Services for Sail : O.C. Entrepreneurs Clean Up Doing Maintenance Tasks That Save Owners Time and Money

You know about cleaning your house and your car. Routine stuff, right?

But if you own a boat, get ready for some surprises. For example, who do you call when you need to get your sails cleaned? You can’t exactly toss a 200-pound, 800-square-foot genoa into the washing machine.

Or consider this: At home, flush your toilet and everything disappears into the city sewers. On a boat, flush the head and everything collects in your holding tank, where it sits until you empty it. Who wants to spend part of a weekend cleaning out a holding tank?

And what about the gunk that collects in the bottom of your fuel tank? Stuff that can clog your filters, causing the engine to stall just as you’re heading in past the Newport jetty. That would be like having an engine cut out on your private jet as you’re approaching the runway at LAX. Not only embarrassing, but possibly fatal.

Dirty sails, dirty heads and dirty fuel are just a few of the special cleaning problems boaters deal with all the time. But where to turn?

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For the past two years, Kurt Zutavern, owner of Aqua Marine Sail and Canvas Cleaners in Costa Mesa, has been dunking, soaking, rinsing and drying every size and shape of sail that you can imagine. Zutavern, who does all his washing by hand in a cavernous warehouse, serves clients from San Diego to Ventura.

“I have a big wading pool, about 20 by 40 feet, lined with plastic,” he says. “I lay the sails out flat on the floor, dump them in the soapy water and scrub them with a bristle brush on both sides.” After a good rinsing, Zutavern then hangs the sails up to dry in his rented warehouse.

For 30 cents a square foot, Zutavern will pick up your sails, take them to his shop and clean them. Prices are slightly higher if Zutavern has to drive outside Orange County for pick-up.

Clients in Ventura County sometimes package up their sails and send them by bus, he says. “Most sails I get are off about a 30-foot boat,” he says. “So cleaning the main costs about $60, and for the genoa it would be about $110.”

But when you consider that new sails can cost $5,000, $10,000 or even $15,000 each, cleaning your old ones may be better than investing in new ones, Zutavern says.

“Sails are the most important piece of equipment on a sailboat. To outfit your boat with new sails is an expensive proposition,” says Zutavern, who recalls one boat owner who spent $250,000 for a full set of sails for his 115-foot yacht.

“With the economy being the way it is, people are trying to make do with what they’ve got. They aren’t out to buy new sails but to do what they can with the ones they have.”

Keeping sails clean is important, he says, and not just for cosmetic reasons. Sure, clean sails look better, but Zutavern points out that they also last longer and perform better. He recommends that sails be cleaned about once a year, more often if the boat is heavily used.

“Salt and mildew tend to break down the fibers,” he says. “Sails are impregnated with resins to make them stiff so they have shape when they are full. The salt and mildew break down the resins so after five, 10 or 15 years your sail can end up looking like a bedsheet.”

And a bedsheet doesn’t make a very good sail, Zutavern points out. Old, dirty, poorly maintained sails can lower boat speed. That’s an especially important consideration for racers intent on getting top speed out of their boats.

But if you take care of your sails and keep them clean, Zutavern says they can last 20 years. “I’ve seen sails that old that were in good shape,” he says.

As for Zutavern’s cleaning process, he says it is simple. “I use a mild laundry detergent and water,” he says. “No harsh chemicals that could damage the sails, no big industrial-type washing machines.”

Business has been good, he says, and the secret to his success is also simple. “It is very labor intensive. Those are my favorite words for this business-- labor intensive. “

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Since Brad Gross of Newport Beach started his marine pump-out service this summer, he has gotten used to bathroom humor. It is all just part of the business to Gross, who spends his days motoring around Newport Harbor pumping sewage from the holding tanks of some of the harbor’s approximately 9,000 yachts. Gross says he will be successful because he is doing something that nobody else wants to do.

“It is easier to pick up the phone and call me than to go to a pump-out station and pump it out yourself,” says Gross, who operates a 16-foot vessel equipped with a 200-gallon holding tank and some very powerful pumps.

To pump out the average 20- to 40-gallon tank takes only a few minutes, Gross says. “It usually takes me longer to tie up my boat than to pump the tank,” he says. Once the sewage is transferred from the client’s boat, Gross gives the tank a thorough cleaning by flushing it out with water. Then, he takes his boat to a pump-out station and empties his tank.

He calls his Newport Beach business Dockside Environmental Service, and in addition to the pump-out service, Gross also does repairs and installation of holding tanks. Because it is illegal to pump sewage into the harbor, most modern boats have such tanks. It’s either that or seal the head and not use it while in the harbor.

“Business has been good,” says Gross, a licensed captain and former operations manager for Hornblower Yachts. “I’ve been real happy with the response. There is a phone call or two every week from a new customer.”

Gross serves clients on a regular basis, depending upon the size of their tank and the frequency of boat use. “The smallest tank I do is seven gallons and the largest is 125,” he says. “For live-aboards I recommend they do it weekly. For others, once a month is enough.” Costs run from $10 for small tanks to about $100 for larger ones.

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For nearly 10 years, Roy Rozok of La Mesa has been cleaning fuel for boaters in Orange County. As owner of the Fuel Oil Polishing Co., headquartered near San Diego, Rozok will drive to your boat with his portable equipment, pump your contaminated diesel fuel through a series of filters, dump in a patented additive, then sweep the fuel tank with a flexible probe.

Rozok describes it this way: “We suck it through the filters and then it goes right back in the tank. The additive cleans the walls of the tank and rejuvenates the fuel. And with the probe we can suck out all the particulates.”

But why?

As Rozok tells it, almost as soon as you fill the tank, bad things start to happen. “Algae grows in diesel and lives off the fuel itself.” Condensation makes the algae grow, and it can accumulate on the bottom of the tank, he says. “It looks almost like fungus; real slimy is what it is,” Rozok says.

Eventually, contaminated fuel can clog filters, and the engine will shut down. If you happen to be halfway between here and Santa Catalina Island when that happens, it can ruin the whole weekend.

“For some reason it never happens in a good spot,” says Rozok, who points out that engine failure is not only inconvenient, but can be dangerous, especially if you happen to be near a rocky jetty.

Even if your engine doesn’t shut down, dirty fuel can affect the performance of the boat, Rozok says. Fuel should be cleaned about every two years, he recommends.

“We’ve seen boat engines go from 1,500 r.p.m. to 3,200 r.p.m. once the fuel was cleaned,” he says.

Rozok says that he has “brought back” fuel that was 20 years old. “We had an old ship where the fuel had sat for that long.”

Because disposing of fuel is a difficult and costly procedure, in that case the ship’s owners contacted Rozok and asked him to clean it instead.

“Nowadays, with the cost of disposing of hazardous waste, it doesn’t make sense to suck out the old fuel and put in new. Just disposing of fuel is quite costly. A minimum of a barrel of fuel--about 55 gallons--costs $350 to dispose of,” he says. So, it is cheaper and more environmentally sound to clean your old diesel than to dump it, he says.

If you did pump out the old fuel, it would cost you an additional $1.15 to $1.30 a gallon to replace it. Rozok points out that some powerboats have a 600-gallon capacity. “So you’re talking thousands of dollars,” he says. “We did a boat in San Diego that had a 20,000-gallon capacity.”

Costs for fuel-cleaning begin at $150, which is the minimum charge for a 50- to 100-gallon tank. The average boater spends about $250, Rozok says. The owner of the boat with the 20,000-gallon tank spent $2,000 to get his fuel cleaned.

Makes a car wash seem like a real bargain.