How Much Money...
Does It Take to Accomplish Various Bottom Job Tasks
This page may take years to finish
We hope this article will help the typical boat owner
(especially customers of Schroth Fiberglass)
to plan a boat maintenance budget.
Warning: All labor estimates in this article are based upon a $50 per hour rate. Every person in the world who sells labor by the hour seems to be charging more than that amount. In fact all the other shops on Lake Travis are quoting $95. We know we are the very best at what we do. It is reasonable that we should charge more than anyone else.
We live on the same planet as all the rest of you and we will shortly be adjusting our shop rate to reflect the real price of our personnel, capital investment, maintenance, insurance, taxes, staff and perhaps even an additional amount for some sort of eventual retirement nest egg for Fred. Hint: Most of my customers seem to understand that they must pay $100 per hour to a a plumber, electrician or AC service man who operates out of the back of a pickup truck. Our operation is more similar to the repair business at your local car dealership. Of course they are not accustomed to or expected to have standard prices for repairs to autos found floating in the lake.
It is probably a good idea to book your work before Fred figures out that he is giving away his life for no particular reason.
Boat Handling: The boat must arrive at the shop and return to wherever it usually lives. We will describe a boat that is floating in a slip and ready to sail.
If you plan to bring the boat to our shop and pick it up when you come to pay your bill, you can probably skip this part. It might be fun to add up all the time and funds you spend on your trailer and hauling vehicle but we can save that for another day.
1. Mast lowering and re rigging after the work is complete.
The rig has to come down to travel to any legal and suitable maintenance facility. There is no suitable place around Lake Travis where it is legal to sand and paint. LCRA is careful to protect our drinking water supply and we would not even consider doing the work we do where our runoff could pollute the lake. Any business that pollutes Lake Travis can be severely fined. As drinkers of the water, we appreciate clean water. The Owners of responsible marinas such as Yacht Harbor and Commanders Point have closed their lakeside repair facilities and as fellow community members who recreate on the lake, we appreciate their responsibility.
The bright side of the forced mast lowering, is the availability of the upper sections of the spar and rigging for proper inspection. It would be nice to carefully inspect your mast and rigging before each trip from the harbor. Certainly it is difficult to properly inspect a raised mast. Most sailboat owners never really get a reasonable chance to thoroughly inspect the rigging. Most of our customers masts have not been down and inspected since the last bottom job we did or worse, since the boat was originally launched years and years ago. Almost every mast we lower has some problem. Sometimes it is just the lights that do not work. Sometimes a sheave or halyard is severely worn. On about one boat in five we find something that is near failure and many of those resulting failures would also cause the mast to fall over. There are regular comments among us while we lower and raise masts related to the good fortune of sailors. It amazes us how few masts actually fall over.
So what does it cost?? Access to the Yacht Harbor mast hoist costs non slip holders $75. The staff member who must be present while we work (and who helps with the job) costs and additional $85 per hour. We supply two or three men depending on the size of the mast. It is nearly impossible to lower or rig any mast in under an hour. When a boat has roller furling, halyards fed through sections of the deck, loads of electronics aloft, a boom cover, a bimini, backstay adjusters and barbecue grills hanging off the stern, the down and up task can total more than a full day for the rigging team.
2. Bringing the boat to a suitable ramp. Some marinas have ramps and hoists for raising and lowering masts. If your marina does not have those facilities someone will have to move the boat to a place where the necessary de-commissioning and hauling can be accomplished. We do very best to schedule with you so you can deliver your boat to available facilities. If we must move the boat for you, we must charge our usual shop hourly rate for our person who delivers the boat.
As of March 2007, there is only one ramp on Lake Travis where boats can be hauled. Consider how long it will take to travel with your boat from your marina to the Mansfield Dam Park. Multiply by a reasonable shop labor rate and you can predict how much it will cost to have us bring your boat from the marina to the ramp.
3. Hauling the boat from the water. We have a variety of trailers and for most common sailboats from dinghies to 35 feet. We also have the necessary truck to move the loaded trailers. We have notes about how to pre-configure those trailers to exactly fit and properly support the hull. As a general rule, we include the rent fees for one of our trailers in the general price of a bottom job or topsides paintjob.
When a sailboat of a type we have previously hauled, is sitting at the ramp, it takes only about one half elapsed hour and two or three or even four men to put the boat on the trailer. If we have never hauled a boat exactly like yours and with the exact same keel configuration, our entire hauling team will sometimes spend an additional hour or three on the hauling ramp. One person will swim around under the boat and adjust the trailer. A second drives the boat. A third uses ropes from shore to help position the boat on the trailer and a fourth person acts as the driver of the hauling truck.
Summary of hauling and launching? It costs us somewhere between $500 and $1500 to make a round trip from your slip, through the shop, and back to your slip. It is absolutely the most expensive part of our boat maintenance business.
and we have not even begun to discuss the cost of actually working on that bottom job....