Hope Marine Services — Local services in Hope

The owner of this marine business was extremely rude and offensive to us. We were travelling on vacation from Canada in a group of 2 families with children. We docked our boat in a designated "guest" spot and were planning to have lunch at the cute pub on the docks. Before we could even get to the restaurant, we saw a woman marching down the ramp headed for us. She chastised us for being horrible mothers, for this being a private dock, ( not true as there is a public restaurant with guest dock vacancies) and for us being in the way of others on the dock. She told us off publicly in front of two other groups of people and continued to tell us off for fishing off the docks ( which we were not, we did not have any fishing gear here) with a child's fishing rod. In fact, a little girl who was not in our group, but was a local, harmlessly catching and releasing small fish with her dad. A very upsetting, embarrassing incident for us, we promptly returned to our boat. As for her comments about our parenting, I cannot understand where she was coming from as we were two young families, escorting our young daughters in the great outdoors, and it should be noted that all of our children wore life jackets. We would have happily spent money on a nice lunch for 10 people if not for this rude lady. It should be noted that apparently this lady works for the marine store and is not associated with the restaurant. The waitresses who we spoke to briefly were...

My family has had a cabin and boat on these water for 67 years. We have used numerous marine maintenance and repair shops from Newport to the Town of Priest River to Sandpoint to Lake Pend Orielle to Spokane.

We came the considerable distance from our cabin 20 miles down-river from Sandpoint after getting numerous recommendations from sources who would know. Matt and Hope Marine were consistently top recommended for their integrity, knowledge and competence.

We brought our current ski and touring boat - an aging 19' Bayliner bow ridervv with several issues - to Matt. His technicians worked each problem up, giving us the cost and information needed to make intelligent, informed decisions regarding what to repair and what to live with. Diagnostic billings were minimal.

Too often weekend boaters who live elsewhere like us are vulnerable to sketchy local shops. Not so at Hope. Matt and his people know that long term success depends on effective work, good judgment and fair bills. We'll keep coming back.

Christopher Pence Bainbridge Island,...

Yesterday I was on the lake with my kids and I was going forward but I heard a bang so I pulled the throttle back really quickly and the engine seized up. I had some help pulling my boat back to the house and we tried and tried everything we can think of and couldn't figure out what was wrong. I called numerous places and everybody was booked out and everybody wanted to take a look first before they'd commit to fixing it. Thats when I found hope marine on Google. I called Matt and he said he will put me on the books but had an idea to fix it. He gave me some ideas of how to correct it myself to save me some money and it worked perfectly. What he said was 100% correct and now my boat purrs like a kitten again. I'm bringing my boat back to him for anything and everything...