The Makai was first polished in November, 2007.  Then she spent 4 months basking in the hot Ensenada Mexican sun and has been in Long Beach since April of 2008.  Last week, we noticed that the top of the pilot house and some of the foredeck surfaces were starting to lose the glossy shine provided by the polish. The shine lasted from  November , 2007 to August 2009 which is 22 months without any additional application of polish.  The shine is dull but water still beads up on the surface so the actual protection of the fiberglass gel coat is still there.  The sides of the Pilot house and the entire hull still have the glossy, look like new shine and water still beads up on both. We decided to have the only the dull sections polished so that we can see just how long the polish will last on the dark blue hull and the sides of the pilot house. Martin Chavez is doing the polish work.  He maintains the topside of the Makai with bi-weekly, water only wash downs and has experience applying our Marine Polish as he has used it on some of his other clients’ vessels.

We  had Jason from Jason’s Window Tint apply a dark tint to all of the salon windows in 2007.  The tint proved to be too dark to see through at night so we asked Jason to remove the tint from the 3 front windows early in 2008.  Initially in 2007 when Jason asked us if we cruised alot at night we said absolutely not so he applied the dark tint.  Turns out, we do cruise at night and that is why we had the tint on the front widows removed so that we could see.  The Makai sits facing east when in our home slip and catches the sun from sunrise to about 12:30.  It heats the salon to an  unconmfortable temperature.  So we called Jason again today and asked for his help.  Jason has a new product called Geoshield that will block a lot of the heat transfer plus block 99% of the  sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays.  The Geoshield will not be as dark as the rest of the tint and also will allow you to see through the glass  alot better.  We will add comments to this entry regarding how well the Geoshield works later this week.

Derek from Alcom worked his magic again and replaced the Raymarine AIS250 receiver with the Raymarine  AIS500 Transceiver.  The hardest part of the install was pulling the cable from the required stand alone GPS antenna on the top of the pilot house down to the Electronics cabinet behind the helm.  After the install, our boat showed up on the AIS receiver of a 43 ft Nordhavn  down the gangway from our slip with all of our AIS data, Lat/long, MMSI #, etc.  So now we can be seen as a AIS transponder equipped vessel by other vessels so equipped.

We now consider the Electronics suite on the Makai complete.