Packing Up The Seadoos And Cottage For Winter
It’s time to put on the boat cover and the Seadoo cover and generally get the cottage ready for the winter. For us a part of cottage life is closing the cottage. I likely won’t totally close up the cottage until after Thanksgiving weekend but I like to get a jump start on some of the chores in the latter part of September. It’s always sad to close the cottage but I actually enjoy the cottage closing chores as I know I can look forward to opening a clean cottage the next year.
Once it becomes too cold to really enjoy the seadoo out on the lake, I take them out of the water for good and start to get them ready for storage. Of course I leave my favorite one in the water just in case of a warm day for one last spin out on the water. Once they are out of the water I do a complete washdown and scrub all the dirt and algae out of any nooks and crannies. This cleaning also gives me a chance to see if I have to fix or replace any pieces or nicks as well.
After everything is all shined up and fixed, now is the time to get out the seadoo covers and get them ready for storage. I store my pwcs inside for the winter so I can keep them like new as long as possible. My favorite part of coming to the cottage is riding our pwcs, so I take extra special care of storing them so they won’t age prematurely. We have a few other boats, like a canoe and peddle boat, that don’t get such special treatment – they are both washed off and stored upside down under the cottage so they get a little protection from the ice and snow.
Another job that I enjoy is finding and splitting deadwood. We don’t use a lot of firewood to heat the cottage but we do have a wood stove and the first few weekends of the cottage season (just after Easter) can be chilly. It’s nice to open up the cottage and have some ready wood to throw into the woodstove. We don’t often come up during the winter but if we do the wood is ready.
We also spend a lot of time working on our naturalized landscaping. There are no manicured flower beds or anything like that, but we have planted a lot of bulbs and hostas and creeping ground cover that give our cottage a wonderful natural landscape. At the edges of the lawn and driveway are some banks of wildflowers that self seed and give the lot beautiful color through the season. I like to cut back any plants and bulb leaves that are starting to die back, so there is less cleanup to do in the spring. I add the clippings to our compost pile, and then take a bit of the ready compost and amend any beds that I think need it. Cutting the lawn one last time lets us enjoy the tiny spring bulbs that we’ve planted, without getting lost in long dead grass.
There are a number of other chores that need to be taken care of in the fall but I will leave those to another article. I am going to enjoy that last parts of this years cottage life and go to find the Seadoo covers.