I live close to Flathead Lake in Montana. It is a very large lake (30 miles long X 15 miles wide), and we take the boat out on the lake almost every weekend during the warm summer months.
We enjoy cruising around the lake and looking at the beautiful houses on the shore. Almost everyone on the lake has a covered dock, and most of those docks have davits for lifting the boat out of the water. All summer long you will see boats hanging out of the water.
Use of the lake drops off after Labor Day and many boat owners take their boats out and dry store them over the winter. The homes with boat houses simply pull their boats up into their houses for winter storage.
This lake is huge, and rarely freezes over (although it has been known to happen in the past). But a freeze over has never happened during the summer months. We get some nasty thunder storms during the summer, and as a result 2-3 foot wave are not unusual on the lake.
So why are these owners pulling their boats out of the water during the summer months? This is a Rocky Mountain freshwater lake and we don’t have mussels or barnacles that would foul the bottoms of the boats. It would seem easy to secure these boats to the dock so they wouldn’t get banged up during a storm.
There must be some reason why they don’t want their boats in the water when they aren’t using them. Any thoughts?
I think it’s just safer for the boat because it is difficult to secure it tightly in a way that it won’t end up bumping against the dock, and there’s some chance it will break free in the water, or be hit by something else. It also might be just to show off that they have a dock, a davit, and a boat to lift.
Sure, for a few minutes or hours (although still not completely easy), but ropes stretch and leaving it like that for longer without regular tending to is actually pretty hard.
Even in freshwater lakes you still get algae, slime, and other crud that can attach to the hull, discoloring it and decreasing performance. And bottom painting a boat is expensive and time-consuming, so it’s easier to haul the boat at the end of the day if you have davits.
Because anything can happen to your boat during a bad storm in the slip, and the marina would not be liable. Also, if your boat damages the dock or pilings, you may be responsible for the marina’s repair costs?
Also, even though the boat is in fresh water, fouling can still occur if the boat is idle, in the slip for an extended period of time. If I know I won’t be using my boat for a month or more, I’ll have my marina pull it.
A lot of those boats are put away in their boathouses because they get used so infrequently it’s not worth leaving them in the water.
I have a have a friend who has an old family cabin up there and their next-door neighbors are out-of-staters with a spectacular house built complete with a playground, water slide, a huge power boat and about six jet skis. Apparently over the 10 years since they built the thing, they’ve been up there maybe a week or two a year on average, but some years they don’t come at all. When they come out, a whole crew of caretakers descend on the place and mow the lawn, clean the house, and put the boats in the water. I think this is not an uncommon arrangement with the super nice houses on Flathead Lake. Things are slowing down a bit now, but Montana real estate and the Flathead in particular used to be really trendy among the super rich house-collecting set. You’ve undoubtedly noticed that Sotheby’s has a very active real estate branch in the area-- that should tell you something about the people buying houses around there!
Rain is also a factor. A boat is not something that people tend to pay attention to every day.
If you leave it in the water, rain can build up in the bilge, even if it is well covered. If this home isn’t your permanent residence your boat can be sunk by rain water. Or you could have it plugged in to electricity so the bilge pump runs when needed and a storm cuts the power.
If you just pull it out of the water and pull the drain plug you have no worries, whatever water gets inside will drain out on its own.
Remember the BOAT is an acronym that means Break Out Another Thousand.
Most boats have automatic bilge pumps so leaving the boat in the rain is not an issue at all. You’d have to go back to the 1990s to find a slipable boat without an auto bilge pump.
Yes, but you are still dependent upon a charged battery or land line to electricity. This leaves you open to pump failure if power to the pump is lost.
The battery of a seldom used boat will not keep up in the off season without a land line power supply. If you have a set up to pull the boat from the water that solves the worry.
Another consideration is that most boat engines are cooled by water being pumped through them rather than having a anti-freeze radiator system like a car has.
While Flathead Lake may not freeze over, it still gets cold enough in the winter to do some damage to any boat that still has water in the cooling circulation system.
For this reason we always disconnect the engine water hoses and drain the water before winter.
My marina hauls my boat out every year at the end of the season on October 15 so I don’t have a problem with freezing. However, we have liveaboards at our marina who stay in the water year-round. For those folks, the marina installed bubblers.