Sitting for 3 months on a mooring ball at Fort Myers Beach, we knew Prairie Dog’s bottom was going to be a mess. The tidal current through the mooring field brings lots of nutrients with it. In previous years, we hired a diver to clean our bottom after a couple of months, but this year divers were in short supply. We finally found a diver, but after doing a bottom before ours, he was too tired and was only able to do our props and running gear. Ron cleaned the waterline several times (from the dinghy, first with a brush and by the end of our season with a wide scraper), but couldn’t get much more than a foot below the waterline. So yeah, we knew it was going to be bad.

The diver was correct: Our bottom was covered in mud. No wonder the grass grew so well! On the up side, we didn’t have many barnacles.