Oh Not Again!

 Just a leetle sneak preview of the latest thing what I have designed to drive meself round the twist a bit further. It’s a wardrobe lockermabob. Made of hundreds of bits of reclaimed oak I got off a job a while back. The lower portion of which contains the starboard water tank and all the pipey bits. More pictures when I’ve got the bloody doors on, so that'll be in like three months (humour) (I hope).

Nearly...

We appear to have survived the winter! At one point I honestly didn’t think it possible, and it hasn’t been easy, but y’know I think we done did it. I grew a large and unruly beard for a while, as shaving in the dark was too challenging, but instead of looking like a distinguished sea pup I ended up looking like some kind of shovel chinned barbarian, so in the end it had to go.
    Hold on a mo, as I type this it’s trying to snow again. What the buggeration!? Bloody weather. Maybe the last three days were spring, we’ve bypassed summer and gone straight back in for another round. If this turns out to be the case at least Becky and I know what we’re dealing with I suppose. We’re still strip washing ourselves with bucket and flannel, still sewn into our thermals the rest of the time, still cooking on the woodburner to save gas, still living with candlelight in most areas. So it’s still testing us. But, at least until it started to snow again just now, we have learnt to smile, or at least contort our faces into a convincing rictus, and we are tentatively beginning to congratulate ourselves for surviving the worst of the cold and dark. We haven’t done much on board except live and sleep, not getting enough of either since mostly we’ve been getting used to the long commute back and forth. But with the hopeful change of season we’re starting to plan the next round of work on board.
We’ve been stockpiling materials and parts over the winter, including a humbly accepted donation of plumbing and electrical parts, rope and paint from an old boat buddy. We’ve also secured some right nice reclaimed hardwoods including large enough amounts of oak, teak and mahogany which is all earmarked for specific homebuilding projects that are coming soon.
I’m still on medication, yes it took its time getting going but it’s helping a lot now. More importantly I think I am beginning to learn some big lessons with regard to my awful and terrifying nosedive last autumn. The pace and balance of what we get up to next has to be moderated by this so, things are going to be a bit different. No guarantees, but hopefully we’ll have some new words and pictures to show you soon.

More History!

With many, many thanks to a recent commenter, Derek, who found this lovely photo of his mother and sister during a family visit to Purbeck and Poole in 1957.

Q: Will that Tree fit in this Bucket?

A: Yes.

Things Worth Doing.

Suddenly it's all gone a bit domestic on board. So I thought I'd illustrate with a couple of snaps taken by Becky during the fleeting daylight hours just before xmas. After the immense changes and challenges of 2012 we must be the only people who are hoping for a completely uneventful year to come, can't think why. Happy New Year Everyone!

Up, Down, Sideways, and Peppermint.

It’s been difficult. 

As the end of summer passed we were concerned about how to survive our first winter aboard our new, lovely, but distinctly unfinished home. I’d been lucky with work and when the contract finished my wife and I discussed how best to invest the money I’d saved. At this point in the year it was still warm with mild nights but autumn had definitely arrived. I spiralled off dreaming about bathrooms, proper woodburning stoves, kitchens, electric lighting throughout and all sorts of other grand ideas that average homes are supposed to have. However despite finding ourselves with a reasonable sum to invest it was clear that I’d have to choose one thing from the list. For some reason I chose plumbing, this was based on a concern that if our standpipe water supply froze we’d be in trouble. Decision made, I gave myself three weeks to complete something that if I was thinking clearer I should have realised was nearly impossible. I knew very little about boat plumbing indeed. Undaunted I set about planning our water storage tanks and the whole bathroom thing, and before too long had splashed the cash I’d earned on ten sheets of 18mm ply, tanks from Tek Tanks, and all sorts of goodies from LeeSanitation. 

Doing nothing but working on the boat for the whole of October started really well, since the first step was all about framing out the areas. Two weeks in we already had the shell of a large bathroom and, on the other side of the boat the carcase of a huge airing cupboard/wardrobe thingy. Contained within these structures were the first pair of large fresh water tanks. So far so good.

