Mysterious boats on the bay: What where they doing?

I woke up the other morning and looked out the back door and I saw a bunch of boats in the bay circulating behind our building.

I thought to myself about Mini Lobster Season, but that was the previous week. I’ve never seen boats congregate like that before. At one point, there were seven.

Even during the lobster mini season, I’ll see two or three spread out over a large area. Now they were all together, mixing and mingling. Almost like they do at a sandbar.

Hmm, what was going on?

At first it started with a couple of boats and I thought it might be developers sizing up our buildings, I know they are interested in the land to add another monster project. And then I saw one guy jump from one boat to another.

Then I thought, maybe it’s a movie crew and they are checking out the area, but then the two boats turned into three and then four and then seven.

They circled each other and then “parked” – they anchored and all faced the same direction almost as if they were getting ready to race.

I asked one of my neighbors what he thought of this, he didn’t know at first but then said, “It’s the painters.”

The painters? The building next door is being painted, they are the same painters that did our building a couple of years ago (the ones who washed my car), it’s been a couple of years now, they are still next door working, but are they now coming to work in boats?

Then I realized what it was. The painters were doing something with the docks and boat lifts – cleaning them? Painting them? So all the boat owners had to move their boats out for the morning.

It looked like one guy picked them up in another boat and brought them to shore, while they were anchored offshore for most of the morning.

By noon, all was quiet, the boats were back at their docks and the mystery was solved.

I see a lot of strange things out on the bay, living on the water is interesting, but this was one of the strangest things until I realized what it was. Then it turned out to be a boring thing. No excitement after all.

Until next time. . .