Getting There

Hello again, dear readers. It's been a while, I know. I've got a lot to update you on. We've been beavering away at this boat of ours for the last six months, and at last it's taking shape. I say 'we'; I mean 'Peter'. My role has mostly been as sympathetic (and only occasionally bored) listener to all the woes and troubles that come with turning a beholed wreck of a boat into a pleasant place to live, and, if I'm feeling very ambitious, holding a screw in place so a nut can be fastened on to it. A couple of times I've been mistaken for a boat builder, but I can't say that I've earnt the label.

This is not how a boat's hull is suppose to look

The boat has, however, been transformed beyond all recognition. Except for the fact that she's the biggest boat in sight wherever you go, which is, I suppose, one very easy way to recognise her. Otherwise, though...

The first thing on our long, long list of jobs was to get rid of the sheer volume of crap she was carrying. That and fixing the holes in her hull. We definitely didn't want to keep those. As Peter dug further and further into her depths, he discovered all sorts of things we absolutely hadn't expected. The cockroaches, admittedly, which we discovered in their hundreds, weren't too much of a surprise, even though Peter had let off three bug bombs when the boat was still in the Caribbean to try to get rid of them. The tree frog he found huddled in a forward locker, looking rather the worse for wear for its voyage, was another matter. What on earth do you do with a tropical tree frog that gets accidentally uprooted to the UK? Peter ended up taking it to the water and hoping for the best. At least with the heat this summer it won't have been quite so much of a shock compared to its usual habitat.




We went through three skips' worth of rubbish, and for a while the boat looked even more dispiritingly wrecked than it had to start off with. It didn't help that, once Peter had cleared all the obvious rubbish off the boat, like the multiple non-functional starter motors someone had for whatever reason decided to hang on to, he started tearing apart the interior fittings. The headlining covering the walls wasn't exactly pretty, but the bare fibreglass beneath, with bits of foam from the headlining still clinging to it, was even less so.

Halfway through tearing everything out. That's insulation
 that looks like someone's being chewing bits out of it.

Pretty much everything had to go, even the floors, which had become so sodden after Penguin's almost-sinking that they were positively dangerous. It took a good week of twelve hour days for him to get through it all, but eventually he had a reasonably clear, if not attractive, space to work in.




While a qualified professional set about making the holes in the hull not be holes anymore (we figured that was the kind of thing we didn't want to take any chances with), Peter began fitting new floors, which first involved re-fibreglassing in supports for all the floors, as all the joists were rotten too. It was messy work, but before long we were in a position where everything but the floors was a mess, which was a significant improvement upon everything including the floors being a mess.

With the floors in place, everything else was much easier, now that we no longer had to balance on the tops of water tanks to walk around. While everything was bare, Peter turned his attention to fully plumbing and wiring the entire boat, starting entirely from scratch. In place of a jumble of confused wires that were just begging to be turned into an electrical fire, he established a well-ordered system, every wire labelled, and returning to a dedicated electricity cabinet.

Peter took great pleasure in his system and his label-maker, but electrickery safety is important! The biggest risk of us ever running into major danger is from an electrical fire, which would probably burn down the entire boat to the waterline, so we aren't taking chances.

We also fully insulated every wall of the boat, and it took on a strange, spaceship like appearance thanks to the silvery foil backing on the insulation.

With these basics complete, it was possible to move on to some more fun bits, like putting in parts of the kitchen and adding worksurfaces. Things like a shiny new fridge, hob and sink made what was still essentially a shell of a boat into something that could plausibly one day be a home.

While Peter was slaving away all summer inside a very hot boat, our engines were serviced and a lovely old gentleman, who works part time to get out of the house (and, he claims, away from his wife), steadily filled in and covered over all the cracks and dents in our outer gel coat, until she gleamed again. We took the opportunity, while she was out of the water, to remove all her old anti-foul (a nasty but useful substance that theoretically prevents any marine life from clinging to the bottom of a boat) and replaced it with a new coating, in black. We also painted over the navy blue stripes down her sides with grey, and suddenly (from the outside at least) she was transformed into a boat that looked positively sleek.

