- Aug 25, 2008
- 1,819
- Boat Info
- 2006 320 V-Drives 6.2s, Bow Thruster, Generator, Raymarine C80, Radar, Fish Finder
- Engines
- 6.2 Horizons 320HP
Thought I would share my first experience with my new boat.
I have been out of boating for about 8 years, busy with 2 kids (ages 10 and 7) and decided I wanted to get back in. :smt115
I was looking for a late model 32 or 34 sundancer. I looked at a few boats and ultimately found a 2006 320 that was repo'd and was in a marina in Maryland just across the bay from Annapolis. I spent a 2 days inspecting the boat and its systems before negotiating a price, but the boat was on land and I couldn’t test everything. After a few rounds of negotiations with the bank we settled on a price, contingent upon a successful sea trial. I had driven to Maryland 2x earlier to inspect the boat and I wanted to sea-trial the boat, close on it and drive it away the same day. It was a little aggressive, but it was doable.
There were some logistics to work out. :smt119 I needed to find a new marina, leave a car there, get a ride to Maryland, plot my trip and find someone to come back on the boat with me. In the end, my friend John agreed to come with me. John used to own a 300 sundancer and had it for 12 years before selling it.
The trip down and sea trial ..
I met John at his house on Thursday morning around 9:20. 10 minutes later, Larry our driver shows up. I said "Hello Larry, nice to meet you" and shook his hand. We leave John’s house with John driving, Larry riding shotgun and me in the back seat. About 1/2 hour into the trip, Larry starts sneezing, coughing and blowing his nose. John leans out his window and asks him if he is sick. LT mumbles something that sounds like.. "no no.. I'm ahright, I just need some Nyquil... At this point, I realized I just shook his hand a 1/2 hour earlier and there was good chance that I would get sick. :smt013 Great...
We get to the marina around 1:30 and the boat is already in the water. The salesman tells me that the boat runs nice, but the generator is not working. I had called Kohler about the generator earlier in the week for a broken breaker switch and found out it was still under warranty. I told the salesman to take a $1,000 off the price and lets move on. I told John the generator wasn’t working and he responded: "So how am I going to charge my cell phone?" :huh: ( I could see this was going to be a fun trip)
We went for a quick drive and everything checked out. The boat cruises as 26 knots at 4000 RPM's. Nice... :grin:
The fuel tanks were almost empty. The guy showing us the boat said that the current marina's price of fuel was too high. ($4.50 a gallon) He recommended a different marina which was ½ hour away on the way back north. I put $100 of fuel in it went back to the office, signed the paper work and we left Rock Hall Maryland around 4:00 Thursday to try to find the marina which was about 45 minutes away.
The chartplotter…
The boat had a Raymarine C80 chart plotter installed. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the Navionics card so I purchased one from West Marine ($200) before coming down to Maryland. The chart plotter worked fine, until I put the card in. The system would re-boot from time to time. I thought that maybe the wires for the radar were touching and causing the system to re-boot. (The Radome had been removed for shipping and was in the cabin, the wires were exposed up on the radare arch. I pulled the wires down and taped off the power wires in case that was the problem. It didn’t help. The system continued to re-boot from time to time whenever the card was inserted, but worked fine without the card. I figured I had a bad card. So we started the trip with a questionable chart plotter. (Fortunately, I brought paper charts, a second GPS and in a real pinch, I had my PC with with a wireless cell card that would allow me to get onto NOAH’s website http://demo.geogarage.com/noaa/ if I really needed too.
Running aground…
A short time later we found the marina (Rock Hall Marina) which was in a small harbor (not much bigger than a foot ball stadium) behind a sea wall. We entered the harbor and started looking for a fuel dock and didn’t see one. We decided to ask someone working on their boat. We trolled over and was told to go over to the left side of the covered dock at the marina on the other side of the harbor. I turned the boat around and started to troll over. There were channel markers in the harbor. I came up to the first red marker and I asked John, if he thought we should go left or right? :smt017 He said left... :thumbsup: 5 seconds later, I ran aground :smt009and the boat stalled. I was just idling so no damage. About 1/2 hour later we were floating again.
