Hauling out...

Being in the Caribbean these days it is a bit of a six of one, half dozen of another situation as things cost more but it's still fairly easy to keep to a budget if you are handy. That said, there are dark clouds on the horizon...

Our favorite boat yard in St Martin just came up with the bright idea of not allowing owners to do any work below the waterline when hauled out. This adds a big chunk of change to a one-week haul out. Enough so that most likely we won't be using the yard in question.

Funny thing is that this year I was actually considering having the yard folk do part of the bottom work as I had a couple of other projects that I needed to fit in to the haul out window this year. Being forced to use the yard folk on the other hand just does not sit well for a couple of reasons...

One, being that in my forty-odd years of hanging around, working and being worked on in various yards all over the world, I know something about boat yards. Good workers do not sand and paint bottoms. It's an awful job and almost always gets relegated to the worst guy in the yard and, in my experience, the worst guy always seems to cause as much damage as actual work. I've seen holes sanded through hulls, paint not mixed and waterlines painted that looked like the current stock market charts. The only way to survive such boatyard talent is to stand behind them and supervise every step of the way. Which in all fairness they don't like anymore than you do. So much for those other projects you wanted to do... like the new hard dodger you wanted to build! Throw in the always possible scenario that the guy doing your bottom work could easily get deported for being an illegal and your one-week haulout might turn into two, three or more weeks does not exactly inspire confidence!

The other thing is, that it is the skinny part of the wedge... Today they don't let you work on your boat and tomorrow they require you to buy the paint from them and so it goes.

But boats are neat in that you simply point the pointy end towards someplace more accommodating somewhere else, and there is always a somewhere else! When enough people do it and let the yard know just why they won't be doing a haul out there in time they will hopefully change their tactics and once again let you do the work needed the way it should be done. On the other hand, if they don't, you may have found an even better place somewhere else.

Speaking of somewhere else... We plan to be sailing up to New England and the Chesapeake for the coming "H" season and one of the places we will not be stopping on the way up or on the way back down to the Caribbean is Florida, whose various anti-cruising/anchoring silliness means that we will not buy stuff from chandleries, not do dinners out, not spend money in shopping malls, not pay to see movies, and not pay one red cent to the coffers of the late great state of Florida... We will however wave as we go by!