we hit a snag

The deal on our Butt Ugly Boat, which for purposes of brevity I hereby dub "the BUB" (say "dubbed the BUB" out loud a few times--it's fun), has hit a minor snag. One condition of the deal is we want to see the bottom of the hull before we close to make sure there aren't any problems below the water line. The seller agreed for us to haul the beast out of the water and now the problem is how to go about it.

Normally it would be no problem--there are companies that do this by putting huge slings under the boat and then using a gigantic crane to lift it out of the water so you can walk around underneath and take a look at the bottom. Well, technically speaking I wasn't going to walk around with a 45 foot long boat swinging over my head, but Morley was going to and I was going to stand somewhere less perilous--such as under a shade tree--and catch all the action with my camera.

Unfortunately we've been turned down by all the crane companies. Thanks to the draught there's only four feet of water in the part of the lake where the cranes are located instead of the normal 15 or 16 feet, and four feet is way too shallow for the BUB to go into. So we've moved on to Plan B: find a ramp on the lake that still leads into deep enough water to handle a boat this size, then rent a mega size boat trailer for a couple of hours.

One marine company says their ramp still has enough water to accomodate us and they'll have a mega size trailer available in a couple of weeks. And that's where we are: waiting for the trailer to become available and praying for the water level to hold steady.

And that's all the news for today. Now I'm off to the office to welcome a new Electrical Engineer who starts today (another fun thing to say after months of looking for just the right person) and see if I can get some work done while I'm at it.

PS Dig out your chrome polish and your buffer--we're going to need all the help we can get when we close on this beast.