new ride: 2001 Ocean 43 sportfish

Here is our newest ride. We sold our 1989 Ocean 38 back in November and recently bought this 2001 Ocean 43 . She is powered by twin 465 hp yanmar 6CXE diesels. She was shipped from fort Lauderdale to St Lucia as deck cargo and then we ran her for the remaining 250 miles to Trinidad . here are some pics

Hi Capt J, yes the power options for the 43 were the 465 hp and then later 500 hp yanmar 6 cxe, Volvo 480 hp and some came with Cat C9 at 510 hp. I chose a boat with yanmars due to them being fully mechanical instead of electronic, and there is also a pretty good yanmar dealer network down here in Trinidad . At 2200 rpm I was cruising at 21 knots and when i ran up to a 2400 rpm cruise I saw 24 knots. I havent run her too much flat out, but I believe she should do close to 28 knots with half fuel. The bottom is in pretty bad condition and is due to be stripped down to hull within the next few months. that should help me to gain a few knots. I will post some more pics form the trip once I have a chance to resize them

Thanks Chesapeake, here is a better shot of her cleaned up and finally in her home cruising grounds

thanks Docjr, I hoepfully I get some more nice Shots as i continue ti make more trips out on the boat

thanks Capt J, she really does have nice lines, btw the hull isnt Ice Blue, its just the reflection of the water on the hull. However, you have given me an idea, and maybe an Ice blue hull could be done in the distant future

We finally got some time to haul out the boat for the first time this month. the bottom paint was in pretty bad shape when we bought the boat back in December, but with our busy schedule we postponed the job till this month so that we could spend some time learning and enjoying the boat a bit. here are some pics from the job. We stripped the hull down to gelcoat and then applied a barrier coat. after that we applied 2 coats of Carboline C FLex 50 VOC on the hull, with an additional coat at the waterline.

We managed to pick up a few knots in the process.!

Here is my Crew T shirt design. A buddy of mine is good at photo shop and we were able to draw this up using one of the line drawings from the boat manual

Thanks Cheseapeake. the hull work took about 9 days. which included, stripping, and sanding the entire bottom, and then applying the barrier coat and bottom paint. this also included removing the old boot stripe and painting a new one on. The work was done quite quick considering the amount of rain we had, which cost us about a day and a half

I went with a hard paint. Down here the barnacles are pretty bad, and we use a diver every two weeks to wipe the bottom. the hard paint seems to hold up pretty well to the cleaning. with our previous boat We went just over three years between haul outs with the paint still pretty intact save for areas close to the waterline where the primer was showing through. Since that area is exposed to the most sunlight the moss grows pretty quickly and requires more cleaning. So fingers crossed I should last 3 years and only need to touch up the waterline. here are some pics of the old boat after 3 years using the same Carboline hard paint

I finally managed to get some half decent running shots of the boat last weekend. Here she is running at a fast cruise of 25 Knots. I decided to stow the tender on shore as I didnt like how the boat looked with the dingy on the bow, plus this hull doesnt like much weight forward.