Ready or not, winter is coming. For those of us living in the northern part of the country, that means getting our boats ready for snow, cold, and ice. Here’s about the most thorough advice I’ve seen about how to best protect your boat from what’s coming, from BoatUS. You can download an entire PDF with worthwhile advice at the end.
It’s that time of year again. The leaves have started to change color, and the nights are getting longer and cooler. Before the mercury dips below freezing, you need to prepare your boat for the coming winter. At its most basic, winterizing means draining any water aboard or replacing it with enough of the right kind of antifreeze to protect against the lowest temperatures your boat might experience.
Fresh water expands in volume by about nine percent when it freezes and can push outwards with a force of tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. That expansion can crack an engine block, damage fiberglass, split hoses, or destroy a refrigeration system overnight. An analysis of ten years of freeze claims from the BoatU.S. Marine Insurance claim files found that more than three-quarters involved cracks in the engine block or the exhaust manifolds that occurred because water remained in the engine or cooling system during a hard freeze.
Those claims come from all over the country, not just from the states that get snow every year. Boaters in the frozen North know they need to winterize, so their freeze claims almost always involve a problem with how the boat was winterized. In the temperate South, the claim files include many more claims where the boat wasn’t winterized at all, or where the boater was depending upon a heater to keep the engine from freezing and the electricity went out.
Click on the link here to download the entire PDF, it’s great: https://www.boatus.com/expert-advice/how-to-diy/winterization
