I have spent some time lately, grousing to friends about marinas. Too often there is too much to grouse about. But the task of trying to explain what one likes and doesn't like is a great exercise in finding out what one wants .... and it all matters. It matters a lot. A great many marinas don't care what you want frankly, though it may seem so up until they have your money and you are in a slip. The money they want can be quite a bit. Prices can range from $3000 to $10,000 for the year. I am certain they are higher in high-end resort situations. Know from the start that a man can choose differently going in than a single woman can and he is treated differently. A single, rookie boater can have a rough time of it.. My only solution has been to vote with my feet and learn inch by inch what works and what doesn't work.
I had EVERYTHING to learn. For instance, one of the first questions posed to me stopped me flat, since it was something about "True North." Well, I was from Michigan and that is about as true as North gets as far as I was concerned. I remember my answer stopped the inquisitor flat too. (More than once and oftener than I'd like to admit.) Now my questions aren't quite "so blonde". Currently, I have a problem with the a.c. and the fuel gauge that refuses to indicate how much fuel the starboard tank has. I was told that it could be the gauge or the sender. What the heck is a sender? I realize its task is to send a message to the gauge, but I always want to be able to a least envision what's going on, even though part of me likes to think there's a little man in there asleep on the job. Basically, what I am trying to say, is that I am not the same ignoramus that bought a boat, plunked it down in a distant port and let people shove me around. Admittedly, they still try. It's been a six year journey out of ignorance.
I started out in Green Cove Marina, New Jersey. What I liked was that I was in a snug harbor. What I didn't like was the hustler who ran the place (sort of) and ultimately it was too snug and not safe. It can be deceiving when a place is gated. It can be an eye opener when you decide to check out a path behind the shower house that leads straight out to the street one is supposedly protected from. Other boaters moaned and groaned about the tortuous turns to be maneuvered getting in or out of the place. I didn't know beans about piloting the thing since I had gotten the boat to be nearby when the Army Colonel I was dating made it into McGuire Field. I, believe it or not, thought it would be more convenient and cheaper. (Any boater I know would be falling down laughing by now.) It was for a while. My first week was lovely. Ignorance really can be bliss. Then I began missing things. Finally, after 11 expensive items went somewhere, and the management wasn't too interested, and the insurance company said I wasn't near my deductible, I looked for a safer and somewhat less expensive port.
That led me to Winter Yacht Basin in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey. There it was enormously safer, but no less tortuous when it came to getting into the slip and a great deal bouncier when the weekend boat traffic ratcheted down the Bay right before my eyes. Yep, I was on the outside facing the bay, next to a weak piling that the boat began slamming into whenever one of those ego driven speed boats flew by. I was often very nauseous. Really though, the view was great if one had a good grip on something while one viewed. The little, casual social group of some great people was equally fine. I was to learn in subsequent marinas how good that really was. It is never easy to be a single woman in the midst of couples, but they kindly did include me and I was happy with their efforts. I spent two years there, but it wasn't cheap, though I did get moved to a more peaceful slip. HOWEVER, I didn't even realize I was in such muddy low water until a friend fell in and stood up ( thank heaven) where she landed. I was too clueless to know what that meant for the engines which I had finally gotten the courage to run now and then. It may seem like I wasn't learning much as I spent my tenure in these places. But I was learning about marinas, how to take care of my boat, (and how not to), how to get on and off (and how not to), and about mechanics, pricing, negotiating and on and on...... AND IT WAS ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG in any of those categories. It was all, every bit of it, a strange and complex, male dominated world. Somewhere in the second year my relationship began to tank and therefore, also, my erstwhile pilot. I realized it made fiscal sense to pick up my marbles ( in this case my boat) and go home.
