It’s time to pull the boat out of the water and you don’t want to pay the big bucks. Well, I fell you! The good news is for centuries, salty sailors didn’t have those fancy slings and trailers to pull boats out of the water. One of the proven techniques that was used was “tidal grids”. Tidal grids??! What the hell is that you say?!? Well a tidal grid is simply a place that lets you bring your boat to this location or dock at a pre-chosen high tide. After the boat is nicely tied and secured to the pillars/dock and resting on it’s keel, the hull of the boat will be exposed at low tide. This is a very affordable technique to work on your boat and do various maintenance: cleaning the hull, changing a thru-hull, zincs anodes, paint, etc.

On our boat we did a full hull scrapping, cleaning and full repaint with 2 coats of anti-falling paint. With all the money we saved, we hosted dinner and beers for all our friends that came to help us that day.

I know the idea of balancing your sailboat on the keel sounds quite scary, but if done properly, it’s a lot easier than you think. Through this post, I will walk you through all the steps I took in order to successfully use a tidal grid and save tons of money!! $$$

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