The April 2023 fishing trip took place here in Freeport Bahamas and was attended by Me, Kyle, Bob, Eric, and Gary. On the positive side, the weather was excellent and the seas were generally calm. We did hit some 6' seas out deep one day but on a bigger boat like Third Wave it was really no big thing.
Just prior to the trip I had the upper end of the stbd engine reworked by a local mechanic who rebuilt and flattened the heads, installed new risers, rebuilt the raw water pump and boiled out the U-cooler which is a heat exchanger for engine oil and transmission oil. This work was done because I knew that a head gasket was blown on that side. Those interested can read more about that here.
On Saturday 4/1, which was scheduled to be an arrival and prep day we did some final prep work which included installing a 24" marine RADAR in the hope of being able to see birds with. Kyle and Eric led the charge on this job.
It looks pretty good up there!
I installed new injectors into the port throttle body and we changed the oil in both engines and the generator. Bob and I also configured some new downriggers for use during the trip. Here is Bob manning one of them.
One big downside was that the incoming folks brought a nasty case of covid with them. I was OK from Saturday when I picked everyone up at the airport to about Sunday evening but then everything went downhill pretty quickly for me and I was actually down pretty hard for 2+ days in the middle of the trip. I then muddled through the rest of the trip without any appetite or energy and then had to sleep for the next week. Becky caught it too and we are only just now finally feeling better.
So on Monday 4/3 I got us out the inlet and we spent time bottom fishing the reef right in front of Freeport. This gave me the opportunity to crash in my bunk for most of the day from the covid. I woke up in the afternoon and made it out on deck just in time to see Gary hook up a very nice grouper and I gaffed it into the boat for him. Back at the dock it weighed in at 18 lbs, a very nice eating size.
I filleted it up and Kyle brought over his gas grill and cooked up a big plate of the world's freshest grouper along with sides.
It doesn't get any fresher than this!
We went out again on Tuesday 4/4 but had no luck. We got back into the inlet around dark. Fortune bay inlet really is beautiful, especially in the twilight hours where the silhouettes of palm trees jump out at you.
On Wednesday 4/5 I was so sick that I didn't even get out of bed so the guys spent the day over in Freeport drinking beer around the UNEXSCO pool.
Tough life, but someone has to live it.
Our luck turned up a bit on Thursday 4/6 when we bagged a couple of nice female mahi for the dinner table. Here is the first one in the box. One was caught on the downrigger and the other was caught on the outrigger.
On Friday 4/7 we fished our way over to West End with the idea of staying the night at Blue Marlin Cove marina but when we got there the place was dead and the security guy told us we could not just come in and pick up a slip. We had to pre-register online. So we spent the night in front of my corner lot that is in that area with two anchors out, very securely. My lot is the one on the left with the 40' container in view.
On Saturday 4/08 we tried our hand at cast netting back up in the canals around my corner lot for a couple of hours in the AM. Cast netting is not something you just up and do. It is a learned skill. Eric and Bob watched a few YouTube videos on the subject but had limited success in getting the net to open.
After that experience it was pushing lunch time so we cruised over to Old Bahama Bay. Here is the view from the back side of the island (the shallow side):
We took a slip in the marina and had lunch at the Tiki bar.
We were joined by my local friend Eric Darville who manned the camera for this shot.
After lunch we cruised back home and cleaned up the boat and everyone got ready to fly out the following morning, Sunday 4/9. All of that happened smooth as clockwork.
The boat gave us a couple of issues over the course of the week. One day the port engine flashed a low oil pressure warning for the port engine over NMEA twice over a period of a couple hours, once while Kyle was driving and once while I was driving. When I saw it I shut that engine down until we could look at the issue with a mechanical pressure gauge. So we ran a few miles on one engine for 1 day. But when we got it back to the dock, the oil pressure tested perfect so that was probably just a bad LOP (Low Oil Pressure) switch. Having access to tools and infrastructure by being stationed from my dock is a huge advantage.
We also had a situation where we experienced low fuel pressure on the stbd engine but that turned out to be a simple matter of needing to change the spin on 10 micron fuel filter which was full of sticks and crap. We absolutely debugged that situation to the clogged filter because I have been worried that at some point the stbd fuel fittings would begin sucking air like the port ones did before we used teflon tape on them instead of the recommended ptfe goo. But as soon as we installed the new filter the stbd engine was back up to full fuel pressure and full power again.
The final issue is that even after the stbd engine is warm, it will sometimes die when going into and out of gear during close quarter maneuvering. I replaced the IAC (Idle Air Control) valve and sprayed it out with carb spray because we found during last year's trip that this fixed a similar issue, but the issue remains. We know that the fuel pressure is rock solid during this time because we have a mechanical gauge connected to it. So I am still thinking about that one. Perhaps the timing needs to be advanced another 2 degrees. I also need to check for vacuum leaks but these engines do not have a bunch of vacuum appliances like cars do. The one vacuum line I know about goes to the MAP sensor. I am writing an NMEA 2000 message logger that will work with the Yacht Devices NMEA2000 to Wifi Gateway. This will allow me to log the output of the Fox Marine MEFI 1 to NMEA 2000 bridge where all the engine details are available.
While we only caught 3 "eating fish" along with a couple of barracudas, the weather was great and the beer was cold. Also, this trip had far less mechanical issues than prior trips so I think we are finally shaking the last few issues out. There is a lot more to be done of course, but having a trip with almost no mechanical drama was a first milestone for Third Wave and I think it only gets better from here.
One more highlight - the ice machine is fantastic. It takes about 400lbs of ice to fully load the fish box and all the coolers. Such a luxury to have all that ice a few steps from the dock rather than driving to the store and buying it by the 10lb bag.
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