We found a fuel dock, tied up for the night and left, fueled up in the morning and headed North. I filled up and the boat took ~170 gallons.(just under $800).
We left Rock Hall Harbor around 8:10 and headed north to the Deleware Canal. We had a slight head/beam sea with waves 1 to 2 feet. We cruised at 3850 RPMs which ran `24 knots. As we entered the canal, there was a parade of about 5 or 6 Searays :thumbsup:coming south. Most were sundancers with one sedan bridge, or aft cabin. Anyone from this board?
When we went through the canal the speed picked up to 27 knots at 4000 RPMs. The ride from the Canal to Capemay was somewhat boring,:smt015 with very little to see except a Nuclear Powerplant As we got closer to the ocean, the waves picked up to 3 to 4 and we headed for the Cape May Canal. I think it was around 1:00 PM. At this point I called a friend of mine who was coming south from Long Beach Island and heading to Atlantic City on his friends 57 foot Viking (Azimut). He told me to stay in Cape May and not to try to make it Atlantic City. :smt018 He said the Ocean was very rough. He if they were going North, they would have turned around. They had a following sea and took a 20ft wave over the top of the boat.
I wanted to be home by Sat night and really wanted to make it to Atlantic City. We had at least 5 hours of daylight left in the day. I figured I would try to make it to AC through the Intercoastal. We headed north on the intercoastal and almost immediately found a gas station with fuel at $3.97. I decided to top off the tanks. The wind was blowing at least 25 knots and it was tough docking.
The guy at the fuel dock was an old salt that was in the navy, went to University of Penn and was a former college professor. A real know it all. I made 2 failed attempts to bring the boat in nice and easy but the wind kept blowing me towards some other boats and I didn’t want to hit anything. I tried to use the bow thuster to control the nose, but the wind just pushed us around. I told him it was my first day driving the boat and I was just getting used to inboards. He decided that he would yell blow by blow instructions :smt014on how to work the throttles and transmissions. It is a little hard to drive with a 30 MPH wind blowing you around and this guy at the dock yelling instructions at you. Against my better judgment I decided to follow his advice. I positioned the boat up wind and he told me to but the boat in neutral and let the wind take me in. A few seconds later we crashed into the dock :smt013and tied up. I told him, that crashing into the fuel dock wasn’t exactly how I like to dock. He said I did fine. Great, Now I have a nice scuff mark on the front of the hull...Next time I will do it my way.
So while filling up, we told him we were headed to Atantic City. He laughed :smt043and said, “you will never make it”. Sea Tow makes a fortune towing boats off of the sand bars. He said if we go 1 foot out the channel we will run aground. He asked if I had SeaTow coverage and wanted to know if I wanted to fill out an application form while we were fueling up. (A real confidence builder) I told him I had coverage. I then said, that we would try the intercoastal and if was too difficult we would go out of the next inlet and take the ocean. He then said, that the inlet was un-navigable and that the coast guard wont use it.
So I told Mr Doom & Gloom that I was going to prove him wrong and take the intercoastal and be in Atlantic City for dinner. We left and headed north.
The Intercoastal:
The intercoastel was very well marked and pretty easy to navigate.:smt038 There were a few tight turns, but nothing too difficult. I think I could even run it at night. I don’t know what all the hype was about. The only thing that slowed us down was that we had to go under 3 bridges that required an opening. The boat was missing the handset for the Northstar VHS, but thankfully, I borrowed a handheld from my friend Jeff before leaving and was able to get the bridges open. John did not like to have to wait for the bridges and was getting a little impatient.