Then I began plumbing, I was already exhausted, having expended my energy firstly on working 72 hour weeks, and secondly on a huge amount of woodwork in a very short space of time. And the plumbing just wouldn’t go. The pace of working suddenly slowed from rocket speed to something akin to crawling through soup. All I was trying to do was fit the basic boat specific stuff, the water and waste tanks and the associated pipes, hoses and skin fittings. Regular domestic plumbing is annotated in greek, but boat plumbing seemed to be written in martian. And our boat is old, could I find parts to fit our existing valves and skin fittings? No, I could not.

Fighting the opening salvoes of what was to become yet another personal meltdown I struggled in vain to get the thing to work, repeatedly coming up against obstacles that seemed progressively more insurmountable and more expensive to get around. The job suddenly ran massively over budget as I frantically ordered parts that I hadn’t realised I’d need, then when they arrived half of them were the wrong size anyway due to the whole greek/martian/english mistranslation thing. The job then ground to snails pace as I succumbed to a sort of cabin feverish derangement. Squandering the last few days I’d allotted myself in self loathing, I hated the boat, hated myself and was  becoming petrified of the fear that I’d spent the last seven years building a very expensive white elephant and was now subjecting my new wife to an impossibly difficult lifestyle which she’d soon tire of and quite understandably leave me...

I was placing myself under an insane amount of pressure, I didn’t want to let Becky down, and considered that if i couldn’t do this one thing (get the bloody toilet and a tap to work) the winter would become impossibly tough and i would have failed in my mission to build us a home. What a Wally. I felt that I’d made a huge mistake, in the end I became my own worst enemy and the whole project came to a definite halt. 

As a result of my panicked overspend we found ourselves short of the money that we’d need simply to get us through Novembers debt repayment obligations. Desperate to get the financial wolf from the door, we embarked on a serious round of scrapping stuff. We gathered together the copper and bronze objects on the boat that were stashed since the launch (broken portholes, heat exchangers, couple of duff motors and a few bits of pipe) and weighed them in. It was a drop in the ocean, but an encouraging start nevertheless. Inspired, that night we combed our way through the cluttered interior of our vessel and gathered items we thought we could do without (several deckchairs, a domestic fridge and so on) and set off to the local boot sale the next morning. We were on our way to beginning to afford the loan repayments and mooring fees for the coming month.

Then we endured a sort of perfect storm of stuff going wrong. Amongst other things both cars broke down, one refused to stop and the other refused to go. The one that refused to go did so permanently and had to be delivered to the big car park in the sky. I couldn’t find work, and in any case was too wound up with stress to be anything like a decent advert for my skills.  Then the night time temperature dropped like a stone. Becky’s business was (and still is) being hit hard by adverse weather and economic climate. Our friend Paula found herself back in hospital again, which meant her four kids, who are brilliant and very independent were nevertheless in need of someone to look after them and ensure they didn’t accidentally burn the house down or something. So after a phone call to the RAC to rescue the stricken brakeless car, Becky was at Paula’s in the warm and I was on a train to Edinburgh to do a short job with my friend Mark.

And then Becky’s grandma suffered a major stroke and died the following day, thankfully her family largely managed to make it to her bedside in time.

Around this time I began to realise I was experiencing a severe depressive episode, probably the worst i have ever gone through. Bloody hell, timing. Visiting the doctor was a supreme challenge, as I’ve struggled with this without treatment for many years, but I am glad I did.

We had to make a trip to Inverness for the funeral and on our return the weather was no better, so in the end Becky and I had little choice, we locked the door on our new home/torture chamber and went to stay at Paula’s house. She was unfortunately taken back into hospital. We, on the other hand, needed looking after ourselves. With our remaining car out of action B had no way to get the fifty odd miles to and from work, I basically couldn’t be trusted to be left on my own, and living conditions at home were becoming grim in any case.

The ‘enforced romance’ of home life conducted by candle light within a four foot radius of a tiny, woefully inadequate little woodburner with nowhere to wash or wash up in the freezing cold semi darkness had taken its toll. We couldn’t carry on. So staying in a fully functional house with Paula’s family worked out to be an incredibly welcome resource swap. We stayed there for several weeks, feeding the family and making sure they got collected from after school activities and did their homework until Paula was released from hospital and for some time after, it was humbling, but very life affirming to be welcomed almost as members of the family every evening.

One night Becky arrived to find me serving supper to the horde and announced ‘I’ve got us another stove’. It turned out that one of her clients owned a multifuel stove that she’d decided not to use in her own house renovation and was offering it for sale. On closer inspection it turned out to be brand new and a deal was struck whereby Becky would give lessons to the value of the stove as payment. 

