I drove the boat from the port of NY to Lockwood Marina in NJ where we would assemble it. This was quite an exciting moment. We arrived at Lockwood marina at 1pm.
At Lockwood Ira, Bob and I unpacked the boat and got organized. We got the mast sections off the boat, laid out all the components and got the mast sections onto stands. This took a few hours.
The boat comes with really good detailed assembly instructions. Each piece of the standing rigging and running rigging was labeled. The mast sections had pull lines already run in all the right places and were marked matching the instructions.
First we assembled the two sections of the mast to make it one mast. It was pretty obvious that the mast had been assembled at the factory then disassembled and packaged for shipping. For example the mast sections slide together and are then riveted. The parts that slide together were already greased. All the rivet holes lined up perfectly once we had the mast straight.
This took the rest of the afternoon and most of the next day. Bob had to leave after the first day so Ira and I finished the job.
Bright and early we started to assemble the standing rigging and finally the running rigging. We tuned the diamonds to get the mast straight. This was so much easier with the mast on stands than when I have done this on a boat with the mast rigged.
The afternoon we had high winds so we could not step the mast. We instead worked on unpacking and testing the systems of the boat.
We were delayed a few hours as rain came through, but finally it cleared and we stepped the mast. Then gave the rig an initial tune.
The dinghy davit/solar panel assembly was wrapped and placed in the cockpit so we unpacked that and installed that on the boat. The solar panels were already installed and wired on the davit frame. So all we had to do was use the topping lift to hoist it into place and secure 4 bolts and 2 struts. Next we plugged the panels into the sockets already on the targa arch. This was very simple and it was obvious that this had been installed and then removed in Vietnam.
Next was the stack pack. This did not have instructions and since this was my first stack pack it took a few minutes to decide how to rig it.
With the boat finally looking like a sail boat we bent on the sails and rigged the reefing lines. The reefing lines were the only lines not marked. So we had to choose where to put each one. All the reefing lines are the same length. We choose to put the first reef on starboard and the other 2 on port. Our reasoning was that the port side has the electric winch and thus that would be more usefull with the 2/3 reef than the first.
We fueled the boat and jumped aboard. I had Deni and a friend come down on Day 3 to help sail it to RI. We motored out to about Sandy hook and then raised sail. Of coarse we had the reefing lines tangled so in the dusk we sorted that out.