We arrived in Trump Marina in Atlantic City around 6:30 and tied up in front of the 57 Azimut that my friend Jeff came down on. The wind was still blowing pretty hard. I had no problems docking. (It was a lot easier without someone yelling at me). We showered and ate with my friend Jeff in the Chairmans club (which is a private restaurant for rated gamblers). During dinner, John kept saying.. “Do you really want to go up North tomorrow using the intercoastal? There are probably a bunch of bridges that we are going to have deal with and it will take forever” At this point I looked out the window and the flag poles were bending from the wind... I said, "Are you crazy? :smt014Do you know what the ocean is going to be like?" He suggested that since we are right here by the inlet, we should just go out in the morning to see what it was like. I told him, if I go out the inlet, then I am staying out and taking the ocean North.
The next morning we woke up around 7:30. The winds had died down to almost nothing and the marina and bay was calm. We ate some cereal and left around 8:20. The weather reported a small craft advisory in effect with seas 5 to 8 ft with a 25 knot North East wind and waves breaking off shore. I started heading out of the inlet and John turns to me and says. "Are you sure you want to do this? Maybe we should take the intercoastal" (You really got to love this guy!)
The ocean looked rough, but I was hoping that it was just rough at the inlet and it would get better once went north. It didn’t. We had a beam sea with waves breaking all around us. I was dodging and weaving the waves and doing all I could to keep the boat from getting broached. At one point I pointed the nose of the boat into a large wave that was coming at us and I managed to get the entire boat out of the water. I was not happy. Its one thing to jump waves with my jetski but it’s a completely different experience to do it in my new 32 ft boat. I was not happy. In fact I was pretty nervous and was looking to see where the next inlet was. Then the engine alarm started went off but I couldn’t even look down to see what was going on because I needed to run from the breaking waves. I wanted off of the ocean as soon as possible. It was more ocean than what I wanted to deal with it. I kept saying how I wish I was stuck waiting for a bridge to open right about now.
After about 45 minutes of this torture, we made it to Egg Harbor inlet. Using the chart plotter I found a buoy about 2 miles off shore, and headed in. My charts showed sand bars all around the inlet and we were surfing 8 foot waves all the way in with them breaking right behind us. I was worried about running aground. We made it in safely and I was exhausted.
The intercoastal was right at the mouth of the inlet. We headed North and started to cruise at 26 knots. It was a welcome relief. There were a few no wake zones, but I needed the rest. At this point I turned the boat over to my friend to drive while and I went down stairs to use the bathroom. When I started coming back up the stairs, I heard something hit the boat. I looked out of the back, and saw a "no wake" barrel rolling past the swim platform. I yelled "WTF? :smt013 You just hit a no wake buoy!” . John said “What buoy? I didnt hit anything. your imagining things". I think at that point, I started to drive again.
We made it to the Brielle Yacht club around 1:00. We tied up at the fuel dock and ate lunch and the SandBar. The wind was winding down again but I was not looking forward to going back out in the ocean. We fueled up (about $500 in fuel) and headed out of the inlet around 2:00, with a plan on turning into Shark River inlet if the Ocean was too rough. The ocean was still rough, but not like it was down in the Atlantic City area. We cruised at 14 knots. As we headed north it go better and we were able to pick it up to 18 knots up by Deal. Once we got inside Sandy Hook we kicked it up 25 knots. The tanks still registered full when we got to the Marina, so I probably used about 30 or 40 gallons to come from Point Pleasant to Monmouth beach.
