Tracking Down the Dollars

We made it home yesterday with no problems. The plane was packed as was the airport. There are still lots of stranded passengers waiting to get a seat after their flights were cancelled due to the effects of the hurricane.

Yachtpath sent us a contract for shipping Gallinero from Port Everglades in Florida to Victoria, Canada. It came is at $44,487.00, far in excess of the $30,000 we had been told to budget. I immediately reached out to both brokers to see if they could apply some pressure from their end for a more reasonable quote.

I also talked with Mike Rusk, the Caterpillar expert in Bellingham, WA. Mike is not a fan of the 3126 engines that are on Gallinero. Apparently they have had a lot of problems with the turbo chargers. This engine was designed in response to meet new emission standards. In order to reduce gasses that are released in the exhaust, the company added the turbochargers for more complete combustion.

Unfortunately, this turned out be a weak spot with failures allowing sea water to infiltrate the engine. Mike gave me some worse case dollars if we have a problem in the future. Mike would run the other way. I need to get another opinion on this issue before we decide what to do.

The initial estimates for the diesel heater are coming in about where we expected. So we’ll plug $30,000 into our purchase offer worksheet.