Service for Europa

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity – how did we have time to work? We’ve spent time with our grand-baby, Mac, completed chores and projects around the house (and begun a few new ones), planned a trip to Florida in January, and basically begun settling into retirement.

One of the things we scheduled for fall is servicing the boat. This took a bit of coordinating. Nick took her up to Des Moines on Saturday (first time single-handing!) and spent that night on board in order to meet our mechanic first thing Sunday morning. Tim was there bright and early to service the Volvo Penta D4 engine. All went well and Tim had no bad news to report – everything looked good – which is what you want to hear from your boat mechanic! He is amazing – easy to work with, and extremely knowledgeable. Several people have asked us why we don’t just change the oil ourselves. Well, because Tim has his expert eyes on everything as he completes this type of full engine service. He always goes above and beyond to check and report on other things that don’t necessarily fall into typical engine service. So, when he says, “everything looks good,” we trust him. We always have other questions, and Tim is extra helpful regardless of the topic. (Thanks, Tim, for the Garmin help and the clue about the thruster remote switch!)

I picked Nick up in Des Moines Sunday, and then he drove up again on Monday for the next steps in this whole process. We had scheduled some work with the Ranger Tugs guys to replace our engine starter battery (we deduced it was bad this summer after always having to parallel to start after two nights on the hook), as well as continued research and repair of our ongoing leak. Don and Ivan removed and re-caulked the forward port side roof hatch. They are pretty sure this will do the trick. Famous last words…but, we do think they got it this time.

After that work was completed, CSR Marine hauled Europa out of the water. This was another first for us. I say “us” but I wasn’t there. Nick said it was little nerve-wracking to get the boat into the sling, but all went well. Above photos show the haul out process and the hull and transom areas.

Apart from the mussels/seaweed/muck growing on the running gear, which we new about, the hull and gear look really good! No dents, dings, cracks, or anything else that could have happened over the past two years. And really, pretty clean given she’s been in the salt water this whole time. Nick came on home, turning the boat over to CSR for scraping and power washing.

Today is the day for Nick and Steve Z. to do their part of this service and cleaning. While the boat remains in the CSR yard, they will replace the zincs, finish cleaning running gear – if necessary, work on a couple of small rusty areas, and importantly…use Steve’s power buffer to work on the hull.

I asked for more photos so I can see how today’s work progresses – I’ll share those soon.