To all you armchair sailors and wannabe boaters out there: Next time you’re flipping through one of those slick boating magazines and dreaming about the carefree life of a live aboard cruiser, try spending a few days in a boatyard to get a true idea of what keeping up a boat is like. Am I glad that’s over!

Monday afternoon (November 5^th) we made the turn off Highway 80 into the cow pasture leading to Glades Boat Storage, where Pura Vida had spent the last seven months out of the water. Tom parked the van, dragged the stepladder out, and set it up at the swim platform. Then we climbed up for a look. “It’s green,” was all I could manage to say. The formerly white fiberglass was covered with mildew from top to bottom, in a lovely green color, except for the windows that had canvas coverings on them - they had black mildew on them. A clan of hornets had moved into a locker to build their nest and various dead critters (like love bugs and spiders) lay sprinkled about. We cringed. I set off an insect fogger and we found a room for the night.

Next day, armed with bleach, buckets and brushes, we dug in, me on the inside, Tom on the outside, but our energy ran out before the daylight did. We fell into bed at sundown. Tom devoted the next day to preparing the hull for painting, i.e., scrubbing it with hull cleaner and a brush and knocking barnacles off the prop, shaft, and rudder. The boatyard is covered with a layer of crushed rock, not the most comfortable bed to lie on, but I made an attempt to chip some barnacles too. With the prop and shaft just a foot or two off the ground, I scooted under the hull and chipped away at clusters of the little crustaceans that had super-glued themselves to the surface, while bits and pieces of the shells flew into my eyes and mouth. I chipped until I could chip no more and wondered why we ever bought a boat in the first place.

After that, leaks in through-hull fittings (below deck) had to be addressed. I squeezed into a pocket-sized hatch and then, working one-handed in the dirty little chamber, unclamped hoses until they unleashed their slimy gray water on me, while Tom resealed fittings from the other side with 5200.

   Tom, preparing my dungeon. 

Then there was the bottom paint. As always, Tom did the lion’s share, but I did enough to get a sore neck and I ended up spattered with reddish brown paint. That night I looked at my arm and couldn’t tell the paint spots from scabbed-over scratches I got the day before.

The best thing about the week was outstanding weather: sunny warm days, cool nights, and low humidity, which, for most of the year in Florida, is remarkable.  After a week of slave labor, Pura Vida started to look like home again and she was happy to be placed back in the water. The old Perkins fired right up and we headed east on the Okeechobee Waterway under gray skies spitting occasional sprinkles, and increasing winds.

The day ended just east of the Clewiston Lock, but the waterway was too narrow to drop anchor. A small dock at the city park would have been fine except that when the boat got close enough to loop onto a cleat, the bottom scraped a hidden rock – I should say, the bottom with brand new $245/gallon paint on it! The only remaining possibility we had to attach to something for the night was a row of six or seven dolphins, and I couldn’t see how that would work. Tom said he would get close to the pilings and I should grab one and tie a line around it. That meant, as the boat was sliding by, I was supposed to hang over the rail, grab onto one of these telephone poles that was full of slivers, covered with creosote and slanted away from me, hold onto it, and then tie a line around it. Not surprisingly, I failed. Then he tried something else. Instead of coming alongside the pilings, he approached bow first so I was able to grab onto a fat rope hanging from a cleat long enough to hold us in place. Then he came up and managed to reach around the pole with the line. Still, the wind blew us perpendicular to the shore and we stuck too far out into the waterway; an overnight barge passing by would have made mincemeat out of us. So Tom rigged up a spring line, wrapped it around another pole, and bumped the engine until the stern came in far enough to keep us out of the channel. He thinks he’s so smart.

Skipper Bob’s anchorage book says it’s buggy there and he wasn’t kidding. Mosquitoes were fierce and in the morning we woke up to piles of some kind of little winged bugs that had expired all over the deck overnight.

There’s some strange scenery along the waterway. A few years ago the Army Corps of Engineers burned all the slash pines in the area because they aren’t native to Florida, which left dead stumps of varying shapes and sizes. Now, creeping vines have grown up to cover all those stumps, creating an eerie landscape, like Martian trees.

(click on pictures to enlarge)