I guess this season was harder on some people than I thought. Our club has very specific rules on when haul out starts and ends, the start would be this coming Saturday, the end is always the last Sunday in October. It seems that next weekend was not soon enough, the lift crew was busy all weekend hauling boats. I'm sure that will be cause for a "colorful" general membership meeting in October. The sign up sheets for this coming weekend are also full, very interesting. A normal season ending means a huge number of members wait until the very end, trying to get the most out of summer boating season. I'm guessing that the only hold outs this year will be the members that didn't use their boats all summer and only take them out because they have to.

It also looks like my plan for the new slip did not work so well. I tested the IP last season, put it into a 30' slip that was just a hundred feet or so from the parking lot. It was a perfectly calm day so threading the needle with 3" to spare on each side was no big deal. The fact that we are a touch over 30' LOA got no complaints all season, life was good. Turns out that the slip is just too tight, especially when the storms came blowing through. When my docklines get wet they stretch a bit, just enough to put the teak toe rails into the bumpers/boards. The starboard side has worn through my shiny varnish job to bare teak, I'm not happy about that. Looks like we will be moving again.

Electronic update. Was on the phone with Garmin Friday morning, they very patiently walked me through troubleshooting the chart plotter. The diagnosis is that it is fried. It is going back tomorrow. That depth and knotmeter are back, displays are functioning fine now which I find very odd. The autopilot was fine, no issues there. VHF is also sounding fine again, just alarming out with no position data being fed to it. Larry, you are correct, I could re-program the radio and shut of the GPS portion, but I think I will just haul early and be done with the season. We have one more son getting married with all the related activities and I have decided to get our property in the mountains logged this year, that should keep me out of trouble for the next 6 months or so.