I can do anything – until I talk to the guys

April 2006

By Tom Snyder

I have yet another nautical confession to make… You probably distrust the kind of people who insist on revealing embarrassing details in the early moments of meeting you. I distrust them. I’ll bet you do, too. Go ahead — admit it out loud. (If you just admitted it out loud, maybe you’re one of those people who confess too fast. I mean, I hardly know you.)

That was unfair of me. I was just trying to set you up to go lightly on my most egregious confession yet: I do hardly any work on my own boat.

Every fall at the boatyard I am given a checklist of tasks that should be performed. The awkward truth is that the first year I owned a boat, I checked everything on the list, meaning that someone else would do all of the work. The resulting colossal bill seemed adequate punishment for the varnishing I had avoided.

The next fall I showed up loaded for bear. A man possessed, a man who does his own work. As we went through the winter checklist, I impressively paused at each task to consider whether it was really necessary to have someone else do it. Hauling the 24,000-pound vessel? Hmm. I do have some buddies, but, OK, let’s allow the yard to do that one. Pulling the mast? I said, “That is just so me! But, I know you guys recently bought a new mast-pulling rig, so go ahead and have fun with that one yourself.”

You can imagine how, at this point, the boatyard understood that they were dealing with a classic “can do” guy. We moved on to some serious boilerplate. Doing the britework? I laughed an understanding laugh and said, “I’m all over the britework.”

“Really?” they said. “Have you ever worked with Cetol?”

I stammered that yes, maybe I had, and that I was well aware that Cetol was an extremely tricky substance. So we decided, as men knowledgeable in the area of materials, that we would not risk the teak until I was Cetol-ready. The same clear thinking informed the waxing, buffing and polishing projects. (It was later, in the comfort of my own home that I learned that Cetol is every bit as difficult to work with as products such as Windex.)

They asked about winterizing the diesel. I said, “You bet!”

They said, “OK, so you’ll check the shaft alignment and do the…”

“You know what?”, I said. “I don’t do shafts, so while you’re in there, you might as well go nuts with all of the winterize-related areas.” By the way, that’s very common — people who don’t do shafts.

How about checking out all of the thru-hulls? I said, “Leave that to me. I’ll just give them all a few yanks and a bit of grease, too.”

They asked in such a friendly way, “Will you grease the valves on the inside and outside?”

I said, “Good for you! That was a test. And no, of course I don’t have the specialized tools for a thorough inside greasing. That I would leave to you. Nice going.”

We went through the entire checklist in a similar fashion. Near the end I was signed up for approximately 0 of the tasks. As they stood to say goodbye, I threw myself a bone. I asked, “What about upgrading the software on my chart plotter from 2.6 to 2.7, including the new system patch which is hard to locate on the web, but I know exactly where it is?” These were good, honest men who graciously conceded that I was probably the only man for this hell hole of a job.

So we parted, each with his own task(s). That was my second winter as a boat owner. This year, my tenth, is proceeding true to form. I am still easily talked out of performing most of these tasks. Yes, this is a confessional, but at the risk of blowing my own horn, it should be known that I am extremely popular with boatyards. And that, my friends, is hard to fake.

Tom Snyder sails Blue Moon out of Peaks Island, Maine.