Logistics

Bringing a 50ft catamaran back to the Great Lakes has been a challenge. At first I had only considered the problems of getting the boat hauled out for the winter and the difficulties I had finding a place with a lift big enough to haul a boat that is 26ft wide. I was pretty excited after calling somewhere around 50 marinas to finally find one that could do it. What I had not considered were the commercial shipyard options. I had called a couple of the ferry lines but got no's from both. Luckily a friend of a friend got us to the owner of the Jet Express ferry line and they agreed to haul the boat. This would save us over 600 miles (each way) of traveling to get the boat hauled. The next problem was what to do with the mast. After calling the various marina's around Buffalo it seemed none were equipped to put such a large mast back up. It seemed the main problem was the additional width of the boat and their cranes did not have the length or sometimes weight to allow them to extend that far. Adding to this I really wanted to get my mast on land so I could replace the halyard's, clean the rust of the rigging, pull a couple unused cables from the mast, and add a new tricolor mast light. 

As seems to more often become the case with this boat when we called Brands they told us they could take it off and put it up for us next spring. Then they saw it and because I didn't want to take the spreaders out (as I would have no idea how to retune the mast bend) this meant they didn't have a place to store it for winter. A few ideas were floated but none seemed like they were going to work out. The Jet Express guys floated doing it with a forklift, but that didn't sound like a great idea to me. After talking to them a bit more they decided they could lift it off the boat with the straps from the boat lift. This idea seemed reasonable and we put a check in the box for a plan on that item. The next problem was going to be once we had the mast off the boat how would we get it back on. In order to get to the Jet Express and Brands we had to go though a draw bridge then immediately after the bridge is a set of power lines that has a charted height of 83ft (currently not sure at what water height). Our manual says the mast height is 79ft on one page and 82ft on a different page. To make things even more exciting no one really knows if that height is accurate as a few years ago after they rehung them following a storm it seems they were not put back to that height and a sailboat took them down. This means I may have to figure out a way to transport the mast to the other side of the power lines and find a location where we can get a crane in to put it back up. But at this point that's going to have to be a problem for another day. For now I'm just going to focus on getting the boat ready for winter as at this point I don't want to make a 600 mile trek around the state in October to the other marina where I would not have had any of these problems.