Call three shops about the same boat and you will get three different words back. Wash. Detail. Restoration. The prices will not be close to each other either, and that is usually not one shop gouging you. They are quoting different work.
There is no standard vocabulary in this trade and nobody is going to fix that, so the useful thing is knowing which of the three your boat needs before you start calling around.
Cleaning takes off what landed on the boat
Waterline scum, bird mess, sunscreen handprints on the vinyl, the grey film that builds up on white seats over a season, whatever got spilled in the cockpit in July, spiderwebs in the corners of the canvas. All of it arrived from outside the boat and all of it comes off with the right soap, the right brushes and a few hours.
That is what we mean by boat cleaning: hull wash, deck and cockpit, interior, glass and vinyl. A good clean puts a boat back to how it looked on launch day.
It does not put a boat back to how it looked new. Once a hull has a few Ontario summers on it, those are two different targets, and no amount of soap closes the gap between them.
Polishing fixes the surface itself
Gelcoat is the coloured outer layer of the hull and it is not paint. It is a thick pigmented resin, and UV slowly chews the top of it into a fine chalky powder. Colour goes flat. Dark blue turns a dusty grey. Red goes pink. On a white hull you often do not notice at all until you tie up next to a boat that has been kept up.
Here is the test. Pick a dry day, run your open palm along the hull above the waterline, and then look at your hand. If it comes back with a white dusty film on it, that is your gelcoat, not dirt. Washing will not touch it, and waxing over it buys you about three weeks of looking wet before it goes flat again.
What actually fixes it is compound and polish, machine work that cuts the dead layer off and brings the live colour underneath back up. Different tools, different days, different price. That work lives under yacht refinishing, and ceramic coating goes on after the correction rather than instead of it.
Neither one fixes damage
Cracks, gouges, dock rash, the star-shaped spider cracks around a cleat that has taken a hard pull. Cleaning and polishing make those more obvious, not less, because everything around them just got better. Chips and cracks are fiberglass and gelcoat repair, which is its own job, and it is worth doing before the polish rather than after.
What moves the price
Nobody can quote a boat honestly over the phone, but four things drive the number more than anything else.
Length. Everything scales with it.
Whether the boat is in the water or on the hard. In the water means no bottom work and it means working off a dock.
How long since the last one. A boat that gets cleaned every year is a fraction of the work of one that has sat for three seasons.
Cleaning or correction, which is the big one. A wash is an afternoon. Compound and polish on a 30 footer is two to three days of indoor work, which is why the two jobs are nowhere near each other on price.
When to do it in an Ontario season
Spring, before launch. The boat is out, dry and reachable from every angle, which is when correction work is easiest to do properly. If you are going to do the big job, do it here.
Mid-season, usually July. This one is maintenance. Waterline, deck, interior. It is the one most owners skip and then regret in August with people on the boat.
End of season, before it gets wrapped. A boat that goes under shrink wrap dirty sits in the dark with that dirt for six months in a humid space, and mildew does fine in there. Everything you leave on the boat in October you are scrubbing off in April, by which point it has had half a year to set.
Not sure which one you need
Send us a few photos of the hull taken in daylight and we will tell you straight. Sometimes the answer is a wash and the boat comes back looking great. Sometimes the answer is that a wash is going to disappoint you and the gelcoat needs the real work. We would rather say that up front than take your money for a job that was never going to fix the thing bothering you.