Thursday, October 14, 2010

Dowry Creek Marina – A Boat Cleaning!


Dawn at Pungo River Anchorage
 We are due to get high winds along with small craft advisories the next two days so we tucked into the Dowry Creek marina to ride out the bad weather along with lots of other boats headed south. It’s a great marina at $1.35/ft with a swimming pool, a clubhouse for transients and very friendly staff. As is the custom down here, the docks are fixed and you have to negotiate the four piers forming the dock. We’re starting to get the hang of it. The trick is to snag the upwind, outer pier so you can prevent the boat from rubbing against the downwind pier. You still need someone on land or on the boat to snag either the upwind forward pier or fend off the forward downwind pier. In the case of this marina, they had dock hands to help at the forward pier and we didn’t rub there at all. Ann was successful in snagging the upwind, aft pier and we made a successful landing, our first!

Dowry Creek Marina
I spent about five hours cleaning the boat, trying successively more aggressive cleaning solvents to get rid of the green slime. Spray 9 seemed to work the best but it still left a residue of faint spots that I wanted to get rid of. Finally, I tried ordinary bleach with did the trick on the last faint stains. Finally the boat is in fairly good shape once again. As I told Sharman in a separate e-mail, it’s not powerboat clean but pretty good nevertheless.

So we’re settled in for the night after lots of thunder and lightening passed by this afternoon followed by the sunset picture in the blog. Friday we’ll use the courtesy car to visit the nearest supermarket for reprovisioning and then watch the high winds we’re supposed to have.

2 comments:

sharman said...

Keep the "fuzzy bills" south ......... I can not imagine the job cleaning it all off. We spent a whole weekend and a few "extra retired" hours getting Milk Made spiffy for the winter. I would have thrown myself off the "bridge" if I discovered "fuzzy bills"!

sharman said...

PS...Bob now that you have the stain off you'll have to start waxing Fleetwing.....have fun.