If you have a boat, you have boat chores. Ignoring those chores goes a long way to making even MORE boat chores. And I have been bad. I have not cleaned my boat’s hull in a couple of years. It’s a jungle down there.

Of course, I have my reasons, coupled with excuses and I had a bazillion OTHER chores to do all the time so I am bad but I have really great excuses. The boat, like all things, doesn’t care about my sad, little excuses. And, if there is any part of a boat that ignores excuses totally, it is the hull-that-lives-in-the-ocean part. The main excuse I had for that was that my marine ways was broken. And that is true. But also true was that the fact that the original ways were scrabbled together in a couple of days to deal with pressing hull matters over ten years ago. Well over ten years. It was not my best executed project but it worked. Until it didn’t.

Now it doesn’t. I have to make a new marine ways.

The basic concept was sound but, at my age, I need to improve the concept and the outcome. This time the boat will rest out of the water (on the hard) a few additional feet in height. Last time, when I hauled, the boat was out of the water but it was still only about three feet off the hard (rocky foreshore). I had to crawl around on rocks and boulders to scrape and paint. This time I wanna stand.

So today Sal and I clambered down the 100′ cliff to the ‘haul out’ site and took measurements and angles and stretched the tape and used the tools and came away with a better concept. The first ways came out of the water at a 10 degree angle and this one will rise up at a 15 degree angle. That extra 5 degrees gives me a boat about 5 feet off the hard and that means I can work hunched over. Yes, I might up the angle to 16 – 17 degrees and make it full standing room under.

The first ways was limited to basically just an inclined slide. Forty feet of beams that had HDPE on the top (plastic) that the boat hull slid up on. It worked. But this time the 40 feet of new beams will just serve as the tracks for a 20 foot wheeled cradle to ride up on. The cradle will be made of 4×4’s and the track will be made of 6×6’s and so there is a bit of a challenge keeping the cradle on the tracks as it climbs out of the water. The weight of the boat and cradle will hinder the cradle from floating away but, if it can go off the rails, it will go off the rails so I kinda have to figure out a bit of a track/cradle containment system. The good news is that the most I have to worry about is 40 feet.

The biggest of our boats is 22′ long. But friends will likely use the ways so I really should make it ‘good for others, too’. The good news there is that just about everyone out here uses boats under 20 feet. Sal’s is just 16′.

So, instead of just beaching the boat and cleaning the hull while lying on the beach and tipping it one way and then the other, I have decided that it would be better to design, engineer and construct a marine ways complete with a winch to pull the boat up.

I must be mad!

My last winch was an old manual Marpole winch from yesteryear. This one will be electric and have a button.

“So, what are ya waiting for, Dave?”

I need two more 6×6 beams 20 feet long. And, well…..for the heavy lifting and all that, I’d like one of my kids to visit. So, there’s that……..T

There is a real possibility that this is the last you will hear of the marine ways…..