It’s been so long since we’ve been in a boatyard I’d forgotten how social the environment is. Maybe it’s because there are so many boats thrown together for a brief period of high energy, maybe it’s because at the end of a day of hard physical labor you want to kick back with a coldie and bellyache about the long list of repairs, or maybe it’s just watching the bank balance drop precipitously and not caring anymore, who knows? In any case we end up having some fine times in the company of other cruisers whenever we pull in to get some much needed work done.
Our first boatyard experience in St. Augustine brought us together with the Boyer family, previous owners of Anything Goes. Then it was Moana Roa and the Haynes clan in Trinidad, and the Jameson/Fitzgerald troublemakers of Toucan in Whangarei. All memorable experiences that took the hurt out of hard work and draining pocketbooks.
This time, with two side-by-side boatyards and hundreds of boats coming and going every week, we had some fun meet-ups at one marina or the other. Most of the boaters were long-distance cruisers like us, but everyone was welcome at our potlucks at the barbie and often included local folks as well. It’s the kind of international social mix we’ve come to love about this life.
One Sunday we took the day off and spent the afternoon in clean clothes enjoying outdoor music and inexplicable stiltwalkers at an nearby plaza.
Inbetween the happy hours and potlucks we not only got our engine woes banished, we also fixed our tired freezer, replaced a broken watermaker pressure gauge, and ticked off a bunch of other small projects that had been cluttering up the list. The only think we couldn’t get fixed was the generator which has been low priority since we rely completely on solar power for battery charging. We don’t like having something onboard that doesn’t work even if we don’t use it, but the consensus seems to be that it’s stuffed and we’re looking at a complete replacement. So for now, it’ll stay on the list, to be dealt with after we win the lottery.
Meanwhile, the boats come and go. And we’re definitely ready to go.
Of course the answer to the “If it’s aboard we want it to work” quandary is to throw it overboard! Or sell it, whatever. Once you don’t have it, you don’t have to fix it!