Haul-Out & Winterization Record PDFA Boat Winterization Checklist in Two Halves, What the Slings Show and What Spring Must Undo

Thirty seconds of hose and the best inspection of the year is gone for twelve months.

Fouling, anode wastage, cutless bearing play, propeller condition, gelcoat blistering: all of it exists for about ten minutes, while she hangs wet in the slings. Almost nobody writes it down. By the time the lance has been over her, it is a memory, and a memory does not compare to last year.

That is the first half of this record. The second half is the one that destroys engines.

This is the boat winterization checklist kept as a record rather than copied from a list: what the slings showed, what was closed in autumn, and what spring reopened.

Winterisation is not a hard job. It is a job with a long tail, done in the cold, by somebody thinking about going home. The failure mode is never the thing done badly, it is the thing done and never reversed.

A seacock closed. An impeller removed. An isolator switched off. A vent taped over. None of them announce themselves, all of them look exactly like a boat that is ready, and every one of them has ruined somebody's May.

So Part III is a paired register: thirty-six rows, each carrying the autumn operation and its spring counterpart side by side, with two dates and two signatures. A row with an autumn date and no spring date shows Open, by name, until it is done. Model W1 counts them, and it has to be complete before you start the engine.

You will not find a concentration, a temperature, a torque, a quantity or a sequence of operations in these pages. What your engine, gearbox, heads, watermaker and heating require comes from their makers, in the revision of the manual that matches your serial number.

A procedure printed in a general document and applied to a system it was never written for is worse than no procedure, because it carries the appearance of authority. The operation column in Part III is blank. You write what your documentation says.

Days out of the water, the cost per day ashore, and the total value of the work you decided not to do this winter. That last figure is the one every spring forgets until it reappears as a failure. All three carry straight into the Annual Running Cost Model.

In the Fillable edition every line has a field. Write each lay-up job as you do it, with its date; in Adobe Acrobat Reader, free on computer, iPhone and Android, each row shows Open until its spring half is in, and the share reopened, the anode wastage, the fouling rate, the days ashore, the cost per day and the work deferred are worked out for you. The Pencil & Print edition is ruled for handwriting in GoodNotes or Notability, or on paper at the yard. Both come in A4 and US Letter and work offline.

The owner who lays up and recommissions single-handed. The paired register is the entire reason to buy this. You are the person who closed the seacock and you will be the person who forgets it, five months later, on a cold morning, in a different frame of mind. Two dates and two signatures on one row is the only version of this that works, because it makes the open item visible rather than remembered.

The owner whose yard does the winterising. Your risk is worse, not better, because the person who closed it is not the person who will open it and neither of you has the list. Hand them the register, get the autumn column signed, and keep it. The spring column is then a handover rather than a hope.

The owner who stays afloat all winter. Fewer pairs, but the sling survey still matters at whatever interval you lift, and the anode and fouling trends matter more, because a boat that never leaves the water accumulates both quietly. Define your fouling scale in Part I and keep it for years; a scale changed halfway through is a trend destroyed.

The owner in dispute with a yard or an insurer. The sling survey, filled in wet with photo references, is contemporaneous evidence of hull condition on a dated day. Nothing else you can produce afterwards has that quality, which is precisely why it must be written before the pressure washer, not after.

The owner preparing to sell. Anode and fouling trends across three winters say more about how a boat has been kept than any amount of polish, and a surveyor reads them immediately. The deferred-work column is worth being honest in too; a buyer who finds it themselves trusts the rest of the file less.

This record publishes no procedure. It names no product, states no antifreeze concentration or dilution, no temperature, no torque, no quantity and no interval, and it prescribes no sequence of operations.

What your systems require for lay-up and recommissioning comes from their makers; what your vessel requires ashore is a matter for your yard and your insurer. Nothing here is training, and it is not a substitute for a qualified engineer or for a survey.

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2026 Edition, Revision 2.1, AML-OWN-2026-02. Apex Marine Labs designs the organisational process behind good seamanship. Our documents record and organise; they do not replace a manufacturer's manual, a qualified engineer, or a survey.