It is that time of year again.  Time to spend some money and get some work done on the boat.  We have heard horror stories from the people who are in our boat club.  The amount of money they are spending on their boats is incredible and makes me want to cry.  But it is time to paint the bottom of the boat plus we need some maintenance done on it.  We checked out a few places down here to get the bottom done and our maintenance completed.  We settled on Diversified Marine which is located just before the Fort Myers Beach.  Not to bad getting there by car this time of year but during season, we pack a lunch :).

Anyway, this boat is quite a bit smaller than the Navigator.  Gary was used to an, almost, walk in engine room,

Navigator Engine Room

where he could get to the engines and repair or replace whatever needed to be done. Unfortunately, with the smaller boat comes no engine room :(.

Engine Room on the Albin

The engine is crammed into the engine box so well, it takes a very skinny guy with long arms like a monkey and the ability to bend like a pretzel, to work on it. That is why we have to pay to have someone work on this boat :(.

An interesting Trivia note, we found out that our old Pearson

1972 43 Foot Pearson

was built in the same factory as our 2003 Albin, which was located in Portsmouth, RI. Apparently Pearson went out of business in 1989 and the building was sold to Albin some time after that where they starting building the Albins.  Small world, huh?

Now back to the story at hand….on the bottom, the boat came with white hard paint on it,

See the white bottom

which was OK when it was in a lift all the time but as the boat sits in the water, the bottom can get pretty nasty.

(And the guy just cleaned the bottom the day before!)

As we contemplated the color to choose for the bottom paint, we figured this time we’d get black anti-fouling paint on it. With the black, it at least won’t show the nasty stuff as bad as the white :), although Gary will know it is there ;).

The maintenance we need completed is the timing belt needs to be replaced.

Timing belt

The recommended time to change the belt is 1250 hours or 7 years.  Now, we are considerably south of the 1250 hours but we are considerably north of the 7 years so we figured we should get it replaced cause if the belt goes, now you are looking at a $35,000 repair.  So, we figured we better bite the bullet and get it fixed before that happens.

BTW, you people that have a place to work on your boat on land don’t know how lucky you have it. Down here, if you can find a place, they charge you $75 to $100 a day to store your boat in their lot so you can get work done on it.  Luckily, Diversified won’t charge land storage.

So off Gary goes with the boat to Diversified to get the boat pulled for the bottom job and the replacement of the timing belt.  (As a side note, if you have a car with a timing belt instead of a timing chain, you too need to change that belt at 60,000 to 75,000 miles or you run the risk of it breaking and taking out your engine.  So you better check those maintenance logs 🙂 )

I drove the van to the marina  so I could pick Gary up when he got there.  Look…….here he comes!

Here comes the Touch of Class

Don’t forget those bumpersSee what a good Captain he is?  He is wearing his life jacket.  Good boy!

Look what they’ll be using to pull the boat out with.

There are a lot of these boat lifts down here for the smaller boats.  They have more dry stack down here.  Dry stack means they pull your boat out of the water and slip it into a shelf in a very large building.  They just put it back in the water when they get a call from you telling them to put it in the water.  This can be a nice option if  you have a small enough boat to dry stack.  Keeps the boat out of the weather and out of the sun.

 Ooooooh!  Look at the size of those tires.  They are about 4 1/2 feet high.

  There is our little baby, up on the lift.

 Wow!  Look at that stained bottom.  The black paint will look good on the bottom and hide that nasty stain.  The guy talking to Gary, Freeman, asked him what kind of time frame the office people gave us when we made our appointment. Gary responded, “A week”.  The guy laughed and pointed, “See that big 62 foot sport fisherman over there? See that 50 foot sport fisherman boat over there?  They were here first.  You might get yours back around Christmas time.”  And the guy laughs.  We hope he is kidding.

So we leave our baby in good hands and go back home to wait for the verdict on the price to fix the timing belt.  It is either going to be over $8,000 cause they have to pull the engine out of the boat because they don’t have a skinny enough guy with monkey arms that can bend like a pretzel, or it will be about $1400.  We’re hoping for the $1400.  We’ll keep you posted.