All too soon, it was time for her to be returned to the water. Much as we like having a boat in the water, it's much easier to work on one when it's sitting stably on land. Plus, it was a very short walk from our flat to the boatyard. Still, there was no room for us to stay. It was both terrifying and thrilling to watch Penguin dipping her toes in the sea again before floating, just as boats are supposed to do. Very terrifying, in fact, given that the yard staff weren't keen to give us an absolute guarantee that they could even get her back in - she's about the biggest boat they've ever attempted.

Ready and waiting to return to the water

Thankfully, it was a perfectly calm day - not bad going for late September - meaning that she was  dropped with impressive precision into the water with no wobbles and at least an inch to spare on either side, and I had no trouble manoeuvring her into the distinctly tight spot she would occupy until we took her to her new home a week later.

Before that, though, we had one very exciting task to complete - giving her a name. With the utmost care, a fair bit of swearing, and the sacrifice of our knees on her hard back deck, we transferred the letters to her stern. Suddenly, she seemed to be coming along rather quickly.

A few days later, we proceeded out of Emsworth marina - very carefully indeed, as it was, if anything, even narrower than when we arrived thanks to the position of the other boats. It was the first time we'd travelled anywhere in her without slowly sinking. The trip itself was an uneventful hour and a half (to travel what was a three minute drive down the road), and although it was awkward getting in to the marina that was her new home, thanks to its shallow waters that left little room for manoeuvre, we were soon tied up and Peter was back to work, naturally enough.

We were starting to get to the point where we could do exciting bits - like putting walls and ceilings up. Even after months of labour, the inside didn't really feel much different, except for the spaceship-like effect from all the foil-covered insulation. As the bright white ceilings and walls began to go up, though, the boat was transformed - suddenly everything appeared brighter and lighter. It started to be possible to imagine her as a pleasant place to live.

Every time a new wall went up, the wreck she was when we first got her faded further into distant memory. Peter's had mental image of what she'll eventually be like in his mind all along, but it's taken a lot longer for me to be able to share his vision of our finished home. Now, though, it's unbelievably exciting to think that we'll be able to move on board in only a couple of months.

I am so excited about this bookcase

This brings us almost up to date now. Practically all the walls are finished, with the exception of a couple of particularly tricky bits, and Peter is working on the finer trimmings, such as white oak edging strips and mini penguin logos. Excitingly, he's almost completed my two bookcases - one of which doubles as a window seat - which will be the thing to really make the boat feel like home to me. The only major thing left to add is soft furnishings - which we'll leave until the last minute, when the boat has stopped being a workshop. Oh, and doors. We could do with some doors.








Now we just have to work out where we want to go. Perhaps it's the effect of being in one place in the darkest month of the year, but we're feeling quite adventurous. There isn't anywhere we can't go in Excessive Penguin, and at the moment we rather feel there isn't anywhere we wouldn't like to go. The open ocean is beckoning - who knows, we could even circumnavigate.

We might be getting a little ahead of ourselves - we haven't even tried out her sails yet. But the possibilities are endless, and that's what having a boat is all about.

That, and this.

The Sieve

Things were looking up.

Our boat was on a ship, and the rest was up to us. This was a very good thing in Peter's view, he being a person with no shortage of confidence in his abilities to fix any possible problem and the absolute determination to do whatever it took to get our new boat where she needed to be.

