A tongue-in-cheek reflection on de-winterizing your boat and preparing for the boating season.
Ah, spring! The ice thaws, the sun shines, and millions of Americans hear the call of the open water, followed immediately by the call of their credit card companies. Yes, it’s time to de-winterize the boat—a process so simple and relaxing that the average boat owner can do it in a weekend or pay the marina your first-born for them to do it for you.
First, locate your boat. If the marina hauled it out and stored it for you, it should be a simple matter of walking through canyons of shrinkwrapped boats that all look the same until you find the one with the bent prop you caused last fall but forgot about until now. Too late to send to the prop shop, so press on.
Grab your utility knife and commence the wrestling match with your shrinkwrap. Ponder your life choices as you slice and dice the $1000 sheet of plastic that you had installed last November and are now throwing away. As you remove the single-use wrapping, you start to wonder how many carbon credits you need to offset the environmental impact of this operation.
Great, now you can step back and evaluate how dirty the boat got over the winter and start to search for what broke while the boat wasn’t being used. Hmm, doesn’t look too bad, you say, and you ponder how to get the hull waxed. The best option is to hire the teenager down the block, but you’ll have to find one that hasn’t seen “The Karate Kid.” Promise him 50 bucks for the job.
You grab your supplies, pick the kid up, and head to the marina. Set up a lawn chair with good visibility on the hull and place a cooler of cold ones next to your chair. After explaining the ‘wax on, wax off’ process, let the kid get to work. Between sips of your favorite lager be sure to helpfully point out all the spots he missed as he works his way around the boat.
Man, the hull looks great, or at least as good as a 17-year-old can make it, and you saved a lot of money that you can use to buy more boat parts. You’re ready to launch and in a week or two or a couple of months when the marina gets around to splashing you. Hooray! Now you can work on de-winterizing the engines.
Pop open the engine hatch and take a look. Are the engines still there? Great! Give them a good look over to make sure all the parts you had last fall are still there. Next, grab a wrench and get to work on the sprockets and gaskets. Tighten all the sprockets that are supposed to be tight and loosen the ones that should be loose. Do the same with the gaskets. Many rookie boat owners confuse the sprockets and gaskets because they kinda rhyme, but believe me, they are not interchangeable. The sprockets do the sprocking and the gaskets do the gasking. Don’t get this mixed up or you are asking for trouble.
Speaking of trouble, there’s something on the boat that broke over the winter, and it's your job to figure out what it is. Is the air conditioner conditioning, is the head heading, is the generator generating, and is the cooker cooking? Keep looking, it’s there. You don’t want to be out in the middle of the Bay when you find out the stereo can only pull in the disco station or that the bilge pumps mysteriously reversed their polarity over the winter and now pump water into the boat.
This is also the moment in time when you might discover what creature(s) have set up home base somewhere in the nooks and crannies of the vessel. If you are lucky, it’s only a nest of spiders, and if you are unlucky, a raccoon is now sharing your living space. If you have both critters taking up residence, you can only hope the raccoon eats the spiders or vice versa, and you only have to evict one of the pests.
Okay, everything seems to be working, at least you think so, so it's time for the shake-down trip. Make sure you have renewed your towing package and hit the water. This is when you really find out what broke, far from the convenience of your slip, your tools, your car, and the chandlery.
Head for your favorite spot and drop your anchor. Wait, the windlass doesn’t work?? Yes, you forgot to test that particular piece of equipment but, no matter, you might as well take the old girl a little further down the Bay and blow out that engine schmutz from the long winter nap. Ah, back on the water, what a great feeling! Just you and Rocky Raccoon!
Well, it’s time to head back to the slip and finish fixing what you just added to the list of brokens. That should keep you busy and your checkbook empty for a while. Enjoy your summer, and we’ll see you again in the fall when the winter storage, shrinkwrap, boat insurance, winterizing, and next season’s slip fees come due all at once. Buy a boat they said; it’ll be fun they said…
About the Author: Gary Armstrong, rear commodore of the Georgetown Yacht Club, is a longtime powerboater on the Chesapeake Bay, currently cruising on a Mainship 400 trawler with first mate, Terri, and their dog named Captain.