Our First Trip on the Sea Eagle happened over the Cinco de Mayo weekend. We flew down to San Francisco on Thursday and met our good friend Jeff Carr on the boat, then went bow to stern, opening every cabinet and drawer to see what was where. During the inventory process, we found and added many items to our list of “repairs”. After dinner, Jeff headed for San Jose and we spent a restless night on board.
On Friday morning, first light, the black water holding tank backed up (this was only the 2nd flush of a toilet). A quick bit of troubleshooting determined the tank was completely full (100+ gallons). We spent the rest of the morning buying tools, marine supplies, etc., for the boat and then Scott changed the transmission oil (which was cooked) and replaced the leaking transmission filter.
We called in a pumping service to empty the holding tank and it took them almost 2 hours to pump all of the sh*t out of the boat. Add one more item to the list of repairs! All the (new to us) Navigation systems were fired up and afte much “head scratching” we figured we’d be able to semi-navigate without falling back to the laptop or Ipad.
Jeff Carr and Ela Schmidt braved the waters of Sausalito Yacht Harbor
Saturday morning, Jeff Carr returned with Ela and after some breakfast, we fired up the Sea Eagle, dropped the lines and headed out into San Francisco Bay for her maiden voyage! The calm conditions made departure and threading the needle of the breakwater very easy for Captain Boyd’s first time at the wheel (actually a jog lever on the Sea Eagle). We headed for the back side of Angle Island and dropped the hook in 50′ of water to mark the anchor chain. Red, white and blue chain markers were inserted into the chain at 50, 100, 150 and 200′ before recovering the anchor and heading off to play tourist at Alcatraz.
The wind picked up considerably as we approached Alcatraz (37 knots) and the girls were getting a little green around the gills. When we turned to head for the Golden Gate Bridge, we had a water coming over the bow and the VHF was busy with emergency calls to the USCG from disabled sailboats in the Bay. It was QUITE the first voyage for the crew, but the Sea Eagle is a veteran, with 17777 miles under her keel already and handled everything with a “ho hum”.
Back at the dock and Captain Boyd made a perfect landing in a very narrow slip (no room for bulky fenders). One of our boat neighbors came over to congratulate us on getting such a large boat in the small slip during such a windy day. They were floored when Scott remarked that it was his first time driving the boat and his first time driving a single screw vessel. You can bet there will be some serious dock bashing in Sea Eagle’s future! 😉
Safe and Sound at the dock, the crew celebrated the Sea Eagles safe Maiden voyage (for a minute) and then donned dive gear to install the prop zinc and clean the keel coolers. It was quite a successful day and we hope there are many more like it!
The fog begins to roll over the hills of Sausalito.
