Signs of spring

Spring on the prairie

Comes as a surprise

One minute there's snow on the ground

The next there's sun in your eyes

Ian Tyson

There’s a lot of signs of spring out here now. Even if there isn’t much sun in your eye its not hard to tell spring is coming to the marina. The weekend warriors are cleaning and polishing, there’s more tradesmen on the docks during the week and the brokers are out in force. There’s a bunch of broker boats tied up along the floats close to the marina and I’ve seen two showings of the same boat in the last two days. Tonight when we came back from shopping another broker was bringing a sailboat back into the slip. The boat next to us also got fired up this morning. Judging by the way it (barely) started it hasn’t been run since last summer.

Gray Hawk on the other hand will be a dock queen for at least the next week. Marilyn leaves early Tuesday morning for a Saskatchewan run and I’m neither brave enough nor foolish enough to take her out alone. I’ve got a long list of maintenance items to keep me busy while she’s gone starting with securing the deck boxes that we bought from Costco. Before I can secure them I need to do some work on the lids because, despite being advertised and sold as outdoor boxes, the lids seem inadequate for Canadian winters. Fortunately our new yacht club comes complete with a workshop so I think I will try it out this week. I had planned all along to encapsulate the lids in fibreglass but I was procrastinating doing it onboard. Now that I have access to a shop I have no more excuses.

I’ve got “Prince Albert, Saskatchewan” on order from a local print shop. The guys at the Vancouver Boat show were willing to do the print job for a mere $150 which seemed a little steep for twenty four five inch vinyl letters so I found a terrorist with a nose ring who will do exactly the same thing for $22.50. When I was buffing out the remains of “Anacortes” I could faintly see the outline of “San Francisco” so that means that the hull above the waterline hasn’t been painted for a very long time. Our understanding is that the boat came north at least 12 years ago. She was originally sold to Aldo Alessio in San Diego but at some point I believe he moved to San Francisco where there is actually now a yacht race named after him. As far as we know we are the fifth owners of the boat.

We’re not required to display our province on the transom, just the home port which in our case is Prince Albert. Ridiculous as it may seem to display a city that we could never take the boat to that’s how Transport Canada’s registry works. We would have preferred to display Buchanan but spelling out Saskatchewan will likely cause just as much entertainment.