First Encounter With the Law

6/2/07 – I woke up in the v-berth of my new boat this morning. I would have slept in one of the aft-berths but since I was tied up to a dock, the wind was blowing the rain towards the stern of the boat and making it drip in through the hatch and right where my head would have been. I made sure that nobody was walking by when I climbed out and walked to my car because it is this yacht club’s policy that nobody is allowed to sleep on their boats. I thought that this was a dumb rule and figured that nobody would notice if I showed up very quietly yesterday evening and went to bed without even turning a reading light on. I went to West Marine and Wal Mart again to buy more supplies to install a fresh water tank and hook the starting battery and thus the alternator on the engine to the house battery system. These improvements will give me fresh water and allow me to charge the house battery (which runs all the lights, radio, and 110v alternator) by running the engine rather than having to plug into shore power at a marina.

As I was crawling around in the bilge under the cockpit, I heard footsteps approach the boat. This was the first human that walked past my boat since the evening before. He told me to come out so I could talk to him. He asked me tons of questions and didn’t believe that the boat was mine so we had to walk through the rain to my rental car and go through the paperwork that I had gotten the previous day at the closing. He finally became satisfied that the boat was mine and then told me that the reason he was here was that he had received a complaint that someone had been sleeping on a boat in the marina. I tried to contain my shock since I had not seen a single other person walking around that could have even seen me. He instructed me to tell anyone else who asked that I worked on the boat all night and perhaps just had a little nap when I was overwhelmed with the work. He said that he wouldn’t do anything about it this time but made me promise to find lodging elsewhere in the future otherwise he would be forced to take action.

I did a bunch more work installing an autopilot and grocery shopping before I went to a cheap hotel in Lake Worth to sleep.