To me, doing yard work is like going to the gym. It’s an awful lot of work for the few fleeting moments of positive feeling you get from doing it! But unlike going to the gym, the yard work I’m talking about doesn’t improve your health one iota. In fact, I wear protective eye wear, clothing and a respirator to minimize the health risks associated from doing it. And it’s much worse than pulling weeds, spraying Roundup or spreading beauty bark!
I’m talking about the boaters’ ritual of hauling our boats out of the water every few years for a bottom job. For those that have never seen it, a huge machine slips two straps under Huzzah and plucks her modest 28,000 pounds from the sea and deposits her on land. Then a guy pressure washers the sea slime and critters from her bottom before she’s relocated to a large sheet of black plastic 20’ wide and 60’ long. She sits on her keel with 8-10 metal stands positioned around her to ensure she doesn’t fall over while I sand the underwater surfaces and re-paint them with $300 a gallon copper paint. Everything about copper paint is toxic, and the Department of Ecology is trying to ban it. But for now however, it’s the only thing that works. So we all don our protective gear and a use special sander with vacuums to collect as much copper dust as possible. The real yachtie types with money hire this work out, of course. But for us DIY’ers, we do it because we can and we save lots of $$$. But we hate it!
So that’s what I did for three weeks this past June. The pictures show the net result, offer a glimpse into the dark side of boat ownership for the average boater.