Not everyone is fortunate enough to own a waterfront home with your boat waiting a few steps across the lawn or deck. Many boaters can afford the waterfront lifestyle but choose not to live on the water because they find it more calming not to worry about their house flooding during another ‘Sandy” incident. Whatever your mindset, if you have a boat, it needs to have some contact with water during the season or sit in it on your driveway and cast lures onto your neighbor’s lawn.
Trailering is certainly an option. The advantages are minimal costs and mobility to different locals that have ramps. Fish the Ocean one day, Peconic Bay the next and the Sound on the third. On the fourth, you get served with divorce paper but as long as you keep the boat, you’re A-OK! One negative with trailering and launching at ramps is that you will become aware that all the boaters launching are idiots except you. It’s strange how it works out that way! Your next option is to find a stranger or friend who lives on the water who will gift you dock space (highly unlikely) or charge you less than a marina. The plus to that is that when you return from a cruise with the family, your dock landlord may have a Bar-B-Que with his family and your family de-boat and sit down, uninvited, to a free meal. Of course, your chances of having that docking spot next year will be next to nil!
So, you aren’t trailering and you lost your spot at your friends’ free dock because you spent the entire summer at every Bar-B-Q they had. Mate! It’s called overstaying your welcome and that reputation spreads like wildfire, up and down the coast from Sheepshead Bay to Montauk. So now you have to spring for a marina. Now, up to forty years ago there were tons of laid-back, sandy parking lots, creepy falling-down office and shop buildings around that were cheap! No more my friend. People started buying bigger and fancier boats, wives thought places looked icky and smelled like fish and the kids got splinters on the shoddy docks. Next came the age of ‘Fabulous Marinas”. Everything salty about them was removed. Parking lots got paved, restaurants and pools were added and prices went up, up, up, and these newbie boaters started shelling out money. The every day boaters and fishermen got boxed out. I was in one marina that, after 10 years, he modernized and asked all the fishermen to leave because they were no longer his “Clientele”. He kept me because I paid him cash upfront. That was the trick. But a few years later I bought a place on the water.
So how do you find the best marina to fit your needs? Well, the first thing is location, location, location. Where you live is a major factor. If you want to be able to access your boat regularly, come home from work and take a quick voyage, or go to a waterfront restaurant that means you need a local marina. If you want to use it on weekends in Montauk or Greenport and live in Seaford, which presents you with other challenges. Then there’s the issue of mechanical support. Do they have an on-site shop that can handle any issues you may have during the season? If your vessel is larger than most, can the boat lift handle your needs? Marinas are expensive these days (So is chicken) can you pay upfront and get a discount or can you pay out monthly? Each way has advantages. Do they have a fuel dock and if so, and you don’t like their prices, will they allow you to “Jerry can it”? Some do, some don’t.
Is it way up river in a “One mile an hour, no ripple zone” that will take you hours to get to open water, or is it a stone’s throw from it and, if you throw that stone will it hit another boat or mariner on the dock?
When you rent a slip, be sure you can easily navigate into it safely under any wind conditions. If you are offered the last slip he has, right adjacent to wetlands and tall phragmites, is it silted up on lower tides?
And are you right next to the largest mosquito hotel in the Mid-Atlantic States? How about dockside potable water? Electric? Wi-Fi? Clean bathrooms? (Well, you may have to compromise on the clean part) and showers? Lockers? Hordes of jet ski docking there? Bait? The questions keep coming.
The best thing to do is to decide what’s best for you! Make a checklist and see how many “Have to’s’’ you can get. It’s always a compromise.
If you are lucky, you’ll find what you want. Me? If I were looking around like years ago, I’d still stick with the muddy, pot-holed parking lot, the weary wood docks and slips, the shack with the office piled with cans of oil stacked upon invoices the owner should have sent out 4 months, an unleashed pit bull named “Quint” and the owner, who always carries a wrench between his remaining teeth, should also be named “Quint”!
It’s not about the money. It’s about the mood. There are still a few of those really salty places out there.
See you on the water,
Captain Eddy