And away we go!
Finally, after a decade of work, we were able to drop lines and push the throttle forward (and ironically the gear lever backward but that’s a story for the episode…)
We were all up early to make the 5 am high tide (and we didn’t make it but went anyway at 10:30 am and cleared the river mud by 4”).
Ropes away and we idled from the berth, she does 2.9knots in gear with throttle at idle. Once clear of the other boats in the marina and with a few meters of water below the keel we bumped her up to 5 knots, then 6. RPM stopped displaying on the bridge but she was just ticking over around 900ish RPM at that speed.
We did a few basic runs in the river channel and then anchored up to give the boat a really good checkover.
Pat in Salonika came out in his boat just in case we needed to tow back and he pulled in behind Brupeg while at anchor and rafted up with us.
First check was we holding with 48ton of Brupeg and 32ton Salonika hanging off our home-built anchor… no problem dug in on the first go and didn’t move an inch.
Next check, how’s the boat? Couldn’t find any leaks or anything out of place so onto the main engine.
After hunting around the engine, gearbox, driveline, and rudder, the only issue we could find was the new oil filter on the gearbox wasn’t screwed on tight enough and we were getting a drip of gear oil every few seconds.
After we had some lunch Birk dropped Duncan back to the marina by dinghy (Duncan had done another marathon push with us to get the systems ready, but needed to head back for a gathering down the coast and in typical Dunc fashion, was working right up until stepping off the boat to leave) the tide had turned by now and we were timing it to have a shot at backing down into our berth with the high water. So we had a couple of practice goes at reversing Brupeg while in the main shipping channel, to learn her prop walk and how much steering she has in reverse. (Spoiler alert… zero steering. Slight prop walk to port). However, our plan was to back down with the rudder hard to starboard and when we needed to push the back towards starboard we quickly put some forward thrust with full port rudder to push the stern across then resume reversing in idle with full starboard rudder. It worked, being our first time backing down, it wasn’t perfect, but it was slow and controllable enough for it to work well enough! No other boats were hit and we were able to tie up so it was notched up as a win.
Overall she went beautifully. She felt really solid in the water, with plenty of thrust, and just felt comfortable.
We are having a day lounging around today to build the energy up and then we are back into more testing on the water later in the week when Duncan arrives back onboard on Thursday.
Birk is winding down and is officially in relaxation mode on orders from the captain as he is flying back to Germany early next week after spending a year onboard with us. We look forward to seeing him return in the new year. We can’t thank him enough!
P.S. Baby Cat did well on the trials, a little stressed at the new noises but loved being on anchor and came alive again climbing all over the boat.
Thanks to Duncan and Pat for all of your help getting us here and on our maiden voyage, it was lovely having you with us and a very special thanks to Birk, all your resilience, smarts, skill, patience, extraordinary kindness, and adventurous spirit make you an incredible crew member and friend.
Thank you to everyone for all of your support in making this possible. It’s starting to feel very real.
With love
Jess and Dame