Friday May 1: Storage Time

 The plan worked pretty well.

Yesterday morning the yard guys were ready for us right at 11 am. We had most everything packed up with just the fridge and freezer needing to be finished up.

First thing was to pull the boat from the water using a mobile hoist.

Second was to transfer the boat to a hydraulic trailer. This would allow the boat to be placed under one of the metal supported canvas covered storage units.

The mobile hoist is fine if it doesn't matter how close one boat is to another but you can see how much wider the hoist is than the boat - so lots of lost space if the trailer isn't used.

Almost done. Back the trailer into our space (carefully I might add as there is not a great deal of room on either side of us).

The last step will be to lower the boat onto wood blocks and then balance the boat using very large adjustable jack stands.

Perfect!

Yesterday's Dream is now tucked nicely away in a north facing covered space (important because there will be less sun directly on the boat).

A few more things (like take the flybridge canvas down) and we'll be ready to go.





Steve came up with the idea of using the boat hook to hand all of our stuff down. I was just going to toss it over the side - fortunately once again Steve saved us from one of my bad ideas :-)

Worked well.

Car was loaded up and we were off to Tampa for a flight back to the farm.

List of things to do when we return in October: repaint the front hull where the muddy waters from the ICW has stained the front. After a couple of years the paint becomes too porous to block the stain - so sand and repaint.

This and many other maintenance things will be done when we return.

In the meantime, it's time to get Guppy uncovered and ready to travel the Canadian water!

Back to blogging in a few weeks .....