Winter Boat Preparations

West Marine keeps sending me notifications about sales on things used to winterize one’s boat. There are local businesses advertising their winter boat wrapping services.

I’ve been prepping my boat too, but for a different sort of winter. My boat is ready to be sailed in warm southern waters. A lot more gear and equipment has been loaded onto the boat, but not too much. The single axle trailer shouldn’t be overloaded. Some of the boat stuff has been loaded directly into the Blazer.

My lovely wife and I will be closing down the house for the season. Most of November will be spent on a train trip out to California. I hope we don’t get too much snow while we are gone. Once we get back to New Hampshire we’ll do a final load up on the Blazer and head south. It would be a pain to have to dig the boat and Blazer out of the snow first.

One year The boat was encased in ice. It didn’t all melt until we were almost in Georgia. To prevent that happening a large tarp will cover the boat for a month.

Before we had a sailboat we used to haul a large Old Town canoe down south. One year it was left down by the beach and we had a lot of snow. I had to snowshoe a trail 350 feet down to the beach and haul it up the hill. On our trip south we stopped for fuel in New York State. The attendant asked what the heck I was doing with a canoe in the snow. I told him I was going to drive south until it didn’t look silly -and that’s what we did.

One major preparation for the winter was buying boat insurance. It’s an essential part of my winter boating plans. Towing insurance is part of that too, both on land and on water. You never know.

-Sixbears