Sat was a tough day. At around 10:00 AM I started to feel sick with a soar throat coming on. By the time I made it to the marina at the end of the day, my throat was on fire and closing up. I washed the boat, drove John home and made it home around 8:45. I was up sick all night. with a severe head cold, chills and a soar throat.. (Thanks Larry)
So the boat is in its new Marina, I have to have get someone fix the generator, the GFI outlet is tripped and wont reset so no outlets work, there was a puddle of water in the aft cabin I am guessing its from a stuck bilge pump and when I got on plane at the very last leg before pulling into the marina, the boat ran as if one of the trim tabs was stuck all the way down. So I have a bunch of things to fix. Welcome back to boating…
I have been out of boating for about 8 years, busy with 2 kids (ages 10 and 7) and decided I wanted to get back in. :smt115
I was looking for a late model 32 or 34 sundancer. I looked at a few boats and ultimately found a 2006 320 that was repo'd and was in a marina in Maryland just across the bay from Annapolis. I spent a 2 days inspecting the boat and its systems before negotiating a price, but the boat was on land and I couldn’t test everything. After a few rounds of negotiations with the bank we settled on a price, contingent upon a successful sea trial. I had driven to Maryland 2x earlier to inspect the boat and I wanted to sea-trial the boat, close on it and drive it away the same day. It was a little aggressive, but it was doable.
There were some logistics to work out. :smt119 I needed to find a new marina, leave a car there, get a ride to Maryland, plot my trip and find someone to come back on the boat with me. In the end, my friend John agreed to come with me. John used to own a 300 sundancer and had it for 12 years before selling it.
The trip down and sea trial ..
I met John at his house on Thursday morning around 9:20. 10 minutes later, Larry our driver shows up. I said "Hello Larry, nice to meet you" and shook his hand. We leave John’s house with John driving, Larry riding shotgun and me in the back seat. About 1/2 hour into the trip, Larry starts sneezing, coughing and blowing his nose. John leans out his window and asks him if he is sick. LT mumbles something that sounds like.. "no no.. I'm ahright, I just need some Nyquil... At this point, I realized I just shook his hand a 1/2 hour earlier and there was good chance that I would get sick. :smt013 Great...
We get to the marina around 1:30 and the boat is already in the water. The salesman tells me that the boat runs nice, but the generator is not working. I had called Kohler about the generator earlier in the week for a broken breaker switch and found out it was still under warranty. I told the salesman to take a $1,000 off the price and lets move on. I told John the generator wasn’t working and he responded: "So how am I going to charge my cell phone?" :huh: ( I could see this was going to be a fun trip)
We went for a quick drive and everything checked out. The boat cruises as 26 knots at 4000 RPM's. Nice... :grin:
The fuel tanks were almost empty. The guy showing us the boat said that the current marina's price of fuel was too high. ($4.50 a gallon) He recommended a different marina which was ½ hour away on the way back north. I put $100 of fuel in it went back to the office, signed the paper work and we left Rock Hall Maryland around 4:00 Thursday to try to find the marina which was about 45 minutes away.
The chartplotter…
The boat had a Raymarine C80 chart plotter installed. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the Navionics card so I purchased one from West Marine ($200) before coming down to Maryland. The chart plotter worked fine, until I put the card in. The system would re-boot from time to time. I thought that maybe the wires for the radar were touching and causing the system to re-boot. (The Radome had been removed for shipping and was in the cabin, the wires were exposed up on the radare arch. I pulled the wires down and taped off the power wires in case that was the problem. It didn’t help. The system continued to re-boot from time to time whenever the card was inserted, but worked fine without the card. I figured I had a bad card. So we started the trip with a questionable chart plotter. (Fortunately, I brought paper charts, a second GPS and in a real pinch, I had my PC with with a wireless cell card that would allow me to get onto NOAH’s website http://demo.geogarage.com/noaa/ if I really needed too.
Running aground…
A short time later we found the marina (Rock Hall Marina) which was in a small harbor (not much bigger than a foot ball stadium) behind a sea wall. We entered the harbor and started looking for a fuel dock and didn’t see one. We decided to ask someone working on their boat. We trolled over and was told to go over to the left side of the covered dock at the marina on the other side of the harbor. I turned the boat around and started to troll over. There were channel markers in the harbor. I came up to the first red marker and I asked John, if he thought we should go left or right? :smt017 He said left... :thumbsup: 5 seconds later, I ran aground :smt009and the boat stalled. I was just idling so no damage. About 1/2 hour later we were floating again.
