The reality of owning an old boat!

San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico

In case you were ever considering buying and living on an old boat, maybe this will help with your decision.

Today was the day of the big haul-out.  Everything went fine - these guys really do seem to know what they are doing.   Instead of a travel-lift like we have seen before, here they use a hydraulic trailer.  The Seca Marina work yard and storage yard are located about a kilometer away from the boat launch, reached via a drive down San Carlos boulevard.  While this seems to be a perfectly practical way of moving boats, it is still somewhat disconcerting to see your boat trucking down the highway at 10 kph or more.

Once we had the boat in the work yard and had a chance to see the bottom, the bad news started.  We knew we were living on borrowed time when we last painted it, back in Nanaimo - lots of new blisters were appearing and we decided to just paint over them at the time, leaving the major work till we were here in Mexico and could take advantage of the supposedly lower labour rates.  But now it was time to bite the bullet and deal with the problem.

Marina hiding in the desert

We have elected to have the bottom completely stripped down to fiberglass, have any needed repairs done, then have a new barrier coat applied before repainting the whole thing.  The expense, while not insignificant, is not really the issue - the problem is the time required to do this job properly.  Once the old layers are stripped off, the boat has to be left out of the water long enough to totally dry out.  At this point, they are unable to tell us how long this could be - anything from a few weeks to 6 months.  We will know more in a couple of weeks when everything is exposed.  Meanwhile we are basically without our home.  Yes, we could live on the boat in the boatyard but that has absolutely no appeal to us.  Spending the winter in Edmonton has almost as little appeal.  If the boat is out of the water for many months, it also means we will miss the majority of the winter cruising season in Mexico, which we had really been looking forward to.  Oh well, we will know more in a couple of weeks - we will defray the hard decisions until then.
 

{GMST}27|56.8825|N|111|03.3573|W|San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico|San Carlos,Sonora, Mexico{GEND}