After spending three days slowly travelling from Cobourg to Loyalist Cove we prepare our boat to be hauled out and stored over the winter.
We spend the morning getting ready for liftout:
- Remove dodger and bimini
- Lower and fold up sails
- Remove all lines from the mast. Some people keep their lines in the mast over winter, some replace with thinner temporary lines (can’t recall what they are called now, tracer lines, mouse lines?). I like to just pull them out, it’s faster and we’ve found re-threading the lines in the spring is easy with an electrician’s fish tape.
- Detach and lower boom from mast
- Remove, deflate and roll up dinghy
- Detach electrical wires from base of mast
We are called over to the crane to have our mast removed.
All of the side shrouds, except the ones going to the top of the mast (upper shroud) are detached from the boat. The remaining shrouds, including fore and aft are loosened to allow quick removal once the mast is secured by the crane. My preferred way to do this is with two tools, vice grips for grabbing the top of the turnbuckle. This also holds the turnbuckle cover (white tube) up and out of the way. A crescent wrench is used to twist the turnbuckle, placing carefully over the meatiest part of the turnbuckle. I’ve seen others just use a screwdriver but I heard somewhere it’s not recommended. I’m not sure if it really matters, but regardless I think a crescent wrench is less stress on the turnbuckle.
Now Foggy looks a bit naked withour her mast.
After the mast is removed, it’s placed on sawhorses for us to dismantle further. We then move over to a fuel dock for topping up the diesel tank and get our holding tank pumped out. The lift then pulled the boat from the water and lifts Foggy onto her steel cradle that is loaded onto a truck trailer.
The bottom is power washed and we do a quick check for any damage to the hull. The repair we made to the rudder in the spring held up well! The white dot at the bottom is the small hole I drilled to allow water to escape.
We move back to our mast and spend some time removing the spreaders and then lash the stays tight to the mast. At the base of the mast we use a 2×4 to support the furler.
The Raymarine wind speed sensor is removed from the top of the mast. We do a quick check of the light and VHF. We will check the pulleys in the mast in the spring.
Time to head home. Before our trip we dropped off a car at Loyalist cove for us to drive home. Our new tradition is to stop in Napanee at the Waterfront River Pub. It’s a beautiful spot on the river.
We did this trip in our Macgregor many years ago and tied up on that wall. What a great place to stay overnight right at the pub!
Next weekend we head out to the boat to check on her in the boat yard. Time to unpack everything!
Foggy is now in the boat yard with the other boats. You can see her hull needs a bit of attention. Poor Foggy. Planning to spend some extra time in the spring focusing on the hull, repainting the hull paint and polishing up the sides.
We can see the yard has winterized Foggy for us. This is a nice luxury service for us. We should figure this out but I’m still not feeling confident enough with the engine. And with our limited free time these days it’s money well spent.
My temporary cover for the mast step worked well! Just a dishwasher soap container and some duct tape. We cover this and the hatch with the solar vent with a small blue tarp as an extra layer of protection.
You can see the blue tarp here.
Lori and I spend the afternoon emptying out pretty much everything from the boat. We talked about leaving more on the boat this winter but we ended up removing most of it anyways.
The boom won’t fit in the car. We leave it behind until next weekend when we will bring the roof racks and the winter cover.
The Honda Civic does a decent job holding everything from the boat. Our Honda Fit is smaller but can hold more!
We’ve been searching for a piece of property for some time. Put in an offer on a small piece of property near Loyalist Cove but we were out bid. Today we go and look at some property near Elgin, On. It’s a beautiful spot. We didn’t know this then but we now own this property. We are planning to build and move there in 2024. This will reduce our travel time to the boat from over two hours to about 30 minutes! We can’t wait to be closer!
Everything gets spread out in our basement and organized. Spend some time vacuuming and cleaning the canvas before rolling it up. Lori has figured out a great way to store it over winter.
A little Clear To Sea on the plastic to clean it up.
Making sure that no plastic window is touching another plastic window we layer up all the canvas and then wrap everything up in a bed sheet.
Using a cardboard sono tube as the center, we roll the canvas up and then secure with straps. This makes it very easy to move about and store.
Next project, winter canvas cover. It’s showing its age, the threads are deteriorating and need to be replaced. Some of the canvas has gotten thin and some of the previous patches need to be redone.
Lori uses some spare pieces of sunbrella to patch and reinforce. The zipper is also reinforced, it gave way last spring.
Next trip out to the boat we put the cover on.
That’s it for the season! With crazy work schedules and lot’s going on we did make more trips back and forth this year than we wanted to. But it all worked out.
Now Foggy gets to hibernate through winter, we spend the time reminiscing of past adventures and dreaming of future trips. And supplement this will YouTube videos of others sailing!
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