It was less of a good thing from my point of view, as it put the responsibility for not crashing our new boat squarely on my shoulders. As I may have mentioned in previous entries a few years ago, I'm the designated boat driver of the household. This is primarily because, being small, I'm less well equipped than Peter for leaping on and off pontoons or attempting to haul the entire weight of a boat on my own. All this is perfectly logical, and our time on Jade (our previous boat) has made me a pretty competent driver of 35 foot catamarans. Excessive Penguin, however, is a 50 foot catamaran, and also 20 feet wide, and our plan involved my getting her through a gap maybe 20 and a half feet wide, my very first time driving her. I was the best person for the job, and I knew this, but I really wished I wasn't the best person for the job.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First we had to move from our much loved house in Ireland to a small and expensive flat in Emsworth, not far from Southampton, on England's south coast, where the ship was due to arrive. The bright side is that Emsworth, aside from sharing a name with P.G.Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth, is one of the most charming and quintessentially English little towns you could imagine, full of independent shops and cafes, and views like this:

This, incidentally, is the walk Peter now takes every day to get from our flat to the boat

Having settled ourselves in our flat, and made a start on testing each of the restaurants now within walking distance of our home (our new location is very dangerous indeed if you want to maintain sensible eating habits), we set off on a Tuesday around lunchtime for Southampton, where Penguin was waiting for us.

Knowing that she was full of water, and leaking, we arrived an hour early, armed with two large batteries, two heavy duty automatic bilge pumps, one manual bilge pump and a lot of hose (to the bemusement of our taxi driver). Penguin didn't seem to have suffered too much for her Atlantic crossing, except for the unfortunate angle

her bimini (the blue cover you can see in the photo) was now sitting at. Peter hauled the batteries aboard and then began setting up our bilge pumps, so that we could counter the sinking process the moment we hit the water.

'She's been leaking water all the way,' the loadmaster remarked cheerfully. 'We nicknamed her "the sieve".'

'...great,' I told him, and he grinned at me. That didn't sound ominous at all.

Our Caribbean captain had been sure the the only reason she'd got as far as almost sinking was that she'd been waiting so long for the ship to arrive; that the leak was very slow indeed and nothing to worry about for a short trip from Southampton to Emsworth. Our abundance of bilge pumps and batteries was, we thought, a case of massive over-preparation. I was nervous enough already, but not so much about the passage. Now, my thoughts ran to whether the varied collection of flares on board would still work, and if not, in the absence of a life raft or radio, whether people often swam the Solent. I figured I could probably cope with the distance; the difficulty would be in not getting hit by ships (it's times like these when you really need the volume 'How To Avoid Huge Ships').

I wrestled with the bimini, which had lost a couple of bolts holding it in place, to try to make it less inconveniently positioned, while Peter delved into the bilges. Behind us, a monohull was lowered into the water and sailed off serenely.

'You're next!' said the loadmaster.

'What?' Peter poked his head out of the cockpit. 'We're supposed to be offloaded at 2.40. We got here an hour early so we could set up.'

'You're supposed to be offloaded by 2.40.'

'But we've got to set up our bilge pumps - there's three hundred litres of water in her.'

The loadmaster raised his eyebrows. 'Well then, get cracking.'

Peter set about his preparations at double speed, and about ten minutes later we noticed that the crane was hovering around a different catamaran. 'Sorry!' said our friendly loadmaster. 'You were right. That one's next.'

Boats really aren't supposed to do this

Disgruntled, but grateful for the reprieve, we were ready miles before our loading time, and I went and hid on the opposite side of the ship so I didn't have to watch. Something about watching boats moving through the air makes me highly uncomfortable, and I prefer to be out of the way until they've been safely put down again. The parts I did catch weren't exactly comforting. She was swinging from side to side in what seemed like a dangerously uncontrolled fashion, with two members of the ship's crew hanging on to her with yellow lines to limit her movement; if either of them lost their footing, or their grip, she could swing straight into the crane.

But, surprisingly enough, the professional crew who make their living lifting boats in and out of the water managed to get her safely off the ship again.

We were allowed to climb on board, and the bilge pumps were spewing beautiful, diesel-contaminated water into Southampton harbour before we hit the sea.

