Iron Lady was loaded aboard a truck and made the short journey from Circa down the street to the travel lift early in the morning on February 1.
A quick look just before she is completely down as the Crica folks climb aboard. This angle also gives an excellent view of the swim step extension which was recently added.
The first order of business is to check the various areas where there are hull penetrations to make sure there aren’t any leaks. The transducer for the depth finder that is part of the Furuno NavNet system is located in the swim step.
Next in the sequence is raising the mast and connecting the foreguy which is also the antenna for the SSB.
Iron Lady now afloat with mast raised sitting nicely on her lines.
Once the stabilizers have been initialized and dockside checks are complete, Iron lady is off for the first time under her own power to a dock not far away.
Initial sea trials at various throttle settings have gone well and the swim step extension appears to both improve efficiency and performance as well as being a great functional addition .
Over the next 4 weeks, Circa will be performing extensive system checks and sea trials on Iron lady including over 50 hours of actual sea time. Our Captain, Steve Parsons will head up to Whagarei around February 21 to begin to organize the spares and manuals for the boat.
We will be headed for Whangarei around March 1 for training and Owners Trials which will last around seven days. Then the process of moving aboard begins (we have shipped over 40 boxes of stuff from the US). There will be more posts as things move forward.