I arrived at Goose Harbor Marina ...or rather my boat arrived, driven by a somewhat cantankerous old devil of a captain , who antagonized the marina I left and the staff of the marina I came into. By now I was 45 minutes away from Annapolis , on the northwest side of the Chesapeake which had just been inundated with every log Pennsylvania could throw at its northern end. It was brown straight across from shore to shore at one point. A year or so prior to that, some of the marina's buildings had been wiped out by a hurricane dubbed Isabel. When you throw in a phalanx of crabpots to be dodged as you went out towards the Chesapeake, it was a daunting adventure. Now the low water problem was mine to deal with again and I learned about impellers, risers, more about batteries and even bigger, I had to begin to learn how to pilot the darn thing. That was and is "an elephant to swallow" as a friend said. I had to try to get used to a very large, somewhat more structured yacht club, that was very couples oriented. Being a person who is more comfortable in small settings, I found the parties difficult to deal with, especially since these people had known one another for years. One or two women were really frightful to be around. However, a few others, the manager and the office staff were wonderful. I picked up a mentor that believed in the total immersion technique of teaching rather than anything structured or incremental. He poured buckets of information down my gullet with every question; surprisingly some of it stuck. He was the B.F. Hutton and mother lode of boating and scientific info. My biggest obstacle and still is, my directionality disability...that, and simple terror. The more I learn, the worse it gets. Whenever I am encountering all the flotsam and jetsam, the dirty water and enormous boats on the Chesapeake, I remember our lovely nine mile lake up North, where I can see the bottom, and know all its twists and turns. The color of the lake water on any given day rivals anything on the caribbean and so clearly delineates its various depths.
I hated the short, somewhat "falling apart" fingerling I had to load and board from. Fingerlings for those who don't know, are some stubby, often decrepit extensions from the dock from which one can lose one's balance daily, precious items weekly and precious friends, hopefully less often, who don't want any directions for what looks to them to be a simple task of climbing aboard. It is not a simple task. Nor do I have a swim platform to climb back up on if you are still conscious....
Obviously fingerlings are a sore point with me. The macho male thing is to leap daringly from this to that. That assumes of course that the leaper is perfectly agile physically and his eyesight and subsequent balance unimpaired. God help the rest of us. All you need and I mean all
anyone needs is one drink and your peripheral vision takes a hit.... and so may you. I watched it happened more than once. This new fingerling, one little dab of a pier, not only was wobbly but had a board broken loose that had to be dodged. I tried hard to get a slip that had deeper water for the engine's sake and a more secure fingerling for my sake, but it wasn't possible. I also think it is insane that huge boats are in slips inches away from one another and divided only by limp lines running between beleaguered pilings. That drives me crazy. It's cheap that's all it is. But very common. I remember one male friend chiding me for being so fearful of hitting something on the way in or out of a slip, and privately I thought, "Hey, I can't afford the hit, that's why". Ye Gods.
I was and always have been constrained by the cost of repairs of an older boat that genuinely needed restoring and trying to afford lessons at the same time. The repairs always won out and logically that should be the case. Basically that marina "was not a good fit" as one understanding friend said. When I look back there were some great people I will always miss. I won't miss one mechanic that I realized later simply wasn't fixing things and I had to do them over. I was beginning to be suspicious and argumentative before I left, but everything was made graphically clear when I brought the boat down the Chesapeake to another marina just at the Bay Bridge and just across that troublesome bit of engineering. I know the bridge is beautiful but it has become a pain to cross due to heavy traffic. On my initial journey down, in spite of the fact that two of the three repairs I had paid for plainly stopped working, (the third quit the next day), I got to do some piloting on a stunning day I will never forget with some of the finest company possible. The North wind was scary... but not until we reached our destination and had to turn into it....
The new marina offered exceptional docks, great bathrooms, nice little fitness center and taught me a lot about the very best to be had. Floating docks with rubber edging and reasonable fingerling divisions between boats at last. Good water depth finally, with a sweet pool looking over the bay, made for a fun but expensive year. The price, plus negligible or very expensive mechanics, too many turns in a circuitous route out to the bay against an ever present, relentless wind were all too intimidating for a rookie- though I managed some of them once or twice. Then there was the fact that I was in with some less than desirable transient boaters with whom or around whom, I never felt quite safe and never stayed overnight..
