Bolero Weekly Progress - 3 May 08

With Tim in full blown wooden boat mode, a welcome relief from fiberglass grinding I'm sure, I spent a fair bit of time finding a way to ship Bolero from Maine to Washington state. One of my early decisions was to purchase a new Triad trailer with the idea that I would almost save the cost of the trailer in shipping. This allowed Tim to haul Bolero from Connecticut to Maine at a much lower cost than having to load Bolero onto a semi for hauling.

My original plan was to fly to Maine and rent a truck and bring Bolero home myself. I thought that this would be cheaper and there was that little control thing working also. But I had trailered my last boat across the country from Fort Meyers, Florida back to Washington so I wasn't overjoyed with the idea of the trip. I also have no illusion about the relative skill between a seasoned commercial truck driver and myself.

With all this in mind I did some google searching to check out my options. This came up with two results. First, I never did find a good source for a reasonable priced heavy duty pickup truck rental. Actually I didn't find any heavy duty pickup trucks for rent. The options I did find didn't provide much cost savings over my second option, uship. This is my first experience so my opinion may well change. But they seem to be trying to rationalize truck shipping the way ebay rationalized individual selling.

This is my listing in which I describe my shipment and the location of the pickup and delivery.

One of the things that quickly impressed me was the quality of the inquires that I received from the prospective bidders. I sort of got the impression that these guys and gals are driving with their laptops open on the dashboard responding while they drive :).

This is the current bidding status of my shipment.

I have currently not selected a shipper, although I do have a favorite. I want to do just a bit more research before my final selection. uship is like ebay in that they use the feedback method of rating the shippers. This is certainly not a perfect method but I have grown quite comfortable with using it on ebay.

I am still brand new to this service so time will tell, I will post my experiences as they they happen.

Project Stats
Total Hours - 405.25
Total Photos - 1223

Click the highlighted days for details.

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

Tim's Total Time This Week 22.25 hrs

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