The Opening Day of boating season is in May in the Pacific Northwest, here we are sitting middle of June and where is Docktails?
Let’s back up. Last September we were thrown through a loop when we called North Harbor Diesel to be hauled out for the end of season and learned they no longer had the warehouse we store Docktails for the winter. Finding moorage for a boat over 60′ in the Seattle area is hard, finding moorage for a boat over 60′ last minute is almost impossible. We put feelers out to all of our boating contacts to try to find moorage, and as luck would have it we found a unicorn! An 80′ boathouse in Maple Bay BC. We were happy to find covered moorage and a caretaker for the winter season with such extremely short notice.
Fast forward to December when the Pacific Northwest had a once-in-two-decades winter storm: over a foot of snow with a couple inches of freezing rain on top. We received the unfortunate phone call that the boathouse had collapsed from the weight of the snow and freezing rain, on our boat.
Once Docktails was extracted from the boathouse and at Philbrooks boatyard, the assessed damage was less than anticipated. The hardtop that Philbrooks had built in 2020 was built to last, and apparently hold the weight of a boathouse. It came out unscathed. Our forward teak rails came out almost completely unscathed with only one blemish. The three items that took the brunt of the boathouse collapse: Intellian Satellite Dish, Stainless Steel radar arch, and our Dishy tripod mount. Thanks to Tollycrafts great build and Philbrooks great craftsmanship of the hardtop, we were lucky to have minimal damage. It could have been much worse.
We already had a winter Honey-Do List for Philbrooks, so fixing the stainless steel radar arch, re-wiring everything that sits on the radar arch, along with a few cosmetic touch ups were added to the list.
Beginning in 2020 every winter we have done significant upgrades to Docktails; including fun things like retrofitting the galley and main salon, addition of the hardtop and vinturi facing forward instead of aft, enclosing the hardtop, Intellian satellite TV, Sonos surround system, Starlink, upgraded our Naiads for following seas, and necessary things like repairing and replacing the foredeck, new windows in the main salon and galley, repairing all portholes, replacing all stanchion screws, many fiberglass repairs on the top deck … do you see a theme for the necessary repairs? Unbeknownst to us we were Swiss cheese when we bought the boat, and hopefully this season we will finally be watertight.
The fun items for our 2023 Honey-Do List are: rewiring the boat for Victron lithium battery system and building a new display console on the flybridge to house two 16″ Simrad evo3 screens, new electrical panel and dashboard. The fun items are all electrical intense, and guess which department may be struggling to have enough employees? You got it: electrical. Staffing and supply chain are still real issues, even though the pandemic is now in the rear view mirror. We also still feel this pain in the restaurant business. Philbrooks told us it would be a push to get the boat re-wired for lithium batteries. However our AGMs struggled last season to last 24 hrs, with our batteries being critical each morning even with us turning off all superfluous systems at anchor. If we didn’t change over to lithium now, it’d be another four years before we’d have the chance to do so and that was not an option in our book.
So, here we are mid-June with three Philbrooks electricians working Saturdays, and a fourth working ten hour days, working meticulously to finish and test our new Victron lithium battery system with wake speed main engine sensors (second season all digital in the gauge department!), to finish the radar arch re-wiring from the boathouse collapse and the new flybridge display console configuration. A little behind schedule, but worth it to be happy clams at high tide in the big picture.