Then we tried to start the engines. 'Tried' being the operative word. The starboard engine started quickly enough, but the other didn't even make an effort. There wasn't even the exhausted chugging of the starter attempting to fire the engine - nothing happened at all. Diagnosing battery as the most likely cause of the problem, Peter hurriedly swapped the engine over to one of our new batteries, and we tried again. Still nothing.

Well, we couldn't stay sitting by a big orange ship forever. 'I guess we'll have to go under one engine,' Peter said and, with a gulp, I agreed, trying not to think about the prospect of manoeuvring this thing in the dainty Emsworth harbour with a single working engine.

A few hundred yards down the Hamble River, however, it became clear this wasn't going to work. Peter had been hanging out in the hulls, adjusting the bilge pumps to ensure they ridded us of water with the greatest possible efficiency (with the result that we'd almost got rid of it all after only about twenty minutes), and had noticed a fresh, exciting new problem.

'Change of plan,' he told me briskly, emerging from the saloon smelling of diesel. 'We need a mechanic. The starboard engine's leaking coolant.'

Sure enough, the starboard engine's overheating warning alarm kicked in almost immediately. There's nothing like a shrill, impossibly loud ringing in your ears to heighten your sense of urgency. I turned us straight in towards the nearest marina - thankfully this was just to our left - and slowed us down, knowing from experience that engines have a habit of stopping altogether if they start overheating. Peter poured our entire two litre supply of drinking water into the engine, the alarm stopped assaulting our ears, and, crossing our fingers all the way that our remaining engine would keep on chugging, we limped into the marina and docked without crashing (not a given with only one working engine). We'd made it perhaps half a mile from the ship.

Me, hanging out on deck while waiting for the mechanic, looking unreasonably chilled,
probably due to the much-needed Starbucks I'm drinking

The marina, entertainingly, told us that we weren't the first boat from that ship making an emergency stop, and the mechanic we called told us we were the fourth.

We'd hoped that we might still be able to make it to Emsworth that day, but the mechanic couldn't make it to us until half past six, and it quickly became clear that our boat wasn't going anywhere that night. We were there late into the evening while two mechanics cursed at our engines - inexplicably, the port engine, which had refused to start altogether while we were beside the ship, started working spontaneously, while the starboard engine was now the problem - and eventually, once our engines were finally fixed, decided to get a taxi home, collapse for the night, and get the train back early next morning. We pumped out the water that had trickled in while we were sitting at the marina and went home.

The idea was that we'd get some sleep, but lingering stress and nerves resulted in a night spent wakeful and restless for both of us. We left shortly after six the next morning extremely sleep-deprived and wishing only to get the day over with.

It was surprisingly cold, for a sunny day, and progress was painfully slow. We had two engines running - we should have been moving at seven knots - but we felt lucky to make five. We'd expected to reach Emsworth at noon, right at high tide, when we had the greatest possible room for manoeuvre, but at this rate we wouldn't make it at all. Emsworth Yacht Harbour has a sill at its entrance to keep the water in at low tide, meaning that we had maybe two hours after high tide to enter. If we kept up our current rate, we might just make it. Might.

Motoring up the Emsworth channel

As we reached the entrance to Chichester Harbour, we started to feel a little less anxious. Our speed crept up, with less of a current holding us back, and the air grew warmer. We joined a line of boats sailing up towards Emsworth, spotting familiar landmarks and thinking how strange it was to be in a boat again on such a familiar patch of water.

We reached Emsworth Yacht Harbour with minutes to spare, and held our breath as we passed through the extremely narrow entrance, as if it would make our boat slimmer, or shallower. Carefully, and highly conscious of the boats behind us waiting to get in, I steered her towards the nearest pontoon, where the harbourmaster awaited us, and got her safely alongside, breathing a premature sigh of relief.

Peter went up to the bow to talk to the harbourmaster, but from where I was, with engine noise in my ears, I couldn't hear a word. They didn't seem to be securely tying us in place, though.

