Guides for Lake Winnipesaukee Boat Owners

Most boat advice on the internet is written for everywhere, which means it is written for nowhere. It will tell you to winterize before the first freeze without knowing when that is where you live, and to launch in spring without knowing that spring here is declared by a spotter in an aeroplane deciding whether a steamship could reach five ports.

These are written for Lake Winnipesaukee specifically. Where there is a date, it is a real one with a source behind it. Where there is a number, it is measured rather than estimated. And where no reliable source exists — a common haul-out date, or New Hampshire's exact horsepower threshold for a boating certificate — the guide says to check with the authority instead of inventing something plausible.

They are also written to be useful before you call rather than instead of calling. The no-start guide will genuinely solve a share of no-starts on its own, and that is the point: a customer who checks the battery switch and the kill lanyard first either fixes it for free or gives a far more useful description of the fault on the phone.

A guide gets written when there is something specific and local to say, not to fill a schedule, and the next ones will come out of the questions that actually get asked on the phone through a season.

If there is something you keep wondering about — whether a symptom is urgent, what a job like yours usually involves, what a fair interval is for your engine — say so when you ring. That is how these get chosen.