Hauling Out – a.k.a. Please Don’t Drop Our Boat!

There are all kinds of trust in life, and we learned a new level of trust when the boat yard hauled our floating home out of the water for us.

There aren’t a lot of boat yards along this portion of Florida that have the capability to haul catamarans out of the water; their travel lift has to be big enough to deal with the breadth of the boat.

Thankfully, Whiticar Boat Works in Fort Pierce have hauled a lot of catamarans, and more specifically a lot of Antares, before. A few months before Ohana was hauled, the boat yard actually had six Antares there at once. Although we felt at ease with their experience, we still had some anxiety when the morning of the haul out came.

We had only a few yards to move the boat from where we had stayed overnight on the fuel dock, to the waiting lift. The boat yard workers then placed the hauling straps according to the tape that Ted had marked the night before (and checked based on another Antares in the yard with us!), and then they lifted Ohana out of the water and moved her forward into the yard. They did a power wash on the bottom and then braced under her hulls, making sure that she was set safely for the duration of the work to be done.