'What's going on?' I asked when Peter headed back towards me, while the harbourmaster was still standing on the pontoon clutching one of our ropes.

'We're being hauled out now. It's too windy tomorrow,' he explained.

'What?!' I yelped. I was not mentally prepared for this. I thought I'd had another entire day to work up the nerve to try and get this beast of a boat into that tiny little slot.

'We're just letting this boat behind us past and then we'll go. Neil' (the harbourmaster) 'will pull you round this first turn.'

An aerial view of Emsworth Yacht Harbour, annotated to give you an idea of what we were doing. Penguin is about 10 feet longer than the pontoon we were on.

In some ways, it was probably a good thing that I had no notice of the change of plan, as it meant I had no time to agonise about it. With some rope-work and judicious use of both engines, we made it round the tight 90 degree turn, and then began moving through the marina towards the slip for hauling out.

'You'll need to spin her round at the end,' Neil called to me, as we passed him on the pontoon. He mimed a 180 degree turn with two fingers.

I stared at him for a second. 'Are you kidding?' It did seem like a genuine possibility.

'No,' he said, looking none too impressed.

'OK then.' There didn't seem to be any other possible response, but I think the squeak in my voice adequately conveyed my misgivings. Sure, this boat can theoretically spin in her own length, but there was a fair wind by this point and very little space indeed.

I made it safely between the row of moored boats and the island, skirting swiftly to port when someone on a nearby boat yelled that there was a shallow patch up ahead (we'd drawn quite a crowd of onlookers already).

Now came the really fun part. I was planning to use the reasonably sizeable patch of water before the slip to spin the boat, but the wind, and our shallow-patch-avoidance-manoeuvre, had carried us too far to port - if I tried to start spinning our back end would hit the boats we were alongside. On the other hand, I was running out of space; if I went too far forward I'd simply be stuck. The wind kept pushing us further to port, and, I confess, I slightly panicked.

'I really don't think I can do this,' I yelled to Peter, acutely conscious of the row of boat owners to my left, keeping very close watch over the ends of their yachts. I knew this wasn't a good idea.

Just as they're starting to lift her

I'm not entirely sure how, but somehow I did manage to get us turning, our stern skimming the other yachts and missing them by a hair's breadth. When we were approximately facing the right way, I reversed towards the guys perched on the edge of the slip with poles to fend us off and push us in the right direction. We needed more pushing than I'd have liked, and the gap was so tight that we had to pull our fenders out of the way when they caused us to get stuck, but we didn't add any new dents to our boat, which seemed liked a pretty major achievement.

Immediately, the team began setting up; with a falling tide they had no time to lose. I skulked off to feed the cats, mildly mortified having panicked in front of what seemed like half the marina. Later, though, when Peter got home, I felt a little less like I'd humiliated myself when he told me about all the onlookers who'd been expressing their amazement that we'd managed to manoeuvre her in there at all.

And all that really mattered was that she was safely ashore - no need to worry about leaks or engines now! We had months to get her seaworthy, and no immediate concerns but the cockroaches the size of mice that had somehow survived the bug bomb Peter had let off back in Tortola.

Best of all, it was a lovely day.

Safely on the hard. The black bags are a very small fraction of all the crap she had on board that we got rid of.

Shipping yachts from the Caribbean, or, how to give yourself an ulcer in just a few short months!

Hello again, devoted followers of the cruising kitties. After such a long hiatus, it may be a surprise to discover an update here (or not, given that I'm 99% sure all my readers know me personally), but this creaking old blog is starting up again, because we bought another boat. This boat, to be precise.

Sitting pretty in Paraquita bay, BVI

She's a very large boat, she's an absolute mess, and she's going to be called Excessive Penguin.



I couldn't say exactly what possessed us.

Or, perhaps, I could say.

Something about the contrast between the image of languid sunbathing on deck in a perfect little anchorage and the reality of being trapped indoors, watching the rain of an Irish winter, when it's light for barely six hours a day - that might have been it.

