Moving to new boatyard

The boatyard where I started working on Whimsy has decided to gentrify, cater to big fancy catamarans and open a seafood restaurant. Needless to say DIY-type liveaboard types were no longer welcome and we were given a deadline of Nov 30 to leave the yard. Which is too bad because it was a great location, very centrally-located to all the stores I regularly visited plus relatively close to my storage lockers where I keep my tools and supplies.

St John's River

Unfortunately the new yard is not nearly so well-situated, though only 30 minutes West of my previous location. The nearest store is a 20 minute drive; the nearest hardware store is an ACE branch that is not really adequately stocked compared to the large Lowes and Home Depot I used to visit, and getting to my storage unit is a pretty long drive. Not to mention the new yard is almost twice as expensive and the boats are jammed together quite tighly (that may resolve as more of the snow-bird Canadians splash their boats soon.)

On the more positive side, the new boatyard is obviously more oriented towards the DIY crowd. There are grizzled old snaggle-toothed guys here who look like they've been working on boats their entire lives. Actually some of the boats here look like they're pretty permanently on-the-hard too. Yet there are plently of cruisers -- lots of Canadians -- who are working diligently on their boats from early in the AM when the rooster crows (yes, there are chickens and ducks running around too) 'til dusk and sometimes into the night, sanding and polishing and painting things. It reminds me of the mothership scene in Water World, the post-apolocalyptic movie with Kevin Costner. 

But I see all this as just further encouragement to get going and finish up my project.

More importantly, this yard allows people to do their own bottom-jobs (though no blasting) so that allows me to save a lot of money rather than having a yard do it. The estimates I was hearing were well over $2500. The cost of the move to the new yard was $1400 but apparently most of that is in the loading/unloading of the boat, the mileage itself is quite reasonable. That means that I could have kept going south to a boatyard that was a in a warmer clime  - and I may still do so, since I can't paint the boat with the average temps around here for Jan and Feb. On the other hand, there are enough other  projects to keep me busy until the weather warms up.