So much to do and no where to go

With this outbreak and the extensive measures that are being taken to prevent further spread of COVID-19, even places of business that play an essential roll in boat owner’s lives are closing. I am specifically talking about the yard that Dauntless is currently hauled out at. As of Thursday, March 26th, at 5PM, Cracker Boy Boat Works is officially closed for at least the next two weeks. For right now, this won’t have a huge effect on us, but we are still feeling the the impact. We are allowed to continue to live here and work on our boat, but with the way this yard works, we are supposed to buy all of our “disposable” materials from them. This means we are to purchase items like sand paper, paint, fiberglass, etc from Cracker Boy. Ok, fine. No big deal. Except, how are we supposed to purchase these items to continue progress on our boat if no one is here to sell them to us? That is just level one of the challenges that we face. They told us that the would be back open in two weeks, but were not very specific on what date they would have crew here again. Is that two weeks from Thursday? Two weeks from Friday? Or would they just wait until two weeks from Monday to reopen? We just don’t know. The other complication to this is that we literally got less than a full business days notice of the closure which means that we spent an entire day figuring out where we would be able to buy materials necessary to continue the upcoming projects instead of actually working on projects! That definitely had Mom & Dad fit to be tied with frustration!!

This brings me to our second level of challenges. We have two scheduled splash dates in April. They recommend that you book two just in case something happens and you miss your first date, you have a back up. Our first date is April 8, which is within the two week closing time so we are definitely not going back in the water then. Our second splash date is April 10, which is exactly two weeks from Friday March 27, the day after they officially closed. We are working very hard to get back in the water as quickly as possible with functioning systems. Let’s be real here, no body wants to buy a boat just to let it sit on the hard. The caveat to this is that, if they don’t open back up on or by the 10th , then the management here is telling us that we are going to have to continue to pay to keep our boat here on the hard until they decide that they are going to open back up again, and we honestly how no idea when that is going to be. In the meantime, we are continuing to move forward with all the key projects that are keeping us from being in the water. For more information on the boat yard closure, its impact on us, our social distancing and self-quarantine, tune into YouTube early this coming week as we will be doing a real time update on our new “new normal”.