After sitting at Sunrise Harbor Marina for 18 months trying to sell
M/V Thunder, a 70-foot Delta expedition-style yacht, it came as no surprise when the owner announced that it was time to get Thunder back to the Pacific coast, the environment she was designed for.

Since the submerge-emerge-and-haul-'em boys were booked for several months, I began shopping the market to ship the yacht another way.

Neal Esterly of Fraser Yachts in San Diego has had repeat success with Yacht Path International of Palm Beach Gardens. Since Esterly was the new listing broker, Yacht Path became the point company for shipping Thunder to Easterly's dock on Shelter Island.

The day before the scheduled lift of Thunder onto the mother ship's deck, I phoned Dennis Cummings, one of Yacht Path's three sibling owners.

"Hey Dennis," I said. "I am surprised I have not heard from anyone within your organization as to Thunder's statistics."

"No worries," he assured me. "We got it all from the broker."

Uh-huh.

"You know that Thunder weighs 118 tons in the slings," I pointed out. I just wanted to be sure because other companies I had called before Yacht Path always seemed to care about that little bit of data.

"No, she doesn't," he said. "She's 56 tons. The broker told me so."

That set the relationship off to an interesting start between Yacht Path and me. I showed up dutifully to witness that first ship never being able to lift Thunder. I waited five more weeks for a bulk grain carrier named Antares to arrive from the Med. Her cranes were not able to lift Thunder either.

The Cummings family, determined to honor its contract to deliver Thunder to as near to San Diego as possible, came up with a unique solution. Two shore-side cranes were hired to lift Thunder about 50 feet. Two of Ft. Lauderdale's largest tugs were hired to move Antares from her berth to a position alongside the dock where the cranes had Thunder suspended in the air.

Then, very gently working in unison, the crane drivers lowered Thunder onto the deck of Antares. The six-hour, happily uneventful process was handled by Kevin Cummings, a man of the highest standards and work ethic of ultra precision. His orchestration of the loading of Thunder onto Antares was flawless.

Antares was off through the Panama Canal with scheduled drop-off points in Golfito, Costa Rica; Manzanillo, Mexico, and Ensenada.

Unfortunately, there are no shore-side cranes in Ensenada that could handle Thunder, so we unloaded in Manzanillo. I assembled my team of Michael Holliday, a colorful San Diego captain/engineer, and Thunder's Mate Brad Morford and we flew to Manzanillo to take Thunder up the Baja to San Diego.

Our stay in Manzanillo awaiting Antares was restful. The only marina available is at the Las Hadas hotel, famous for the filming of "10," Bo Derrick's bathing suit movie of yesteryear. Eerily, the hotel plays the movie 24/7 on one of the six channels in the room. This place is totally frozen in time.

Gabrielle Ramos is Yacht Path's agent in Manzanillo. Her bilingual skills made working with the agency painless, but she is new to the game so other issues must sort themselves out in time. She phoned Saturday and said we would unload at 3 p.m. Sunday.

At 8:15 a.m. Sunday after the crew had breakfast and broke up to head in various directions for morning exercise routines, I got the call that Thunder was being launched and that we should head straight for the port.

After feverishly getting the hotel staff to start a grid search pattern for my crew, we rounded up the lads and headed excitedly for the port ¦ only to stand around for five hours and then be told at 4 p.m. that the cranes would not be available. We were to return the next morning at 9.

OK. I can be patient and understanding. How about a tour of Antares' engine room? The captain and chief engineer of Antares, both from the Philippines, were pleased that we were interested in their ship. The old girl has a BMW nine-cylinder engine with a piston throw of 1.9 meters. This is one tall engine.

The tour provided us with a lot of respect for what these guys have to tolerate in their work and living arrangements. We quietly thanked the White Boat Gods over dinner that night for our white boat universe.

After a good night's sleep and the breakfast routine, my cell phone rang at 7:20 a.m. It was Oliver, Yacht Path's British unloading engineer (also of the highest caliber) saying that the crane slings were in place, they were ahead of schedule and ready to launch, and where were we?

Again, we raced the 10 miles back to the port, only to find that a solenoid on one of the cranes had burned out and a spare was being installed. By 10 a.m., Thunder was lifted off Antares and the same cycle was repeated as in Fort Lauderdale: two tugs held Antares off the dock while Thunder was gently dropped into the water between the dock and Antares two crane drivers working in harmony.

No pressure here as I had to bring a very dead ship back to life in several minutes due to the tugs holding Antares off the dock. The crew and I had rehearsed the procedure several times verbally so within a couple of minutes, we had Thunder purring along in reverse to get out of the way of Antares redocking.

We headed to the port captain's dock where we were given a safety clearance to head to San Diego. The next step was Las Hadas marina to load 1,000 gallons of diesel, our frozen mahi mahi and fresh goodies, and then our immigration and customs clearance. By 4 p.m. the day of the unloading, we were blissfully at sea.

The Yacht Path experience was multi-dimensional. The company's entire team rose to each challenge. The Cummings family, including sister Colleen, was very accommodating and, in the end, Thunder was delivered to Manzanillo without any damage.

Seamless it was not. Cerebrally challenging, it was. But that's exactly how I like it.

Capt. David Hare bid farewell to M/V Thunder in August and has been in school getting certified as a dive master. He is interviewing deserving owners for his next adventure. Contact him at david@hare.com .