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Marina business going full sail during COVID-19 slowdown

By Bruce Hope bruce@opcfla.com
Posted 5/6/20

FLEMING ISLAND – Many Clay County residents have had a lot more time on their hands recently. They’ve been doing more projects around the house and spending more time in their gardens. They have …

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Marina business going full sail during COVID-19 slowdown


Posted

FLEMING ISLAND – Many Clay County residents have had a lot more time on their hands recently. They’ve been doing more projects around the house and spending more time in their gardens. They have also been spending more time outdoors, on the whole, getting more exercise and enjoying the fresh air.

One of the ways that is happening on the First Coast is by people getting out onto the water in their boats. One of the places that is happening is at the Doctors Lake Marina in Fleming Island on U.S. Highway 17.

“We don’t count boat movements as a general rule,” said Navy veteran and Doctors Lake Marina owner Robert Jones. “But the leading indicator of whether or not there’s a lot of activity on the water is our fuel sales. As you would imagine, our fuel sales go up on great weather days, on the weekend, and they go down on bad weather days. During the last month, the increasing levels of lockdown, there were two very nice weekends. One of those weekends, everybody was out. It was like you could walk across the river from boat to boat to boat.”

Jones says people are out boating because it’s one of the activities you can still go out and do. It allows people to enjoy the activity while maintaining social distance and being responsible from a health perspective. Individual families can go out onto a boat and enjoy the time together on the water in the sun.

Even during the week, the traffic is up.

“Our dockmasters can get a boat on a good day, they can grab the tractor, go into the yard, put a boat in, launch it, get it tied up on the dock, and get the trailer put back away in about 15-20 minutes,” said Jones. “So days on which we launch 25-30 boats, those are memorable days because those guys work really, really hard during those days. Definitely, there’s been more boating during the weekdays than there used to be.”

“We had our busiest weekend that I’ve ever seen here, probably the second week after the lockdown,” said Bob Thibault, one of the dockmasters at Doctors Lake. “We sold more fuel in one day than we ever did before, over 2,000 gallons. We’ve gotten to the point now where we try to put boats in ahead of time for people, but the dock is so full we can’t do it. We have to wait until they get here. During the week, you might have two or three boats going; now you have nine or 10.”

“There’s more people boating. They can boat, so they’re boating,” said Jones.