October 13, 2012. So its boat show time again. Every year its pretty much the same ole’ same ole’. The same boat manufacturers showing this seasons latest and the greatest.  Every once in a while there’s something new that makes you stop and say WOW.  Sometimes it’s “Wow”, how cool or why didn’t I think of that but a surprising amount of the time its more like “Wow, What the hell were they thinking”.  A new trend I saw this year was the deck mounted winches on the new generation of catamarans. In the past the winches were mounted on the cabin top somewhat in the helmsman’s line of vision.  So to get rid of this possible safety issue the trend seems to be to mount the winches down on an angled panel adjacent to the instrument panel.  The way the lines are now led up and over a stainless plate mounted on the corner of the cabin top just seems kinda wrong to me.

Years ago lines had to be led “clean”.  Now it seems that with stainless plates, electric winches and fancy schmancy high strength line anything goes. I do enjoy looking through the vendor booths in search of something new and cool.   Since we’re starting our refit I did spend some quality time with the people at Garmin and Beta Marine.   But on a whole I’ve become a little boat show cynical.  One thing that hasn’t changed for me is using the boat show as an opportunity to meet people.  I interact with a lot of people on the internet by either reading their blog or by them following ours.  I said it before but it always freaks me out a bit meeting people who’ve been following our blog and know so much about us before we’ve met. This year we met 3 new to us couples.   Just before the boat show we were able to spend a few hours with Paul & Deb of s/v Kelly Nicole.  We took the skiff out to their boat and picked them up for a little river cruise followed by dinner at Davis’ Pub.  We’ve been following each other’s blog for more than a year so the playing field was a little more level.  They’ve been sailing in Lake Ontario for years and their plan for warm latitude sailing has been suddenly accelerated.  It was good to finally meet them as they headed down to Florida to start another chapter in their sailing life. Then there was a guy I met through work.  Mike was in the yard to sea trial and ultimately buy a beautiful Baba 40.  He recognized me from the blog and we did get to spend some time during the work day talking about boats. Finally while we were walking through the show we ran into Walt & Sally.  We’ve chatted through the blog so they knew we had alcohol in common so we immediately headed over to Armadillos for a couple of cocktails.  We talked about all things boating and were enjoying each others company when the phone rang.  It seems there was a problem at the marina. A customer had left earlier in the day in his sailboat and was reporting an issue.  He said he sailed away earlier in the day and now out in the middle of the bay the boat wouldn’t start.  He said he was going to sail back to the dock and could I be there to help them in docking.  I assured him that with the crowded harbor and the current wind direction sailing onto our docks was not an option.  I advised him to sail close to town and to call TowBoat US to aid him in getting onto the dock.  He agreed but imagine my surprise an hour later when he called and said that he had gotten the engine started and was now safely tied up at our dock BUT now the engine won’t shut down.  Won’t shut down?  He swears the engine won’t shut off.  Crap. He seems to be pretty unfamiliar with his boat so we’ve got to get up and head back to the marina. So we said a quick goodbye and headed back through the boat show. We pushed our way through the crowd with a sense of urgency. We made it back to the water taxi and after a short wait we were whisked back across the river. We double timed the short walk back to the marina and headed down to the waterfront. Sure enough, when we walked up to the boat it was still running. The owner started going through his theories on what was going on or whose fault it might be. I stepped into the cockpit and glanced at the engine panel. He had the key off and the engine was still running. Imagine his surprise when I explained to him that when you shut the key off you were shutting off the power to the panel which includes the kill button. It turned out that he was trying to start the boat by pressing the large red button clearly marked “Off”. But conversely he was trying to kill the thing by just turning the key rather than pressing the big red button. Once I was sure that Captain Alzheimer was all straightened out we headed home to the boat to start packing. Thats right we're moving....