March 23 - March 30, 2024
Brunswick, Georgia
Utopia is now on the hard in a boatyard and we have been residents of Red Roof Inn for a nearly a week.
Pre Haulout
Although our haulout was scheduled for Monday, we moved Utopia over to the haulout well two days early due to concerns of winds building through the weekend and through Monday. Once there, we continued to prepare the boat for long term storage.
The prior owner gave us a copy of his decommissioning list when we purchased Utopia which has been very helpful for us. I will admit there are several items on the list we performed without knowing exactly why were doing it. And of course, we’ve also made a few mistakes along the way, like discovering that we performed a few tasks out of order, creating some extra work for ourselves.
Haulout Day
About 4 a.m. Monday morning, Baxter woke us up by running forward and aft inside of the cabin making little trilling noises. I recognized this odd meow as his “Hey there stranger, I want to be friends with you” sound and figured we had a guest onboard. Sure enough, in the morning we discovered that a racoon had left a set of muddy footprints on the deck. The prints show that it investigated our open portlights and that it also jumped into the cockpit. I am glad it was gone before sunrise.
We had arranged to have our holding tank emptied on Sunday, the day before the lift. The guys running the mobile pump out showed up on Thursday, with an apparent miscommunication; this should have been a warning sign… When we explained that we requested the pump out for Sunday, they talked us into waiting until Monday morning stating that the fee is significantly higher for a weekend pump out, plus they had plans for the weekend. So, they told us that they would be at the haulout dock at 7:30 a.m. since our lift was scheduled for 8 a.m. Sure enough, nobody showed up at 7:30 on Monday morning. Jimmy made a few phone calls and was told somebody should be on the way. By 8 a.m., the boat yard crew had moved the travel hoist over to the well only to have to wait for the pump out boat. The boat yard manager also made a few phone calls and eventually a guy showed up and pump out our holding tank. Unfortunately, because of the delay, we were unable to flush it out as we had originally requested.
Now for the very positive experience of the haulout. As soon as the pump out boat disconnected from Utopia, Jimmy and I had to get off the boat, leaving Baxter behind to go for a ride. The boat yard team was extremely professional as they gently walked our heavy boat into the haulout well with gusting winds, then lifted her out of the water. Once out, they pressure washed the bottom and moved Utopia to her summer home.
Post Haulout
Now that Utopia was out of the water, we were able to review the condition of the bottom paint. Last year when we had the boat hauled out in St. Peterburg to replace the shaft seal, the yard manager mentioned that we might have a problem with our paint, so we were prepared for the possibility of bad news. It appears that at some time in the past, a hard paint was placed over ablative paint, and this is now causing the paint to pop off. With a lot of discussion on what to do, we have elected to have the yard sand down to the old ablative layer and repaint with ablative paint. Note, that this yard does not allow boat owners to perform any work below the waterline, so we could not do this work ourselves if we had the time to do so. It is more expensive this way, but it also works out with our backpacking schedule. Photos of the bottom are available in the decommissioning photos, link below.
With the haulout on Monday, we thought we had a full week available to prepare the boat for long term storage before heading off to a water conference the following Monday. However, we discovered that not only is the yard completely closed on weekends, but that they were also closed for Good Friday. This knocked down our seven workdays to four! With this news, we started to skip or defer many items on our decommissioning list. Since rain was expected on Wednesday & Thursday, we spent Monday afternoon and Tuesday focused on the outside tasks. Then Wednesday and Thursday would be used to tackle in inside tasks.
At the end of the day Monday, we lowered Baxter off the boat and took him to his new home: The Red Roof Inn. There are not a lot of hotels that will allow a cat to stay, but Red Roof Inn advertises that they are pet friendly and we needed to find an affordable place for a full week. At first Baxter had to get used to being in a new place with new scents and sounds. After about a day, he appears to have adjusted nicely. In fact, we wonder if he loves having the extra room to run around when he is not sleeping.
By Tuesday afternoon we had accomplished a good bit of our outside task list when I started to clean the fenders before storing them away. At the time the fenders were tied onto the top of the hard dodger, and I decided that was a good place as any to wash them. This required that I stand on the combing and hold on to a grab bar with my free hand. Well, I ended up mis-stepping down from the combing, twisting my ankle as I fell to the deck. This incident scared me on many levels. Some thoughts that entered my mind included: did I break something in my foot? If so, how do I get off the boat? Is this going to cause me to cancel the backpacking trip? Where do we live if our boat is in a yard and we cannot backpack? We have so much work to do to get the boat ready for storage! And so on… I was rather mad at myself for being careless. To attempt to shorten the story, I am happy to say that I think that all will be okay. Today, five days later, most of the swelling is gone although my foot is rather purple, and that is after I continued to work on the boat until Thursday afternoon, when the yard shut down for the weekend.
With the yard shut down for three days, we have decided to take advantage of having some downtime before things get very busy for us, giving my foot more rest time. Tomorrow morning, we will head to Utopia one last time to button up a few remaining items. Then we’ll go back to the hotel to pick up Baxter and drive down to Kissimmee to attend the Florida Water Resources Conference where Baxter will stay with a sitter for four nights. After the conference we head to Tallahassee for a few days before taking off for Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina. But more on all of that in another post.
Since it was a pretty big work week, we do not have many photos. I did take the time to separate decommissioning & project photos from the rest of our photos, so feel free to examine what you would like. New photos in the Brunswick folder begin on March 23.