Day 65 - Finding a winter home for Ciara
Oh, how I love Frankfort! And how grateful I am after all those crazy weeks to have some down time here! Captain and I had a great night sleep as the temps have been just perfect. I was up before him and enjoying my me time and also hard-boiled eggs which were something I added to our provisioning when we were home last week. I can’t describe how good those taste. Just the little change in variety after 9 weeks is noticeable.
Captain got up and we both did some computer chores that had to be done for the real world. The really bad news came when Captain called our boat yard to follow up, yet again, about winter storage. For context: We have winter stored Ciara for all eight winters that we have had her at that this boat yard. Because she has so much wood and we do all her work we pay extra to have her mast taken off and have her stored in indoor heated storage. This helps us keep her 74 years young and turning heads wherever she goes. The last many years management has turned over and our greatest fear about being a captive audience had been coming to reality. Taking away what work we were “allowed” to do and even when. We had adjusted accordingly. This year the rumors amongst boaters was they weren’t taking sailboats this upcoming season. We listened to the rumors but nothing was coming down officially from management. This spring we had an awful time with the boat yard, as you may recall, getting Ciara launched and when she finally splashed down it was a month later then the previous year. Captain has been trying to get answers to our bill (which magically doubled from last year) and get confirmation of a contract for this winter which we still haven’t gotten. So, when we called today and we heard the voice of the secretary and her “oh, hi, I’ll hand you over to Rick” we knew it was over. Sure enough, Rick spent a better portion of ½ hour lying directly to our faces and basically telling us we were out, they weren’t renewing us and they didn’t care one bit that they had no intention of telling us other then when we finally begged for an answer. You should also know that finding heated indoor storage for a 45 foot sailboat isn’t as simple as just going to the next boatyard. We already had our name on four to five waiting lists and even those were for worst case outdoor storage. To say the least we were upset and scrambling at that point. We decided to take a long walk.
On land I got coffee from the local shop and got Kona a pup cup with my unwanted whipped cream. Captain was on the phone with friends who all sent us leads.
We headed off to the beach. This time Kona had her ball and it was game on! We walked her out on the pier without her leash on. The ball is better then any leash. She only has eyes for the ball. Captain threw the ball out off the pier and Kona did her jump and swim without hesitation. I walked back to the beach to “retrieve her” and bring her back to Captain without having her go a visit the public sitting on the beach minding their own business. What amazed me about Kona was when she got back to land, she didn’t even hesitate. She zoomed past me and everyone on the beach and made a bee line back to Captain half way down the pier. She would do this non-stop for an hour. By the time she was done I had made new friends on the beach (another Bradley graduate!) and Kona had everyone’s admiration. I still can’t get over how good of a dog she is; a complete childhood dream come true. After we had our pier fun we took a really long walk down the beach. I have been missing this since we left Frankfort last year. The water is low enough that we are able to now walk the beach pretty indefinitely and eventually turned around when we were tired. The sand dunes mixed with crystal blue water and soft clean sand is the stuff dreams are made of. We spent the time playing with Kona and discussing our winter options with Ciara. We decided we would call as many places as we could but also keep the uber expensive option of buying our own hydraulic lift trailer and hauling her ourselves to our own storage inland in the back of our mind.
We returned to Ciara and made a nice cheese plate while Captain got to work calling boat yards as far south as Chicago. The results were terrifying. Most places are not doing sailboats anymore. The old saying “sailors get the wind for free so they want everything to be free” seems to be the culprit. The truth of the matter is boat yards, like car dealerships, make their money from the service, not the storage. And sailors, in general, are more likely to do their own work and not hire out. This holds especially true to us with a very old classic boat. Sailboats needs extra equipment for haul out/splash in if they want the mast taken down as well and those are reaching the end of their useful lives and they simply don’t want to invest in the capital. We understand, however it really puts us in a pickle. We even started to joke/cry about having to take Ciara down south for the winter and just keep sailing. She simply can’t stay in the water up here. About four hours later Captain’s phone was ringing non-stop with returned phone calls. We did get a lot of sympathy from most places and put our names far down on their waiting list. Captain was talking to a nice gentleman at one of the other boat yards in Sturgeon Bay when he missed a call. Calling it back he found out it was the head manager at the same place calling. Our hearts fell and Captain began to cry when the words “I’m going to make this happen for you, and I found you a place” came out of his mouth. We aren’t sure, but probably good friends and word of mouth helped us find this space. Captain eagerly signed the contract and paid the down payment. Best of all??? Its just across the channel from our old boat yard. Our winter lives and logistics won’t change much. Now we have the daunting task of getting our old boat yard to give us our boat stands back. Thankfully we have proof that we own them and brought them with us. But we expect a fight. Thankfully we also have some leverage with the bill we haven’t paid as they refuse to explain why they doubled it. It may get dirty, but frankly management there has been nothing but dirty for the last few seasons.
With that huge task done Captain wanted to celebrate! Instead of buying a $40,000 trailer and then more we kept to our yearly budget and he wanted to take me out for dinner, or buy some really nice steaks from the butcher here in town. We opted for the later and got beautiful filets and fresh broccoli. Dinner was, of course, amazing. We waited until the sun was mostly down before we cooked as was toasty on board and enjoyed a sunset dinner up on deck. The haze is really down today so I took some pictures of the anchorage. After dishes, and still in a great mood I “demanded” we go to shore for ice cream!
We have been docking our dinghy behind Brook’s boat as there aren’t great places to do so and we know that is out of the way and okay by him. We invited him to join us for ice cream. He wasn’t going to get anything but joined us. Maybe we are bad influences but after getting there he opted for a scoop of their no sugar added stuff and treated us to our treats as well. That was super nice of him and I thoroughly enjoyed my affogato. We wanted to take Kona girl to the beach one more time so we parted ways and took one more walk. At the beach we noticed the horizon dotted with hundreds of fishing boats. The salmon must be running; thankfully the fisherman coming in afterwards have been 100 times better mannered then they were last year. Maybe the DNR came and gently reminded them off the rules. I know the locals were upset by it, maybe more so then then boaters even. Very dangerous and I even think some fisherman ran his boat at full speed into a concrete wall last year….
I really don’t see us going anywhere for many days unless we really want a fun downwind ride, but I’m not in the mood to replay any big waters day-oh yeah, and I love Frankfort!
