Boating is fun. Having a boat . . . not so much.

Saturday. Beautiful day. So we go down to the dock, hop in the boat and get ready to go, push the button to lower the boat lift . . . nothing. Battery’s dead. Okay, no big deal. We have a portable power pack we always bring along, just in case. Hook that up and . . . nothing. It was plugged in overnight and should have a full charge, but it’s dead. Okay, guess we won’t be going out today after all. Dean set up our solar panel, which we hadn’t set up this year because we’ve been planning to demo the dock and build a new one but didn’t know when exactly that would happen. Sunny day so the solar panel should charge it up.

Sunday morning. Big storm coming so we want to move the boat as far forward on the shore station as we can. The waves tend to hit it from the front and side, pushing it back. So we hit the button and . . . no power. Solar panel didn’t have enough time or sun to charge it and our portable power pack is officially a brick. Okay. Dean goes back to the house to get the jumper cables and we used the boat battery to jump the shore station, got the boat lowered, pulled it as far forward as we could and raised it back up. That’s pretty much all we can do to try to keep it secure.

Sunday afternoon/evening. The lake is a churning mass of whitecaps. Our neighbor calls to tell us “your boat’s really getting pounded.” We went down to check it out. Yeah, just as we feared. Huge waves from the northwest coming up under the boat, lifting it and pushing it back, then slamming it down again. But there isn’t much we can do. It is getting pushed back, but since it was so far forward to start with we’re hoping it will be okay.

When we left it Sunday afternoon, the bow extended about two feet over the dock on the right side of this picture. Here's where it was Monday morning.

Monday morning. Boat’s fine. One of our neighbors wasn’t so lucky. There’s a 34 foot boat belonging to a neighbor about half a dozen docks north of us washed up on its side on the shore south of our dock. Our boat was pushed way back, and the shore station was moved back about two feet as well, but it all looks okay. Until we take a closer look. The shore station is damaged. A bunk is broken and the support in the back middle has cracked, pushing the two back supporting beams outward. We can’t lower the boat because the beams are pushed so far out that they won’t clear the dock on either side.

Monday afternoon. Dean borrows a come-along and portable charger since ours is dead, a friend comes over and they try to pull the two support beams close enough together so they’ll clear the dock. No go. The weight of the boat is pushing them out. The salvage barge is here and they’re working on getting that bashed-up boat out with their big mechanical arm. Dean talks to the guy – he’s the same guy who’s giving us an estimate for replacing our dock. He says when he’s done with the salvage job, he can come back and lift up the back of our boat. Taking the weight off the framework will make it possible to pull those support beams back into position so we can lower the boat. Sounds good. Dean tells him to be sure to call before he comes over so we can take the canopy down first.

Tuesday afternoon. No call yet from the barge guy but he’s probably pretty busy. Lots of damage from the storm. So after work we’re ready to go down and take the canopy off when our friend Gary calls. Our boat is over there tied up in his neighbor’s boat slip. Barge guy just came over without calling us, got it off the lift and took it over to Gary’s. So now we have no god-damned f*cking way of getting the canopy off. Leaving the canopy on over the winter would wreck the canopy for sure and possibly the whole shore station. With the canopy on and without the weight of the boat to hold the shore station down, a wind storm can pick the whole thing up and wreck it. The canopy is 10 feet wide and 20 feet long. Under the right (make that wrong) wind conditions, the whole thing can turn into a giant kite.

So damn damn damn. The canopy is fastened to the framework all around the edges and in a line down the middle. From the dock we can reach a few of the fasteners along the sides but not the front, back or middle.

Thursday/Friday. We had to reject Plan A (making the shore station workable) because upon further inspection it has more damage than we thought. We thought about Plan B (a makeshift platform laid across the 11-foot span of the slip) and finally rejected it as stupid and unworkable. So we went with Plan C. We went over to Gary’s, got in the boat and brought it back to our shore station. We can’t put it up on the lift, though. Which means that in order to reach the canopy, we’ll be standing on a stepladder. A big stepladder. In a rocking boat.

Good thing Dean is tall. He did most of the stepladder work while I did my best to hold the boat steady and maneuver it into position to reach the various fasteners. Got everything unfastened so now we just need to get the canopy off the framework and into the boat. But damn, how do we push it up and out? Even on the ladder, Dean’s fingertips just barely reach the fasteners on the underside of the framework. 

Okay, what do we have on the boat to work with? What would MacGyver do? Hey, we have an aluminum pole with a rubber tip on the end. It’s meant to prop up the canvas to help it shed water when the boat is buttoned up but not under a protective roof. We use that to pop the canopy off the corners and then start the tedious task of trying to roll it back from both ends, over the slats of the framework so we can pull it down in the middle.

When we’re working from the boat raised up on the lift as we normally do, all this is within easy reach and we can usually get the canopy down in about ten minutes. This took over an hour but we got it down without hurting the lift, the boat, or ourselves. Boat, trailer and canopy are all home safely and ready to be winterized.

Boating is fun. Having a boat is mostly work. We’d be better off if we didn’t have a boat and just had friends who did. 

At least we're not this poor bastard. Doesn't look so bad in this photo but it was all bashed in on the side and bottom and it was totaled. We went by his dock and the big (formerly straight)  steel I-beam that supported the end of his shore station was twisted into a U-shape. Guy who owns it also owns the bar and grill a couple of miles up the road, so we figure a burger and fries there will probably go from $12 to around $45.