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wrote:

At the end of my aborted cruise, I left my boat at Cortez Cove Marina
near Bradenton, FL. As my boat is a 28' S2 with a specified length of
8.5 meters which actually comes out to less than 28', I paid
$10/ft/month or $280/month. Now, the marina says THEY have measured it
to be 30' and want to charge me $300/month. Very strange. I wonder if
I leave it there longer will it continue to grow in length and value at
a faster rate than the increased slip fees.
I am halfway inclined to simply bring her back to N. Florida where I
get a slip for less than half that much and I do not have to put up
with such nonsense.

Some marinas are more anal about this than others. For $20/month I
wouldn't worry about it too much. There's always something.

Sometimes there will be something about it in the written material
which says that you will be charged for the length of the boat
including bow sprits and dinghy davits OR the length of the slip
whichever is greater. (I saw this in Hilton Head)

So a 30 foot boat in a 45 foot slip would be charged for 45 feet, and
a 45 foot boat in a 30 foot slip would also be charged for 45 feet. I
wouldn't like either of those scenerios and I wouldn't want to stay in
that particular marina anyway because it is way too expensive.

What I REALLY object to is when they don't tell you the parameters up
front, and trick you into paying more. Like the marina in Marathon
where I wanted to stay for 3 months. I came in on the 15th, and they
charged me for a month in advance of when I came. That was OK but
then they said they only billed from the 1st to the 1st, so for the
second half of the second month, I paid a half a month using the
monthly rate.

And then when I wanted to leave on the 15th, they said that for the
part of the last month they would charge by the week and day. The
weekly charge for 2 weeks plus the daily rate for one day was more
than the monthly charge so I wouldn't get any refund just because I
didn't come in and leave on the 1st. I didn't find that out until
about a month before I left - it wasn't in any of the written
material.

This marina has some other really unfair (and not written) policies
also, so while it was a nice place, we'd never go there again.

Sometimes they do have a point - where a boat that is bigger than what
the owner tells them will stick out into the freeway and make it
difficult for other boats to get by. And of course at a face dock,
they can't put another boat into the space taken up by the bowsprit.

As the dockmaster at Palmer Johnson told me "I have to allow 5'
between boats, and I don't charge you for that, but I will charge you
for all the space along the dock that you actually occupy". Of course
he charged even when he only had a small space and we hung off the end
of the face dock, but c'est la vie. We were only there for 1 night.

grandma Rosalie