Or the call of adventure, of rocking up to a completely new place every few days, hopping ashore and setting about exploring a beach, village, supermarket, forest - all of which might be almost identical to a dozen others you've passed before, but only almost, and the differences in that almost are waiting to be discovered.

Or the freedom to travel at will, but with your home and all your possessions and familiar comforts with you, snail-like (a very apt descriptor for sailing yachts, whose occupants start getting incredibly excited if they hit 8 miles an hour).

Or maybe it was nothing more than the fact that this particular boat was a really, incredibly, I-seriously-cannot-overstate-this-crazily good deal.

The saloon, after we removed an entire skip's worth of crap from the boat 

She's had a rough old time of it, the poor dear. She's been through two hurricanes, although in fact the worst of the damage was caused by nothing more dramatic than neglect. Her insides are rotting and her outside is leaking, and she's been home to a large and diverse cockroach population for quite some time.

She's a project. And, now, she's our project.







The first challenge was simply getting her here. When there's a hole in the bottom of your boat (caused by the mangrove swamp she landed on while being battered by Hurricane Irma, hastily patched up with a small piece of tin roof nailed into the hull, which is a lot more effective than it sounds but obviously not ideal), you don't want to try sailing it across the Atlantic Ocean. So, we plumped for a ship.

The idea that you can put a boat on a ship was a really strange one to me when I first heard about it. A boat, on a boat. The concept just seems wild. The actuality is that it's about the most stressful thing you can do short of parenthood. With weather to consider, shipping companies don't like to make promises about timeframes, so you have to be ready at any moment to have your boat loaded - not a problem if you're just sitting around waiting for it, more of a problem if you've had to arrange, in advance, mooring and a captain to move your boat from several thousand miles away.

In this case, the shipping company decided it could make a whole lot more money if it diverted to Mexico a couple of days before it was due to arrive in the Virgin Islands, and so ended up arriving three weeks later than expected, which well and truly fucked up all our plans. Desperately, we scrambled to find a replacement captain (our original guy was heading off on another delivery) and somewhere to put our boat while we waited, which didn't charge the $250 a night rate (everyone we've mentioned this rate to has made the exact same expression of horror) of the local marina. Fine, fine, with the help of our original captain, who was a godsend and fully deserving of sainthood, we got everything sorted, and after shouting a lot at the shipping company they even paid our extra costs, so all we really lost was a lot of sleep.

The really stressful part came about half an hour before she was, finally, due to be loaded, when Peter got an email with the news that she was listing heavily - meaning that one of her hulls was sinking. Oh God. All this time she'd survived, sitting happily enough in the water despite the hole in her bottom, and now she decided to sink.

After some frantic messaging, our captain leapt into action, accompanied by the original captain (the ship was so late that he was actually back from his delivery by this point), and they began pumping water out of the boat with all the speed they could muster. With too much water in her, she couldn't sail even the few hundred yards to the ship to be loaded. With too much water in her, she'd be too heavy for them to carry. And if she missed her slot, she might not get another. Did I mention that it costs well into five figures to ship a boat across an ocean? And you don't get a refund if you don't make it. And due to the hole in her hull she couldn't be insured until we got her to the UK and out of the water.

We waited. We paced our living room, and cursed our foolhardiness for deciding to buy a hurricane-damaged boat. Peter, who is normally teetotal, drank four shots of triple sec (the only spirit he can stand that was in the house) and debated driving down to the local shop for cigarettes (having quit smoking four years ago) until I reminded him about the whole drinking and driving thing (it's funny how you completely forget about such considerations when you never normally drink).

And then, finally, we received this photo:





























She still had about 300 litres of seawater sloshing around inside her (which, yay! we'd get to deal with when she arrived) but she was safe, not sinking, and would soon be on her way to us.

We nearly collapsed with relief, and then we went for a celebratory walk - because what else do you do in Ireland?