Luckily I managed to pull my finger out of my arse for long enough to get a lucky run of handyman work, and we both worked and saved as hard as we could. A couple of weeks before christmas we had paid the bills and could just about afford to fix and MOT the car and order the flue parts for this new stove. Despite being ‘budget’ they were not cheap. So we started commuting back home every evening and last saturday evening after loads of work and heartache, and a little welding on the funnel top conducted after dark in the rain, our new stove was lit for the first time. The difference is simply astonishing, once we’d done opening every available hatch and porthole to air the stink produced by the high temperature paint as it cured the levels of warmth on board have shot up to sensible domestic levels. With both stoves lit (but neither firing particularly hard) we’ve discovered it’s easily possible to walk around most of our home wearing nothing but underpants if necessary, while outside the climate is clear, and cold. A first experiment with crappy garage coal has delighted me because this morning the embers were still glowing. 

All of a sudden we’ve gone from huddling around the forward stove in coats and hats, to occupying the entire vessel. Ok, so the plumbing still isn’t finished, and most light is still candle light but it feels so domestic that in spite of being forced to cancel christmas (see above) it came anyway. The day before Christmas eve we were able to obtain a massively reduced tree that’s far too big, and after a bit of a struggle getting it down the stairs; nail it to the engine room floor opposite our sofa and the new stove. Then we could do what ‘normal’ people do; stuff ourselves and fall asleep on the sofa. What a massive relief.

Maaawwwiagge......

