The Muffin is on the hard at our friend Nate’s yard in Fort Lauderdale – see the post below for the ORDEAL we’ve gone through getting her there!

This is what we’ve been dealing with the last few weeks:

So we hired a trucker to haul the new boat up from Florida…

The Monday before the weekend we are supposed to go down to coordinate the move, Sam Stoia of Boats and Tires calls to go over the numbers for unstepping our mast. He wants to get started “disconnecting all the wires”, etc. I told him we’d do that ourselves, we just really needed him to unstep the mast. Well, his insurance has changed, he says, and we can’t work on the boat ourselves any more. And no, he doesn’t have new yard rules in writing. And no, he can’t fax us a copy of his insurance. “Just bring $2000 in cash and that should cover it”…

“New

(the new Muffin on the hard at Boats and Tires)

Frankie calls the next day to set up a work order – now Sam says his guys have to take down the solar panels, and we should “just bring $3000 in cash and we’ll be fine.” Sam, of course, treats Frankie like she knows absolutely nothing about boats, and our rig is so complicated, it’ll take 2 guys 2 days to drop the mast, etc. etc. By the end of this call, Frankie had steam coming out of her ears. But our trucker is going to Florida on Friday, so we have him send us the work order.

The work order shows up the next day. On it – “Prep boat for transport – time and materials – labor at $68 per man-hour, crane time at $150/hour” No estimates, no limits. Now with some yards, that’d be just fine – but Sam had previously tried to charge us for 25 hours of welding on a job that his welder had estimated at 2-4 hours. So Frankie asked for an estimate, and Sam blew his top.

The next day, I called Sam, and he gave me a long speech about how complicated it is to drop a mast – our rig is so complicated, etc. etc. Whatever. He says “Just bring $4000.00 cash and you’ll leave with change in your pocket.” This is starting to get scary, but I tell Sam that I’ll fax the work order, with some generous not to exceed numbers, and he can get started, and he agrees. So that’s what I did.

That evening, he emails our trucking company to tell them that we refused to sign a work order.

WHAT?! Our trucking company calls FRIDAY MORNING ready to pull out. We quick get on the phone to Sam, fax the work order again, call the trucking company – but by 11AM, they’ve had enough. They don’t trust that Sam will release our boat, and they pull out. So we’re left flying to Florida with no trucking company.

We spent a good half hour standing in the kitchen fuming, trying to figure out what to do – whether it’s even worth going to Florida. But, what the heck – we’ve got plane tickets – we might as well go.

Down in Florida, trying to come up with a plan B – we call Sam to see what his current take is. Now he wants a $3000 cash “deposit” before he starts work, and then we can work out the additional bill once the work is finished – but it’ll “probably be less than $4000.00.” All we can imagine is that he owes someone a lot of money, and wants us to provide it. But we’re afraid that we’ll hand over the $3000.00 and still not have a boat that can be transported. Oh, and he says that if we don’t get the boat out soon, he’ll start charging us $350/day for storage. Too bad he scared off our trucking company.

It was then that Frankie decided to call in the big guns. Her brother Pete has a friend Nate who has a yard in Ft. Lauderdale. Frankie makes a few phone calls, and we are put in touch with Big Tuna – a bad-ass boat transporter who nobody messes with.

Now Big Tuna wants to meet us – he’s unloading boats at the Sarasota boat show. We drive up there, get into the show, take a stroll around – but we can’t find the Big Tuna anywhere. So Frankie calls him up on his cell phone – and he says to just “look for one of his pirates”. We wandered around for a while, until suddenly sure enough, there goes a pirate – a woman in a full-on “sexy pirate” costume. Then another, and then a boy pirate… so we get our courage up, and ask one – and he says “see that – sticking out from behind that tree? That’s about 1/3 of Big Tuna”.

He’s pretty big.

Yes, for the first time in our lives, we hired a fixer. Life started to feel like a Carl Hiassen novel.

(here Frankie takes over narrating)

Big Tuna had to go to the yard in person, with a truck, our letter of permission, cut the lock off our container and started loading our stuff up. Sam the Crook freaked out and was running around like a mad chihuahua. Then Sam apparently went into his office and checked up on who Big Tuna was and came back out with a whole new more compliant attitude. I wish I could have seen it and I wish I could say it was a little consoling but we’re hemorrhaging money for it to happen. Probably more than if we just gave Sam the Crook the extortion money he wanted. That is, if we still had a transporter.

AND, get this- Big Tuna wanted to take the boat too but, Sam’s crane is broken. It’s sitting next to our boat Broken!! i.e. it was probably broken or broke while we were planning the pick up and Sam was trying to use us to finance getting it fixed. Which could account for the sudden switch to demanding an insane cash deposit. Sam’s plan originally was to get the work done before we got there so they could charge us however much he wanted (again). Luckily Tony wisely thwarted this by writing in not to exceed limits on the work order. Which made Sam go postal. Which, unfortunately or not, lead to Sam canceling our transport or at least trying to delay it without telling us. There is some consolation knowing that if we had pushed forward with the pick up, it most likely would have gone all to hell and we would have had to pay the transporter for a non-pick up which would have been horrible. We both would have had heart attacks from the stress and died. So the transporters instinct was correct- something was not right.

Big Tuna and Sam went through all the paperwork. Tuna told Sam exactly what was and was not acceptable as far as work still to be done to splash the boat for tow to Lauderdale. Tuna sent us the paperwork with all his cross offs for record. AND Tuna told Sam he’s to have his yard equipment in order by today for the boat removal on Monday or Tuesday of next week. He also wrote in that the work must be completed by 5/14 so we don’t lapse our yard contract. If we do it’s the yards fault and we’re covered.

At least there has been some progress and our equipment is out of there and safe. So we’re 1/4 of the way there- whoo-hoo -and it’ll probably cost us the cost of the boat by the time she finally crosses the FL state line- we now officially HATE Florida! (except for Jen & Donald’s, Sonny’s Dad’s place and my folks place, of course). But by Hook or by Crook (I now know what that really means), we’re going to get that boat outta there if it kills us!…and it is killing us…

Morals of the story

1. If I guy tells you to follow his Pirates to find him- take note.
2. If you ever actually have to hire said Pirates- Don’t forget, they are Pirates for a reason.
3. Oh yeah! and another one- To snipe an auction is divine but you always pay in the end.

Another unlikely adventure in the the log of the Sea Muffin.

blocking out the hatches and electrical – the rustproofing is done in the V-Berth; have to order some more stuff to do the lazarette.

Tomorrow I’ll post Frankie’s update on our saga with the boat in Florida. We’re out all of our cruising kitty and are still not sure what’s happening with her. It’s SCARY.

I’m going to take some pics today for anyone that’s interested in the old Muffin. She’s really an awesome boat.