Annapolis Boat Show Workers

His and her’s boat show staff hats. Mines the red one on the left. I got this as a rookie member of the electrical staff. Chris has the nice yella hat. She is working the gates – keeping those gate crashes at bay. The show has been pretty busy. A lot of vendors I’ve talked with say business and potential business is the best they’ve seen in 4 years. Chris is working the boat show days. I‘m on mainly before the show, between the the sail and power boat show and during the tear down after the show.
The work is tough. The show builds an entire marina. New pilings, docks and water and electric. The electric crew runs all the underwater power cable, sets up the panels for each slip and sets up all the power and lights for the dozens of tents. This all occurs over 3 1/2 days of setup. Mainly 12 to 14 hour days. Right now I’m nursing a bruised (or cracked) rib. I was carrying to long strings of lights and stepped over from a fixed dock to a floating barge. The barge had astroturf on it and was wet. The bridge was not in place yet. I slipped and went down hard on the edge of barge. Fortunately my lower rib grabbed on the edge of the barge and I stayed out of the water. Lost my wire tie cutter to the deep six. Ouch.
On Monday night after the sailboat show closes we will start disconnecting the dock power so the docks can be opened up, the sailboats moved out and the power boats brought in.
The good news is that it makes it so much easier to justify spending money at the show for boat toys. I think we’ve spent our boat show earnings 3 or 4 times by now.


We had a great visit with Denny and Becky off Kokomo. They are our friends from Mexico, El Salvador, Panama and the San Blas. They were up in DC to see their son who is just back from Afghanistan. They needed to spend a day at the boatshow to lighten their wallet. Tom and Carrie off Dragons Toy, also friends from El Salvador, anchored near us in Back Creek on their way back south after visiting Maine. There was too much conversation going on to remember to take out the camera, so I had to photoshop in a picture of our guests.
Paul