The last couple days have been pretty crazy. The owner of Winnisquam Marine and one of his top techs made a 3000 journey from their home in New Hampshire to Seattle. We spent Thursday working on final delivery stuff and launched. We spent Friday going through all the systems.
For those of you who may or may not know Seattle very well, I have had a slip identified on lake union - right in downtown Seattle. When the boat shipped to Genmar, I partnered with another local ship (Regal dealer, ironically) to take delivery of my boat and provide storage and launch services for me about 40 miles south of Seattle in Tacoma, Washington. Genmar delivered the boat before Christmas (note my other relevant thread).
Over the last 2 weeks, I've been in a chaotic position of orchestrating all the stuff involved with "delivering" my new boat. Oh - and we also had to replace the starboard outdrive due to some cosmetic damage done during shipping. I had to chase down 3 interstate batteries that FW provided coupons for, get the boat opened up from shrink wrap and get it cleaned up, and start getting all the stuff a cruiser needs.
On wed evening, Ed (owner of Winnisquam Marine) and one of his top techs flew into Seattle. They have been staying at la casa de CougarCruiser for the last couple days. after a few hours of short sleep - we were down a the boat by 8:30am. We installed batteries, replaced the outdrive, did a full diagnostics check/fluids check, dry bump start, and visual inspestion of everything possible. Had a quick lunch at 12:45 and started the launch process.
Here is the boat when we pulled it out of the work bay:
I had a 2:30 launch time at a local marina, so we pulled out around 1:30 to make our way to the marina.
There's nothing like the look of your classical slurpee sales guy from the Simpsons when I walk him and tell him "we're going to run pumps 5 and 2, and I'm going to need you to remove the $100 limits on those machines." 168 gallons and god knows how much $ later, the tanks were filled.
Here's a couple pictures from slinging the boat in. It's now 2:30pm
All Night Long is officially wet!
We warmed up the engines and checked fuel valves, looked for leaks, and got the EVC readouts configured to show engine diagnostics. We pulled away from the dock at 3pm and had about 2 hours of daylight to make it 36 miles to the ballard locks in Seattle which allowed us to get from Puget Sound (salt water) to Lake Union (fresh water). We knew we'd be running out of light quick
There were tugboats, ferry's, and a 2008 Vista 318 on the water. That's it.
Getting into the locks in Ballard. Yes, it was after dark at this point. We had to fight a huge debris field which set us back a ton of time of cruising. We were the only boat going through the small locks - which was awesome.
Leaving the locks and getting into downtown Seattle.