We found a fuel dock, tied up for the night and left, fueled up in the morning and headed North. I filled up and the boat took ~170 gallons.(just under $800).
We left Rock Hall Harbor around 8:10 and headed north to the Deleware Canal. We had a slight head/beam sea with waves 1 to 2 feet. We cruised at 3850 RPMs which ran `24 knots. As we entered the canal, there was a parade of about 5 or 6 Searays :thumbsup:coming south. Most were sundancers with one sedan bridge, or aft cabin. Anyone from this board?
When we went through the canal the speed picked up to 27 knots at 4000 RPMs. The ride from the Canal to Capemay was somewhat boring,:smt015 with very little to see except a Nuclear Powerplant As we got closer to the ocean, the waves picked up to 3 to 4 and we headed for the Cape May Canal. I think it was around 1:00 PM. At this point I called a friend of mine who was coming south from Long Beach Island and heading to Atlantic City on his friends 57 foot Viking (Azimut). He told me to stay in Cape May and not to try to make it Atlantic City. :smt018 He said the Ocean was very rough. He if they were going North, they would have turned around. They had a following sea and took a 20ft wave over the top of the boat.
I wanted to be home by Sat night and really wanted to make it to Atlantic City. We had at least 5 hours of daylight left in the day. I figured I would try to make it to AC through the Intercoastal. We headed north on the intercoastal and almost immediately found a gas station with fuel at $3.97. I decided to top off the tanks. The wind was blowing at least 25 knots and it was tough docking.
The guy at the fuel dock was an old salt that was in the navy, went to University of Penn and was a former college professor. A real know it all. I made 2 failed attempts to bring the boat in nice and easy but the wind kept blowing me towards some other boats and I didn’t want to hit anything. I tried to use the bow thuster to control the nose, but the wind just pushed us around. I told him it was my first day driving the boat and I was just getting used to inboards. He decided that he would yell blow by blow instructions :smt014on how to work the throttles and transmissions. It is a little hard to drive with a 30 MPH wind blowing you around and this guy at the dock yelling instructions at you. Against my better judgment I decided to follow his advice. I positioned the boat up wind and he told me to but the boat in neutral and let the wind take me in. A few seconds later we crashed into the dock :smt013and tied up. I told him, that crashing into the fuel dock wasn’t exactly how I like to dock. He said I did fine. Great, Now I have a nice scuff mark on the front of the hull...Next time I will do it my way.
So while filling up, we told him we were headed to Atantic City. He laughed :smt043and said, “you will never make it”. Sea Tow makes a fortune towing boats off of the sand bars. He said if we go 1 foot out the channel we will run aground. He asked if I had SeaTow coverage and wanted to know if I wanted to fill out an application form while we were fueling up. (A real confidence builder) I told him I had coverage. I then said, that we would try the intercoastal and if was too difficult we would go out of the next inlet and take the ocean. He then said, that the inlet was un-navigable and that the coast guard wont use it.
So I told Mr Doom & Gloom that I was going to prove him wrong and take the intercoastal and be in Atlantic City for dinner. We left and headed north.
The Intercoastal:
The intercoastel was very well marked and pretty easy to navigate.:smt038 There were a few tight turns, but nothing too difficult. I think I could even run it at night. I don’t know what all the hype was about. The only thing that slowed us down was that we had to go under 3 bridges that required an opening. The boat was missing the handset for the Northstar VHS, but thankfully, I borrowed a handheld from my friend Jeff before leaving and was able to get the bridges open. John did not like to have to wait for the bridges and was getting a little impatient.
