First Watch Marine offers mobile service to your boat in her slip or at your home. In many cases, it is more economical to troubleshoot problems or provide services on your boat at your location rather than bringing the boat to the boatyard. If you are not sure which approach is best for your situation, give us a call and we will be happy to discuss it with you.
We have insurance coverage for and have access agreements with every marina in San Diego Bay and Mission Bay. We regularly service boats from Coronado Cays to Mission Bay, and everywhere in between!

We all know that bringing your vessel to a boatyard is expensive. Charges for haulouts, laydays, dock days, bottom paint and other yard services all add up. When you start including parts and labor costs for mechanical or systems maintenance and repairs, the bills can become stunning. Sometimes these costs are unavoidable because the work being done has to be done out of the water (bottom paint, stern drive service, etc.), but sometimes, the boat yard is not the appropriate location to have your boat serviced. Many repairs start with a diagnostic, then parts must be ordered and may take a week to arrive unless shipping is expedited. Having a vessel in the yard or at a work dock waiting on parts may accrue significant yard charges. 

Most diagnostics and many repairs can be done while the boat is in the water or on a trailer. With the above in mind, it is easy to see that having work done on your boat in the slip or on the trailer may be the better option. That being said, mobile service ain’t cheap either.

A mobile service technician has to bring everything he can possibly think of that he may need to your boat with him, and it is impossible to plan every job so that the tech has every possible tool or part with him. He is leaving behind our shop location which is surrounded with marine suppliers and infrastructure and must drive to the marina or house and then
negotiate access through the marina office or past the dog. If, in the process of the job, the tech finds there is an item he needs that he didn’t bring, he has to drive back to our shop or to a supplier to obtain what he needs and then come back. 

When the job is done, all this has to be reversed. This is why mobile marine technicians charge for mobile services. Some outfits may tell you they don’t charge for mobile service. This is disingenuous. They may not itemize the service call charge on their invoice, but they are charging you anyway. It costs marine technicians money to come to your boat, so
if they are not accounting for the cost to come to your vessel, they would not be in business for long. We occasionally meet a potential customer who objects to mobile service charges. Our response to this is to say that we would be happy to work on their vessel here at the boatyard, it is very much easier for us that way. The customer will have to take the time to bring the boat here from her slip, need to pay the yard for the space at the dock or in the yard, and will need to pick up the boat for return to the slip after the work is completed. Considering how much time and money it takes to do that, a mobile service call charge does not seem so expensive.