Greg's Fishing Boats

When Greg was 19 and living in Hawaii he was living with a Hawaiian family. Every night they would go fishing. He lived there about six months and then came back to Santa Cruz. Greg thought fishing would be a good career. He went to Stewart Beach, Florida to a maritime academy to learn to be a captain. While he was gone, I bought the Bala, a 26 foot fishing boat with a diesel engine in it. When Greg returned it was the starting of salmon season. Kaye and Bonnie learned how to clean all those fish. I bought the 1985, one ton, Chevy truck to pull the Bala, so he could move the boat to different areas to fish. We bought a camper for the truck. Bonnie was pregnant with Jimmy at the time. They took the Bala up to Fort Bragg and berthed it on the Noyo River. Greg fished and they stayed in the camper. The Bala was too small to take out in bad weather or heavy seas. So Greg and I started looking for a larger boat that we could afford. I found a 46 foot steel boat with a diesel engine named the Kathleen Ann at Oakland and bought it. The owners of the boat brought it to Moss Landing Harbor where we docked it during the time we owned it. We took it out fishing and found it needed a lot of upgrading. We took the top house off because it made it top heavy. We replaced the top house with a nice steel fly bridge. The engine was a 670 GMV diesel which was fine. We put a new Izuzu auxiliary engine in for the electrical. We replaced  all the electrical wiring. We put rolling chalks on the bottom of the boat so it wouldn't roll so much. We replaced the mechanical steering with hydraulic steering. We replaced the drive shaft with a 2 1/2 inch stainless steel shaft and put on a new 3 blade prop in place of the old four blade prop. We replumbed the boat for fresh water. We completely gutted the cabin area. We put in a shower and toilet and fiberglassed it. We redid the whole cabin with oak-the walls, cabinets, nice kitchen area, bunks and captains area. It was so nice inside it looked like an expensive sport fishing boat inside. We put in all new electronics. When the boat was completed it looked beautiful. It had a black bottom and a white top. We renamed the boat the Liahona. The liahona was the name of the compass that guided the ancient people in the Book of Mormon. Kaye painted a picture of the liahona on the front of the fly bridge. Greg had designed exhaust to go up the mast so you didn't smell the fumes on the deck. Now it was time to go fishing so we put the boat in the water. Then the problems started to pop up. Our engine would only rec up to 1100 rpm. Normal running speed was 1800 rpm for that engine. We thought that we had restricted our exhaust system by running the exhaust up the mast, so Greg cut them off. This spoiled the looks of the system but we thought it was necessary. We were wrong. It was still 110 rpms. No one could give us the answer. Everyone told us it had to be the prop. We knew we had the right pitch and length of blades on the prop because we had sent the prop to a prop shop to have this propeller changed to the right pitch and length of blades for our engine. The prop shop polished it and stamped it with the proper pitch and length of blades. What we didn't know that they had done nothing except polish the prop and stamp it for $800. we had to pull the prop (which weighed a lot) off the boat again. We had pull the boat out of the water to do this. We didn't know the prop hadn't been done right, but we took it to Pitchometer Prop Shop in Oakland. It took 5 seconds for the fellow to see that they hadn't changed the pitch or the blade length. We took it back to the original prop shop to have them do it right. He denied that that was his stamp and said that we had forged it. I took it back over to Pitchometer Shop and they fixed it correctly. The boat ran perfect after that. We had most of the work on the boat done by a crook in Mass Landing. He double charged us and cheated us every way he could. I had to do a lot of the work that he had done over. I used Chuck Aldrech's company and got a judgement for $196,000. He immediately declared bankrupty and I got no money. My accountant said I had $500,000 into the boat altogether.