Moving Kozad

We moved Kozad on 19th May, 2007 to Portside Marina in Brentwood Bay, B.C., from Oak Bay Marina which is just outside of Victoria, B.C. Our close friends Janice & Glenn Benoit, who have a lot of boating experience, came along for morale and physical support! Both were needed as this was the first time I had operated a single screw, full keel & displacement hull boat! To say the experience was humbling would be an understatement. Many hands, including feet, fenders and boat hooks were needed to get us off the dock! The experience was heart pounding, but worth a few laughs once we were safely off the dock....

But wait! We still had to get back onto the dock at some point in time......

The wind was howling, there was a minus 2 foot tide which facilitated us leaving just in time to catch a 5 knot current; reducing our speed to 1 knot per hour for the first 90 minutes. The weather and the speed could not dampen our enthusiasm of having our own boat.

We made the trip from Oak Bay to Brentwood Bay in a little over 6.5 hours; Jan likes to say we are in the slow, slow lane of boating, crawling along while all the other traffic is passing us by! She equates us to being on a bicycle while the cars are whising by!

And yes by the way, we did make it onto the docks in Brentwood Bay just fine; mainly due in part to all the extra hands, feet, and opinions on how I should be docking this beast!

The plan now that Kozad was at Portside Marina, was to have Abernathy & Gaudin Boat
Builders in Brentwood Bay, work on the minor items identified during the survey, as well as doing some work on the boat for us.....

We wanted to personalize our boat to our style of boating; being out for extended periods of time at anchor, having access to battery power and an ease of getting on and off the boat while on the hook!

So, we needed new ground tackle (windlass, chain & anchor), a davit system so we could easily launch and retrieve a new Walker Bay Genesis RIB and Yamaha outboard motor, an upgraded electrical system including new batteries, battery charger and inverter, along with a rather large list of additional extras!

As well, we felt obliged to keep the boat in pristine condition after the amount of effort that the previous owners had done in refitting and updating the boat; so now it was our turn to ensure we maintained the boat in like new condition. So, the new leak we found on the rough ride over needed to be taken care of as well as a few other cosmetic and minor structural items.

Well, it was a good thing we bought the boat a year early as the work took a little longer than we thought to finish, along with an unexpected chain plate leak which had destroyed some of the Pilot House coring, and a few minor (but costly) repairs kept us from using the boat in 2007!

We now know what a BOAT unit is - Bring On Another Thousand, as in dollars; Kozad has a few of these units invested since we have taken ownership!

Ah, the joys of owning a boat!