We arrived in Trump Marina in Atlantic City around 6:30 and tied up in front of the 57 Azimut that my friend Jeff came down on. The wind was still blowing pretty hard. I had no problems docking. (It was a lot easier without someone yelling at me). We showered and ate with my friend Jeff in the Chairmans club (which is a private restaurant for rated gamblers). During dinner, John kept saying.. “Do you really want to go up North tomorrow using the intercoastal? There are probably a bunch of bridges that we are going to have deal with and it will take forever” At this point I looked out the window and the flag poles were bending from the wind... I said, "Are you crazy? :smt014Do you know what the ocean is going to be like?" He suggested that since we are right here by the inlet, we should just go out in the morning to see what it was like. I told him, if I go out the inlet, then I am staying out and taking the ocean North.
The next morning we woke up around 7:30. The winds had died down to almost nothing and the marina and bay was calm. We ate some cereal and left around 8:20. The weather reported a small craft advisory in effect with seas 5 to 8 ft with a 25 knot North East wind and waves breaking off shore. I started heading out of the inlet and John turns to me and says. "Are you sure you want to do this? Maybe we should take the intercoastal" (You really got to love this guy!)
The ocean looked rough, but I was hoping that it was just rough at the inlet and it would get better once went north. It didn’t. We had a beam sea with waves breaking all around us. I was dodging and weaving the waves and doing all I could to keep the boat from getting broached. At one point I pointed the nose of the boat into a large wave that was coming at us and I managed to get the entire boat out of the water. I was not happy. Its one thing to jump waves with my jetski but it’s a completely different experience to do it in my new 32 ft boat. I was not happy. In fact I was pretty nervous and was looking to see where the next inlet was. Then the engine alarm started went off but I couldn’t even look down to see what was going on because I needed to run from the breaking waves. I wanted off of the ocean as soon as possible. It was more ocean than what I wanted to deal with it. I kept saying how I wish I was stuck waiting for a bridge to open right about now.
After about 45 minutes of this torture, we made it to Egg Harbor inlet. Using the chart plotter I found a buoy about 2 miles off shore, and headed in. My charts showed sand bars all around the inlet and we were surfing 8 foot waves all the way in with them breaking right behind us. I was worried about running aground. We made it in safely and I was exhausted.
The intercoastal was right at the mouth of the inlet. We headed North and started to cruise at 26 knots. It was a welcome relief. There were a few no wake zones, but I needed the rest. At this point I turned the boat over to my friend to drive while and I went down stairs to use the bathroom. When I started coming back up the stairs, I heard something hit the boat. I looked out of the back, and saw a "no wake" barrel rolling past the swim platform. I yelled "WTF? :smt013 You just hit a no wake buoy!” . John said “What buoy? I didnt hit anything. your imagining things". I think at that point, I started to drive again.
We made it to the Brielle Yacht club around 1:00. We tied up at the fuel dock and ate lunch and the SandBar. The wind was winding down again but I was not looking forward to going back out in the ocean. We fueled up (about $500 in fuel) and headed out of the inlet around 2:00, with a plan on turning into Shark River inlet if the Ocean was too rough. The ocean was still rough, but not like it was down in the Atlantic City area. We cruised at 14 knots. As we headed north it go better and we were able to pick it up to 18 knots up by Deal. Once we got inside Sandy Hook we kicked it up 25 knots. The tanks still registered full when we got to the Marina, so I probably used about 30 or 40 gallons to come from Point Pleasant to Monmouth beach.
Sat was a tough day. At around 10:00 AM I started to feel sick with a soar throat coming on. By the time I made it to the marina at the end of the day, my throat was on fire and closing up. I washed the boat, drove John home and made it home around 8:45. I was up sick all night. with a severe head cold, chills and a soar throat.. (Thanks Larry)
So the boat is in its new Marina, I have to have get someone fix the generator, the GFI outlet is tripped and wont reset so no outlets work, there was a puddle of water in the aft cabin I am guessing its from a stuck bilge pump and when I got on plane at the very last leg before pulling into the marina, the boat ran as if one of the trim tabs was stuck all the way down. So I have a bunch of things to fix. Welcome back to boating…
