Boat Yard Blues

View out to sea, from the boat yard.

Our boat is presently sitting out of the water in a boat yard - “on the hard” in boat-y parlance.   And it must be said: this is NOT an enjoyable place to be.  Boat yards are by nature dirty, sweaty, uncomfortable places filled with hard working people and a menagerie of machinery: engines, cranes, forklifts, travel-lifts, and tools of all types.  And boatyards are inhabited by mostly grimy humans working on boats of all varieties, and in all sorts of disrepair (both the people, and the boats).  At every turn you find people grinding, sanding, polishing, scraping, bonding, glueing, pounding, drilling, screwing, unscrewing, sweating, and often swearing.

 

Jamie checks out the travel-lift.

Our boat, On the Hard

There’s a certain camaraderie in boat yards, a certain conviviality that comes from shared misery, especially in “nice” boat yards where “nice” people are working on “nice” boats.  Unfortunately, this is not a nice boat yard.  Nope, this place is a pit.  Yes, there are a few nice boat-owning folks scattered about (especially at the moment, as Key West Race Week begins in a few days), but this is not a place you want to spend an extended length of time.  

Julian: Hard worker.  And dirty.

Local color.

"Nice" boat owner.  Slightly dirty.

Some guy from Norway.  Also dirty

Did I mention that it’s dirty?  Mike Rowe needs to film a segment of “Dirty Jobs” here.  And, might I add, there are no amenities in this yard.  Although, they have made some improvements here since we last visited: there are now toilets. That flush.  And showers!  (Yes, a shower sounds lovely after a day of semi-toxic grime has accumulated on the flesh....except that the shower room has no ventilation of any sort.  A steam-pit hot-box, in a place where the temp hovers around 82 degrees with 82 percent humidity so that you are just as sticky after the shower as you were before.  But at least the water is wet, and you smell a little less.)

To add insult to injury, a phalanx of no-see-umms and mosquitos inhabit the nearby mangroves.  And the bugs are hungry.  We have the welts to prove it.  

Jamie and some boat yard junk.

Crane lifting a mast on to a boat getting
 ready for Key West Race Week.

And so, here we are, in a place that on some days feels a bit like one of Dante’s Nine Circles.  We are here because we have work to do; maintenance that needs to be done so that Points Beyond can keep it’s “nice” boat status, with amenities.  Tasks that need to be done so that the boat is clean, tidy, and organized.   Projects to be completed like a nicely polished prop, a fresh coat of bottom paint, a perfectly purring diesel engine, new solar panels, an updated refrigeration system, and fully charged batteries.  And, yes, working toilets and showers.  

Dante's detritus.

Here are some thoughts on boat yard living from Brady:

Life in a Boat Yard - by Brady

Life in a boat yard can be difficult or fun but sometimes it’s miserable!  Like when it is 90 degrees and extremely humid while you are breaking your back, sweating in the engine room.  But it all pays off when you get to go and see awesome and new places.  Now it’s not that miserable.  Now it’s perfect and sunny , but the mosquitos are the biggest problem and we put on bug spray to stop them and that seems to work.  

Lots of people wonder how we work on the boat out of the water.  Well I will tell you.  There is a huge machine called a travel-lift that lifts up boats and puts them on wooden blocks.  The boat is kept from falling over  with metal stands.  Here is a picture of some boat stands.  

 We took our boat out of the water because we need to work on a couple of jobs, like taking off the propeller because it needed to be worked on.  We also need to paint the bottom with bottom paint.  Bottom paint is a special kind of paint that keeps barnacles and other stuff from growing on the bottom of our boat.  Here are some more pictures of the boat yard. 

Air Conditioned.  And Landscaped.