Well, you’re probably wondering if I fell down a hole or something, and I apologise for the my tardiness in blogging. It has been total mayhem down here. You’ll be glad to know that our wedding was a success, albeit in a very different form to the one we’d both imagined and planned for. Ready? Here goes...
A week before the big day Littlehampton was subjected to unseasonal and widespread flooding, this meant that one of the two fields we’d hired for our reception was waterlogged right up to the thursday when we arrived to welcome the marquee company at 7 in the morning. So they put up the huge and beautiful traditional canvas marquee in the adjacent field, which was closer to the beach and had no hedges around it. The significance of this will soon become apparent. It turned into a lovely day so, after unloading all our boxes of carefully collected and packed crockery (which had taken six months of boot-sale trawling to get), the fizz etc. and all the tent-dressing props into the marquee everyone buggered off on various missions and left me with my mother babysitting the marquee for a few hours at 6pm. Then it started to get windy. Really windy. By 8pm this had developed into an unforecast severe gale force 10 and I had to give up trying to hammer wooden tent pegs back in. I knew that it was time to call the marquee company’s emergency number when I saw the force on the windward side start to jack the three foot long metal pins that hold the main guys out of the ground in front of my eyes. At 9.30pm we lost the marquee, had to get everything and everyone out in a hurry and were still sitting in the van with best man at midnight waiting for six teams from the marquee company to pack everything up and take it away. Members of family went back to stay at their B&B’s and we went to stay on the boat with nowhere to hold a reception for 160 people.
The next morning we were awake before five, and by 7.30am we’d somehow been offered a modern steel barn on an industrial estate in which to do the do, by 9am we’d removed the combine harvester from it and evicted the rats. So instead of a village green style tent, we now had a warehouse party to organise. Thus began the busiest, most stressful day ever. Launching a restored tug had nothing on this. We couldn’t get the drinks license moved at the last minute due to predictable local council bureaucracy so Becky’s sister rang round the list of every guest and told them firstly about the change of venue and secondly that they’d better bring some booze. The marquee company very kindly came back and dressed the barn up as best they could with carpets and some marquee linings and as our guests began to arrive we strongarmed them into helping get the show on the road. Everyone was, without exception, a bunch of superstars. We all mucked in sorting all the hurriedly repacked crockery out (miraculously unbroken from its ordeal) and dressing up the party space, which took some time. We were done, and righteously frazzled, at midnight and Becky and I parted company. She went with her parents and friends back to a B&B and I took my best men (they multiplied) back to the boat, and passed out. After everything had gone so sideways the previous 48 hours, the first thought I had as I woke up on my wedding day was ‘whatever I do, I must maintain a grip on things’, and my second thought was ‘and anything I’ve forgotten to do will have to go hang, possibly including the previous statement’. With a head full of these two thoughts we stomped off to the beach for a little cobweb blasting, which worked a treat, but I still struggled to get the bacon sandwich my best men provided down my neck. I didn’t have to worry though, the day turned out to be almost perfect. The ridiculous wind dropped off and the sun came out, I had a shower in a horsebox whilst chatting to me Dad over the back gate and got dressed up into me specially tailored coat. I turned up far too early at Arundel town hall and at 3.30pm on the 23rd June 2012, in front of all our friends and family I married Rebecca Hewlett. She looked radiant in her dress. I even managed to say my vows clearly without a lump forming in my throat, a fact that I’m inordinately proud of as I was struggling during the registrars meeting just an hour before and it had threatened to make my mascara run. Afterward we had a really lovely blessing conducted on board our boat by my aunty Heather, watched by 90 or so people on board. Yep, they all fitted, just about. And then Becky’s father William drove us to our rather unusual new party venue in his rather grand little 1929 Humber motor car. The party was brilliant, after some great food a live band- The Duplicates- played an excellent set, well, half of it- because at that point the rather harried lady that we’d originally hired the field from arrived to shut us down. At 11.30pm. I shit you not. Her brother had lent us the barn, and he had also assured us that since no-one lived anywhere nearby we wouldn’t get any complaints. So who complained? Him, apparently. Go figure. By this point I’d given up on the whole stress thing as a bad idea and was just trying to enjoy myself, but it did rather kill the party off so Becky and I were home and tucked up in bed by 3am.
The next day was almost as much fun, Becky and I got ourselves back to the barn and we enjoyed an energetic day, like setting up but without the stress, packing everything away. We cleared the barn, ferried people to train stations, and even managed a few extra guided tours of the boat for people who’d missed it the day before. AND made it to a reasonable hostelry for a late lunch with everyone who was still around. Although B and I had gone to bed on our wedding night completely sober (seriously), quite a lot of my mates in particular were busily banishing sore heads in the time honoured manner, we just enjoyed finally being able to relax and speak to people properly. Everyone says a wedding day is ‘your day’. That’s not really true is it?
 The biggest mistake I made immediately after our wedding was to lose my mobile phone charger in the rush, and the subsequent move (see below). It being a cranky old steam driven device which isn’t compatible with anything this meant that I was out of touch for a week during our ‘honeymoon’. This does have its advantages...
 Also in the week long honeymoon after the wedding we moved to stay on the boat full time, which was a fairly big operation too. Living on board is GREAT, and a long awaited dream made real. But certain things are very different. I am surprised at how effectively in just under a month, we’ve managed to move boxes around, over and over again and settle into what is still very much an ongoing project. We washed all the calico that we’d used as tablecloths at the wedding feast and stretched it around all the unfinished hull sides inside and it looks surprisingly domestic, and is excellently keeping the dust down. As the boat is unfinished, we only have sporadic 240v power, like when I fire up the big generator. or plug in the ‘my first inverter’ I got the other day. So everything in married life seems different and new, from cooking (woodburner and gas stove) to washing hair (tin bath, team effort) to communications with the outside world (paper cups and ball of string)! There’s also an hour plus commute each way for Becky to deal with as she’s maintaining her livery stables business in Epsom. I’ve even managed a couple of days of woodwork on board, after first sealing myself into the engine room with clear plastic to avoid dust getting into the bedroom or galley. The framing for wing tanks and real bathroom-to-be has begun in earnest. Becky has been oiling and waxing finished woodwork in the wheelhouse cabin using a pure tung oil/black bison wax combo, and after about a million coats we started putting books onto finished bookshelves in there. It looks divine.
Dunno what’s going to happen to the blog, being on board with my wife sort of feels like mission accomplished, and being away from regular contact with computers for now may hamper regular updates, but I’ll try. For now it feels sufficient to say that right now it feels like all the years of torturous expense, hard work and massive sacrifice have suddenly come to fruition.
 PS. I’ve suddenly remembered about the tale of two and a half toilets, and a visit from the Royal Navy Bomb Disposal Unit, and the adventure of selling half the crockery at the first boot sale we visited after getting wed, oh god, and a bunch of other stuff.
 That does it, I’ll have to write more soon as I can.