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?