Help Alan Retire at 85

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I guess I really don't need to go on and on about the cold - but we should see a bit of real snow today - not the teaser we had on Monday. Thank goodness for little electric heaters! The one I am using is quite old and I may have to pick up a more modern energy efficient model. Every time the price of gas goes up, the price of electric seems to follow. We keep finding heaters plugged up on boats that are winterized. Electric is not included in storage costs and we do have to pass the cost along to the users.

Don't Let This Happen To You

We had a good offer on a large boat yesterday which almost fell through because the owner had not done the scheduled maintenance on the engines. If you think this is not important consider how it impacts resale as it almost did on this boat. As you can see, the fuel filters were last changed in 2007 - 1600 hours ago!


Also, set your way back machine to yesterday to my Top Five List about rust. These types of problems do raise flags at survey.


Needless to say, the scheduled maintenance and some of the other survey items are at the top of our work list to get this sale through.

Update 11am
Snow is coming down quite smartly now!

And it continues as you can see in the forecast above. Fortunately, we are in much better condition than we were this time last year as far as having boats pulled and winterizing done. In fact, we have sort of a liberal leave going on - if you don't want to work out in the cold, you can stay home - at least until winter work begins.  And since there are still no good photo ops, I have to continue with my Top Five lists - just to have something to put up or maybe just to enlighten - you be the judge.

Top Five Reasons to take care of rust.

1. Rust shortens the life of the equipment it is found on
2. Rust travels to adjacent equipment
3. Rust diminishes the resale value of your boat
4. Rust flakes get down in the bilge and get picked up by your bilge pump
5. Rust intrudes underneath the paint and becomes hidden further into the equipment

That's my list and I'm sticking to it!
You may remember this photo from last winter:

It's officially too cold for me to go outside and take pictures. Not that there is anything going on to actually take a photo of. All the boats were hauled yesterday except one small sailboat that will probably be taken out today. Everyone is back doing last minute items on winterized boats and checking to make sure nothing was missed because it is just cold.

I had put a little blurb on the Broker's Corner stating that Jen would be taking over that section of the site but I noticed that nothing has been posted so we may have to abandon that section if there is no action there by the new year. I do some things in mind to do here after the holidays to make the blog a better resource. I did not have many responses on the poll about making comments and unless there are a lot of requests I am inclined to abandon that because I would have to constantly monitor for spammers.

If you are thinking about what you need to do to your boat over the winter, here are the Top Five Reasons to have your bilges cleaned:

1. Dirty bilges create odors
2. It is hard to tell if you have leaks if your bilges are dirty (especially oil)
3. It indicates bad housekeeping on the owners part
4. Dirty bilges will be stained if not cleaned on a regular basis
5. If water gets high, oil and diesel could be pumped overboard with the oil

 
You may remember this photo from last winter:

Well it has started - the first snow of the season. One of our customers from Wisconsin has evidently sent it our way. And although it is barely cold enough to snow now, I don't expect to see temps out of the 30's for a while. The tides have finally returned, albeit a bit lower than normal - it is enough to finish the sailboats awaiting haul-outs. The snow did not show up in this photo, but believe me, it is there.



We did start off today fixing the "big boy" pressure washer. It has been out of action for several weeks, during the rush, because we did not have the mechanic available to repair it. Now that things have calmed down a bit, we found that it was an easy fix.


We finished up the Bristol skiff as I said the other day but we did notice the console is pulling up from the floor. This is just installed with self-tapping screws into fiberglass. Vibrations from running the boat distort and weaken the attachment. There is just not enough thickness in most fiberglass to support this type of fastener for this sort of application.


Whenever you remove trim, there is a certain about of clean up on the part before reinstalling it - in some cases more than others depending on the compound used .

Low attendance today, a lot of them are coming in tomorrow to haul boats. The water is finally coming back and there should be normal tides tomorrow. There should also be a high of 42 degrees tomorrow, which will also help improve morale of the guys stuck working outside. I still can't say when we will be shut down for the holidays - evidently we are on a need-to-know basis.

We did a stove swap out yesterday. The owner had an electric stove and wanted a propane. This makes sense if you are away from shore power and don't want to start the generator every time you want to cook.


Oh, that's going to leave a mark! We noticed this little bumper over the stove where something has gone terribly awry. I'm not sure if the heat has melted the bumper or if something brown was used to adhere it. In any case, there will be scarred varnish beneath.


On this boat we want to take care of some water stained plywood beneath the pilot house door. What we found was delamination. The edges of the plywood had not been sealed and water worked it's way down inside. This means replacement. We had to do a lot of searching to find a piece of plywood that matched what was there.


The skiff was completed except for the varnish work. Since we had trim left, we were experimenting with adding a nice teak border around the helm area of the console.


Anything Can Happen Friday
If you are still having a dilemma trying to find that perfect gift for the boater in your life, you may want to check out the Boatsafe blog.  He has a gift a day which began on December 1 and I assume will go until December 24th - although if you haven't found a gift by then you may as well accept your fate.