Excitment and setbacks

Buying a new boat is a dream come true. Everything is brand new and beautiful. There are also a lot of things to check, and everything isn’t always perfect. Some things work great, others have inexplicable “features” that make you frustrated.

We spent Monday and Tuesday going through all the boxes and gear, setting up electronics and piling in the gear that we had shipped. Not to mention running up a huge tab at the local chandler for all the new stuff we needed. In the afternoon we filled up the tanks and went for a small a test sail.

The wind was quite brisk, and we took in the first reef before we hoisted the mainsail. It looked beautiful, new and white. What a crispy cloth! Then the first setback came. The luff wasn’t straight all the way. We just couldn’t trim the second third section between the middle battens and the luff knocked quite irritatingly at certain sailing angles. The situation has to be monitored, and we just put it back to not doing a proper reef. The boat sailed great anyway. The skipper just has trauma over irregular and unwanted banging on the mast.

We made it safely back to the pier in beautiful sunny weather and grabbed some dinner, then we got ready to spend the first night on board. Our helpful and enthusiastic young dealer headed for his hotel room.

With the water and diesel tanks full, it was time for me to test the water heater and the heater. The heater wouldn’t start the panel just gave an irritating error message. As we were hooked to shore power, I also turned on the water heater. That in turned flipped all the emergency circuit breakers. A beautiful loud click. A problem on the pier or the boat? As it turned out the next morning, a bit of both.

I managed to flip the breakers on but we had no shore power anymore. In the morning, thy fixed the pier electricity, but the water heater kept flipping the breaker on board. After checking all the other sockets, we defined that it was a problem with the one the heater is connected to. With an extension cord, we hooked up the heater to another outlet, and got hot water. Something to be fixed in Helsinki.

Unfortunately, the heater was a bigger problem. Our young sales rep was getting rather stressed but had help from home. With pictures flying around, the Palme was defined as a missing electronics unit. The brains were gone. No wonder it didn’t work. The pressure was on. The sales rep had to log a complaint into the Hanse yacht database before anything could happen. Running back and forth to the chandler/shipyard he did his utmost to get things fixed before he had to leave for the airport. To no avail. The large shipyard did not have any capacity to fix the problem in any acceptable timeframe. We were planning on leaving on Thursday morning and a weeks delay was out of the question. The promised electrician never arrived.

The sales rep seemed exhausted and markedly more irritated than we were. About ten times. We knew, that buying a brand new boat would have some finishing to be done. Having no heater is an uncomfortable event when it rains, but otherwise we use it during spring and fall. Wet gear may have to dry out a couple of days and that may lead to extra nights in som harbour. So what.

We made lunch, and said goodbye. I hitched a ride to the supermarket for some final shopping. In the evening we even had time for some sightseeing in Greifswald. A quaint historical town with a huge church and a university.

It was time to hit the sack and prepare for departure. Luckily we had been informed that the bridge on the river doesn’t open till eight in the morning. Our original plan was to set off at five and head straight for Bornholm. So that was more or less out of the question.