So I was on my way again and found a marina in the midst of change and renovation on my side of the Bay, ten minutes from home, with two great, very honest mechanics, one, now the manager. I don't intend to lose those two. One of them worked with Silvertons ( my boat is a Silverton ) for twelve years. Ginger Yacht Basin was one step off a busy highway without a bit of security though for a while a "misaligned manager" slept in his boat there at night. All my friends advised against it. The place was under construction and it was more a busy boat moving yard than a marina. Dust, dirt, and debris were flying all over the place, usually right after I had killed myself cleaning the boat. There were more difficulties getting into the slip than I , in any kind of wind could deal with. My mentor tried the turns on a nice quiet day and couldn't understand why I couldn't handle it. I had seen several good pilots try it and they had trouble, but as I have learned, you can never get very far arguing with Colonels.... nor Captains.
My next move just this last spring was across the South River to Pier 7. The manager has put forth herculean efforts resurrecting what had been a rundown, dumping grounds for derelict and abandoned boats. It improves weekly. I have another horrible fingerling, and the social life hasn't quite gotten off the ground, but I have a slip that I should be able to go straight out to the Chesapeake from, --had I two cents for the Captain , could raise a crew, or had the money for gas. Our family owned cottage had severe and immediate concerns that needed our joint attentions and cost a bundle. I was thrilled we could finally address these issues, but it beached me. And it made me think. O.k. if this is going to be the "floating hotel"as it had been insultingly named, I needed to find a place that would be a great resort, as well as inexpensive. Much to my amazement, when I went back to check out one I visited a few years back, I found one. $3240 a year. Great docks and extraordinary fingerlings, so long I can go in bow first, good security, good water depth, casual but continual social life--they have free coffee and doughnuts every Saturday morning and free hot dogs and hamburgers every Saturday afternoon and best of all it is close to the Inner Harbor of Baltimore with all its wonders easily accessed by water ferry. Have to wait til spring though and make sure my boat is "dressed up and ready to go". So here's the final lineup with my ratings realizing it is a trifle unfair to include the next year's marina (Anchorage Marina) when I haven't gotten there yet. But I am a the ruler of this blog if I am the ruler of nothing else; that's what writing does for you. It gives you a voice and a place to use it. While I may not always be able to confront anyone right on the spot....
oh, I can later....! Me and Walter Mitty...and my computer.
Green Cove Marina:
D plus. --Good docks saved it from an F
Winter Yacht Basin:
C minus-- New, not user friendly management moved in and ruined the social club or it would have had a higher rating. All those friends left for other ports.
Goose Harbor:
B Excellent security and I was very fortunate to have someone watching over me. Also a great place for families raises their rating.
Bay Bridge Marina:
B minus-- They were not "reliable" when it came to measuring the amount of electricity used and it wasn't just me complaining about the large, unexplained increases in cost. May have been a looney meter reader or a deliberate "overlook"on the part of the office. The mechanics or boat cleaners leaned a ladder they needed to climb on onto the isinglass and it naturally sliced its way through it. I found it at the next marina and had to tape it.
Gingerville Yacht Center:
B minus-- The mechanics get an A rating, but the yard is discouraging for women or socializing or parking. I picked up a nail there in my new Michelin tire.
Pier 7 Marina:
B minus-- Still needs work and will probably get it due to managerial efforts. If you have company with you it is nice to have dinner on board or nearby, but it is wide open yet.
Anchorage Marina:
A Until further notice
I feel like the woman in the red cape in the movie called Chocolate with all my fleeing from place to place. It takes that to learn what you want or are running from at times and I think, too, it satisfies the gypsy in me without my selling my home every two or three years. Hopefully.
Lately in my blogs I like to close with a wise ( or at least I think so) quote about relationships which is a strong undercurrent in this big, big blog....
"It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, and an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone... but it takes a lifetime to forget someone." from Y.E.L.F.
P.S. next blog will be an "Art attack". (Finest kind) since on Thursday my friend Susan and I board the big Megabus next to the White Marsh Mall and go to the Whitney in New York. It will be nice to go somewhere on something.
Please help me promulgate my work by forwarding this to others that may be interested.
Copyright: August 15th, 2010.
