doing the boatyard two step...

You have to admit 84% and no perp walks is some kind of impressive (who says crime doesn't pay?), musical chairs, and it appears Bruce has something to say...

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time researching the costs involved for our next haulout and, to be honest, it was not fun reading.

Seriously, it's nuts when hauling my boat into a boatyard for a week costs about the same or more than going to an all-inclusive resort. Of course, where boatyards are concerned, it's impossible to use the words all-inclusive and boatyard in the same sentence...

Boatyard rates these days are so complicated with their various nickel and dime schemes/extras/minimums and restrictions you really need a Cray computer on steroids to figure out what a week on the hard is going to cost you.

One yard we've hauled at before gives you in and out and two free laydays for $450, but then, there is the cost of popping six jack stands under the boat, electricity, liveaboard fee, extra laydays, etc so by the end of the process a week on the hard doing all your own labor is costing you more like $1400. Ouch!

As for those two included "free" laydays, well, if past experience is anything to go by, they keep you waiting all day (as I recall be here by 8:00 sharp were the words used) but won't actually get you out of the water till the end of the business day you haul and will insist that they launch you somewhere around sunrise the day you go in... Pretty much making your two "free" laydays as useless as that aspirin between the knees that Santorum dude keeps going on about.

Once on the hard it does not get any better... Well, that is unless you actually enjoy wallowing in filth and toxic waste which seems to be something of a de riguer part of the whole hauling in the Virgin Islands experience.

I could go on about charging you as much as $150 a can for using your own paint and not buying it at the so called discount yard shop or the fact that the reversed polarity yard wiring may just eat your tools or give you a cardiac arrest (if the boatyard contract/quote had not already) but what's the point...

The thing is, there simply has to be a better way... Ya think?

More about that tomorrow...

Listening to Flogging Molly

So it goes...