We get off our boat, into our dingy and motor to the dock to check in with Grenada customs.
We found land. Ahoy!! What a great day!!!
We grabbed a mooring ball at Prickly Bay Marina. This marina has customs and immigration on-site (So does Grenada Marine but only on Tuesdays & Thursdays) which makes it easy to clear into the country. What’s not easy, getting a mooring ball – like the technicalities of it – still learning but we are 2/2 with LOSING our boat hook and Mike having to dive into the water to retrieve it. I digress.
We check into customs and immigration ( two desks side by side) and decide to have breakfast at the marina – our first real meal in 3 days!!
Then it hits us while sitting at the restaurant…” Miiiiike……are we moving???” “Miiiiiike I’m dizzy”.
Typical with boat passages is how you gain your sea legs…even when you make it to land. You feel like you are constantly moving. Weird. But it went away. Anyways, lets get to the good stuff.
We are cleared into the country. We motored (with one engine – starboard engine still angry and overheating) to Grenada Marine, where we have a spot reserved on the dock….*almost*. Mike did his best to end the trip on a high note but with some problematic wind as we made our approach we might have kissed the dock as one would when docking for the second time ever (and by “we might have kissed the dock” I mean we made out with the dock full on – oopsie daisy)… It’s not truly yours until you have dented it, right? BUT still, we have arrived and praise ourselves we have gotten over the hard part and have arrived at our destination!
Naturally, there is a beach bar on-site. That helps.
We have never owned a boat that needs to be stored. We have never owned a catamaran. We have been in possession of our boat for one week. So here’s where the fun begins.
We googled everything that needs to be done. Some obvious, some not. We made lists of daily tasks and daily rewards (beer). We were prepared or so we thought. There is A LOT that needs to happen for a haul out.
The purpose of taking the boat out of the water and storing it on land is to prepare the boat for long-term (outdoor, hot and humid) storage.
So the basics are to protect this beast inside and outside.
Main tasks were the obvious – clean water rinse everything that has been in contact with salt water. Soooo everything outdoors – sooooo the entire outside of boat / sails / cockpit enclosure, helm enclosure, lines (ropes) there must have been easily a dozen, cushions, etc. Then once they are cleaned, they need to be fully dried and put away inside the boat- its the wet season in Grenada so once you think you have everything washed and ready to be dried – it torrential downpours and you start from scratch – sideways rain is a real thing here! You see blue skies and it’s raining…
Other things to do include remove mainsail and genoa (the mainsail weighs prob close to 250lbs..) and wash and pack them.
Bag everything interior that is susceptible to the humidity (clothes, towels, bedding, pillows) and then dry the inside of the boat as best you can, including the bilges where water collects, as well as the two fridges, freezer and ice maker.
Us Canadians would call it “winterizing” but this needs to happen to the 2 diesel engines, generator, toilets, washing machine, water maker, outboard engine for dinghy and batteries…the list goes on. But not only doing the actual work was a pain, but learning how all the systems work was a challenge too ie. how to “pickle” the water maker.
To add to the list, fixing things that were working and then weren’t (air conditioner lost its prime, refrigerator froze, ice maker was making ice with odd particulate in it, one of the hatches was leaking) and doing jobs over and over again (bilges appear wet after being bone dry the day before, air conditioner produced water that leaked inside 2 other compartments that needed to be dried up…)
You also have to secure everything so it doesn’t disappear or get damaged by the weather (dinghy, outboard engine, kayak, SUP, coolers, bbq, other sh*t we have onboard that seemed awesome to have and now we have to figure out how to store it!)…it may not seem like a lot but by the day we left….we were DONE, like mentally and physically ca-put.
We worked our butts off for 8-10 hours a day getting all this prepped yet we never felt we were done or had done a good enough job.
It was also 7000 degrees outside, humid, intermittent rain and bugs that love to bite.
We have NEVER sweat so much ever. EVER. Like EVER.
I love the sun and I just wanted that sun to disappear behind the clouds all day! Wah wah wah. You have a boat, why are you complaining? – it was bloody hard labour intensive work and we had a very tight time frame (now that we know the process, we would have given ourselves an extra 2 days which would have reduced the stress and workload significantly).
This was not the dream. Why do people buy boats???? They are crazy!! (this was going through my head constantly)
Ok, reality check – this isn’t something that happens every year. There will be maintenance that happens onboard but a haul out and storage is a very different level of labour intensive work. As we will be cruising, we *shouldn’t* have to haul out and store for a very long time!!
So it’s home time to Toronto now.
The boat is stored on the hard and it is as prepared as it can be. We also opted for the basic package to have marina staff check on it monthly just for our peace of mind….as well as tackle a few jobs that we aren’t capable of doing (solve the starboard engine coolant problem, inspect the sails, fix a soggy locker).
The plan is for Mike and someone to go down and prepare the boat to launch back in the water for mid October – I will follow with the kids a week or two later once everything has been put back together….If it’s anything like preparing the boat to come out of the water, I think Mike got the short end of this stick!
