It has been a long wait, about 18 months since I paid my deposit to Blue Water Cruising Yachts. The build started in September, due for completion before Christmas, but problems with getting the trailer certified pushed delivery back to January. In late January, I drove from Brisbane to Newcastle and hauled the boat back. On the journey, some folks complimented me on such a handsome boat. How did it go, they asked. About 95 km/hr, I said as it sat on its trailer at a roadside stop.
Unrelated to the boat, except as a means to haul it, I found something about my Ford Territory that I did not know before. It seems a certain tyre mart with Mart and T and Jane and Bob in its brand name, did not know it either. When replacing the tyres on an all-wheel-drive, make sure they are the same brand. Not just the same type, but exactly the same brand. I had arranged for said tyre mart to replace two of my tyres with the same tyres I already had. Something went wrong in the booking and when I turned up on the Saturday, they said they didn't have them. No problem, they said, we will just fit these more expensive tyres to the front and leave the 3-month-old good ones on the rear. When I drove off, there was a thudding that felt like I was hitting a speed hump every second or so. So, instead of leaving on the Sunday, I drove home and returned the car to the tyre mart on Monday morning. The tyre mart checked everything but could not find the problem. Satisfied that my wheels would not actually fall off on the 1700 km round trip, I ventured forth and found that I could avoid the thudding if I abstained from cruise control. I got back safely, with the boat, and asked Moreton Bay Ford to diagnose the problem. A big shout to Moreton Bay Ford for looking at the problem and diagnosing the power distribution was the problem - the different brand tyres were tracking just differently enough to trigger an attempted power distribution, hence the intermittent thudding. The tyre mart swapped out the "wrong" tyres and the thudding stopped.
My experience of registering the boat and trailer in Queensland is best described as a necessary evil. I don't envy the clerk as he tapped various numbers and codes into the computer, but it was a tedious 60-minute wait to get charged the registration fees of $513. And, this was after I had to pay a Queensland inspector $220 for a trailer safety certificate and HAVRAS because the NSW certification did not count. Obviously, what is safe on the roads in NSW is not safe in QLD. That, or the bureaucrats found another way to justify their jobs. With the registration, I could tow the boat from my home to the Wynnum Manly Yacht club, where its parking spot was waiting.
Launch day was fun, if I draw a discrete blank over my attempts to get the mast up in the morning. A few friends and family joined us at the Wynnum Manly Boat ramp as the Reverend Jim Stonier blessed the boat, and my wife named it. I named it Sandpiper, after the Mirror dinghy that I had build with my dad as a teenager. That boat finally fell to pieces, and I kept one of the gudgeons as a memento. This boat was of a far superior quality. After the formalities, I took some of the guests and their kids on a brief circuit in the marina. In launching and retrieving I made the obligatory rookie errors, but I am glad to report that no one actually died.
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