.

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Exploring West Palm Beach, Florida, USA

Sunrise on Friday, May 16

The 2/3 moon was bright in the sky even after dawn.

As part of morning chores, Eric ran the water maker. As suspected, the water was dirty. We’re probably going to go through a lot of filters here. After we finished schoolwork and chores, we headed back to shore for lunch. We noticed that a Nordhavn 57 had anchored near us.

We went to a Mexican restaurant called Rivales, which was a short walk from the French bakery that we’d had breakfast at yesterday. The decor felt more like a modern art museum than a traditional Mexican restaurant. The food was good.

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Welcome to West Palm Beach, Florida, USA

Thursday, May 15, continued… We traveled south down the channel, taking in the scenery as the sun rose. The barrier island between us and the ocean was the infamous Palm Beach. Palm Beach was the first tourist destination in Florida, with three fancy hotels that catered to high end guests. As it blossomed into a city, it became known for wealthy and powerful inhabitants, including former President Kennedy and current President Trump. Initially, we passed mostly lower buildings that looked like houses, though we did eventually pass a cluster of larger buildings (though no hi-rises) that looked like they may be hotels.

The mainland side was West Palm Beach, which, in the early days, was purpose built by one of the hotel owners to be a blue-collar area where the hotel staffers lived. Nowadays, it’s also an expensive zip code. It had a lot of high rise towers with an assortment of other types of structures in between, as well as several marinas.

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