The boat that ruins your June is the boat you fitted out in June. I learned that the slow way, queuing behind every other owner for the one travel hoist, watching the first settled weather of the year slide past while I waited for a part. Now I work backwards from the day I want to sail and build the spring around it, and the difference is a season that starts on time instead of in the yard.
What follows is the schedule I run on a boat kept in France as a non-resident, the order I do things in, and roughly what each job costs in 2025 and 2026 money. Adapt the dates to your coast: an Atlantic relaunch is tied to a spring tide, a Med one to whenever the yard can drop you in.
Late winter: book before everyone else
The first job of the season is not a job, it is a phone call. The travel hoist, the rigger and the engineer all fill up, and the owner who books in February sails in May while the one who books in April waits.
Get the lift slot and the launch date pinned first, then work the work around them. If you are hauling and standing the boat ashore for the winter and into spring, the booking and storage mechanics are the same ones in the hauling out at a French boatyard as a foreign owner guide, and reading it before you ring the yard saves a fortnight of confusion about lift fees and lay days. Ask, while you have them on the phone, whether the yard lets owners do their own work or insists its staff handle the dirty jobs, because that single answer changes your whole budget.
Below the waterline: antifoul and anodes
Everything that needs the boat out of the water happens in one lift, or you pay for the hoist twice.
Antifoul leads here. A yard antifoul on a 10 metre fibreglass cruiser runs 750 to 1,000 euros done by their team, and a fraction of that if you do the painting yourself, since a litre covers about nine square metres and a fin-keel 10-metre hull eats two to three litres a coat. Swap the anodes while the boat is in the slings: a 10-metre boat usually carries a shaft anode and a hull anode, both worth renewing annually, and doing it now costs minutes against a special trip later. Eyeball the keel joint, the rudder and the skin fittings while you can see them. The detail of paint choice, DIY rules and the order of the job is the whole of the antifouling and survey while based in France guide, and pre-season is exactly when you act on it.
This is also the window for any survey your insurer wants, since the surveyor needs the hull stripped and dry. A moisture meter reads true after about three months ashore; above 20 percent points to active osmosis, below 14 percent and you can relax. Stack the survey onto this lift rather than buying a second one.
The engine: the service that earns its keep
A diesel that has sat all winter wants waking up properly, and the annual service is the cheapest insurance on the boat.
For an auxiliary up to around 10 metres, an annual engine service lands in the 250 to 900 euro range done professionally: oil and filter change, fuel filters, a new raw-water impeller, belts checked, coolant and seacock looked at. The impeller is the small part that punishes neglect, so renew it every year or every 1,000 hours regardless of how it looks, because a shredded impeller off a lee shore costs you an engine, a tow and your nerve. If you are handy, most of this is a Saturday with the manual; if you are not, it is money well spent.
While the engine is the focus, run the fuel through a filter and look hard at the tank, because winter condensation breeds the water and diesel bug that clogs filters on the first hot passage. A boat that will not make revs in a building Gulf of Lion sea is usually a boat with a dirty fuel system, not a tired engine.
Rig, sails and safety gear
Up top, the jobs are about catching the failure before it happens, because a rig comes down faster than you can react.
Standing rigging wants a visual inspection every year and a professional inspection every five, with many makers calling for wire replacement somewhere between ten and fifteen years. In spring, go up the mast or have a rigger do it: check the terminals, the spreader ends, the split pins and the furler. Look for the single broken strand or the weeping stainless stain that says a swage is going. Service the running rigging, end-for-end a tired halyard, and check the sails for chafe and stitching before the loft gets busy.
Safety gear runs on dates, so spring is when you catch the expiries. Walk the flares, the lifejacket gas cylinders and firing heads, the EPIRB battery, the liferaft service date and the fire extinguishers. France enforces its own safety-equipment requirements on the boats it checks, and arriving at a port control with out-of-date flares is an avoidable conversation. Build the inventory now, not the night before the crossing.
Topsides, systems and the small stuff
The jobs nobody books a yard for are the ones that make the boat pleasant to live on, and spring is when you do them while the lockers are already open.
If the boat carries wood, get the brightwork back up to full film and walk every deck seam, the discipline the teak and brightwork in the Med sun piece sets out. Run the heads and the holding tank, service the sanitation hose and the pump if they are due, and check the offshore discharge valve still works. Test the bilge pumps, the nav lights, the VHF and the gas system. Wash and reproof the cockpit canvas. None of it is glamorous and all of it is the difference between a shakedown sail that is fun and one that is a snagging list.
The single best thing you can do here is take the boat for a shakedown sail a fortnight before your first real passage, not the morning of it. A short day-sail out of your home port surfaces the faults that bench-testing misses: the autopilot that wanders, the reefing line that jams, the log that reads zero, the bilge that fills from a weeping stern gland. Find those a fortnight out and you have time to fix them. Find them on the way to a Channel crossing and you have a problem and a deadline at the same time. I treat the shakedown as the last item on the spring list, the test that signs off all the others.
A word on records while you are at it. Spring is when I update the boat's log of what was done and when, because a dated note that the impeller went in this April and the rig was inspected this March is worth real money at sale and exactly what an insurer asks for after an incident. The folder of receipts builds itself if you file as you go, and it falls apart if you wait until December to remember what you did.
The cost of a properly fitted-out spring
Add it up and a thorough pre-season on a 10-metre boat in France is not trivial: antifoul at 750 to 1,000 euros if the yard does it, an engine service at 250 to 900, anodes, a rigger's day, safety-gear renewals, plus the lift, launch and lay days on top. A survey year adds a thousand or more.
That sum is not a surprise, it is a fixture, and the owners who budget for it sail relaxed while the ones who do not get ambushed every April. The full annual figure, including the berth and insurance that sit alongside this spring work, is laid out in the annual running costs of a boat in France guide. Work backwards from your launch date, book early, stack the wet-out jobs into one lift, and you buy yourself the thing money cannot otherwise get: a boat that is ready the morning you are.
