We have had the Bayliner Pilothouse 4788 for about 6 weeks now, most of that time we have been under “Stay Home – Stay Safe” orders from Washington State due to coronavirus. What are the odds that just days after purchasing the boat that we would hit with lockdown orders, and although that didn’t apply to boating, the stay home orders prohibited fishing, and prohibited the use of State Parks. We have done plenty of work to prepare the boat for our first outing, but nothing will really put it to the test until our shakedown cruise.

On our first trip out we went to Shallow Bay on the west side of Sucia island and dropped anchor.

Weather: Starting out on Friday, the weather was good, nice and sunny, Saturday morning the weather turned a bit windy and rainy with small craft advisory, Saturday afternoon the wind really picked up, and by Sunday morning the wind had mostly died down.

The shakedown

Part of the shakedown is to find out everything that isn’t working as expected. These are the things that were not caught in the survey or in the test drive, pre-purchase checkout.

Icemaker ice tastes like mud. We are assuming that this will improve after we send more and more water through to flush out the system. We are hoping that the smell comes from the ice maker not being used for a while. This is still a to-do to sort out, but for now we will continue to make ice and see if the flavor improves.

The icemaker is a U-LINE ice maker that appears to have come with the boat as original equipment.

Generator not starting. After some help investigating from Marcia’s brother Mark we were able to track down the reason the generator would not start. Since purchasing the boat, we have turned on the Westerbeke 12K generator many times at the dock, then they day we head out for our first trip, no joy. The generator will not start, so we threw our 4k home generator onboard just in case. I didn’t want to stress over the generator on our first day out so we planned to just use the home generator. Saturday morning after breakfast, I decided that I time to spend tracking down where the problem was. With some help from Mark, George and my ETEKCity MSR-C600 multimeter,  we were able to track it down to really dirty, and lose battery terminals. We could see that there was 12v power getting all the way to the starter relay/soleniod.

Port side starting batteries – dead and will not charge. Time to get some new batteries, but instead of getting another 8D battery we will be replacing it with 2 group 31 batteries which will supply slightly more cold cranking amps, but they are much easier to move around and install.

The good news.

Master state room bed is really comfy.

The built in trash compactor works great. I had never used a trash compactor before, but I really like it. It is a smart thing to have on board the boat to reduce the size of our trash bag.

The inverter power is working really well, although the battery bank may be a bit work out. The house batteries are 4 8D, they seem a bit old, and don’t seem to hold a charge. We are investigating replacing the 4 large batteries with 16 “golf cart” batteries, 6v batteries that are then wired in a combination of serial and parallel to get them to 12v. I think I can fit 16 of the golf cart batteries in the space that we have available. Our usual go to for batteries is West Marine, so we will be placing an order soon.

The food was good. From barbecued steak to chicken on the BBQ It was all really tasty.

Dingy ran really well after the recent work done by Alex and George on re-wiring the whole boat.

Unknowns

Unknowns that we need to figure out. We have not yet tried the onboard washer/dryer combo to see if it works. We still need to try that out.