The new repairs were all finished and we were put back into the water again. This time everything looked pretty good. We didn’t see any leaks so we were moved by tug over to the docks so we could spend the night then do a sea trial and vibration analytics the next day. The next day we were preparing to do the sea trial but we just kept running into problem after problem. The first thing was that we needed to bleed the air from all the sea chests so we would not get any air in our systems. One of the sea chests valves was seized and needed to be replaced but the problem is it is before the through hull valve so it could not be shut off to be worked on. Because I had to deal with a similar situation with the science water valve of working on the through hull without closing it, I helped out the chief engineer with that project. When we got the bleeder valve off we had to hammer a wooden plug into the hole to stop the water from filling up the engine room. Luckily found a new valve that fit, and we were able to reattach without getting too wet. We then were ready to start the engine, but our port engine would not start. We figured out the problem seemed to be a bad battery. We replaced the battery. We got the engine started, but then we found that where the cooling water goes over bord was leaking at the through hull. So we had to try and fix that. We spent most of the day on it but couldn’t get it to stop leaking. We had some of the pipe fitters from the yard come and finish it. While they were working on that we found that cooling water wasnt getting to our dripless seals. So we had to take apart the water system for that and clear it. The pipe fitters finished working on the leak at around 8:30 at night we were going to still try and do the sea trail but then we found that there was an issue with our steering system. We worked on it till 9:30 and decided to just finish it in the morning. The next day we started out working on the steering system. The problem was the angle of the rudders were not lining up with the controls. So we had to re-calibrate everything. We didn’t finish up with that until around 1PM. We then could get under way with our sea trial and vibration analysis to make sure everything was good.
We then headed back towards miami. We did the same watch schedule as before. The trip was pretty smooth with no issues. We arrived back in Miami on Monday morning. We spent Tuesday cleaning everything up. Then we had to prepare the ship to go again. There was a hurricane forming and it was projected to hit Miami by Friday or Saturday. On Thursday we took the ship up the Miami River to Merril Stevens. We have a spot reserved there for when we need to shelter from a storm. The storm ended up going to the east of us and we did not get much bad weather at all.