Bad Omens

Presenting Excessive Penguin, mostly finished boat

It was an inauspicious beginning. After a couple of weeks of glorious, unseasonably warm weather, the time had come for us to move aboard our beautiful new boat, and it was raining. It was just the sort of weather for curling up on a sofa, indoors, in a nice warm house with unlimited heating and no habit of moving about in high winds.

Instead, we were packing up all our possessions and hauling them down a pontoon, while attempting to keep things like bedding and clothing from getting too damp. The cats watched in consternation, and the rain timed itself to perfection - as soon as we were leaving the boat, hands free, it stopped, only to return as soon as we were heading back boatwards with armfuls of increasingly soggy boxes.

Indeed, in the almost-week we've been living on our boat, life has been characterised by strong winds and frequent rain - with only occasional bursts of sunshine. And to top it all off, yesterday our calorifier (hot water heater, for those who, like me, would have assumed this somehow related to food upon first hearing the word) started leaking copiously. It deposited a good quantity of water into our bilges, while I listened to the bilge pumps straining to pump it all out and gently panicked. We established that perhaps it wasn't the best idea to trust that a calorifier that hadn't been used for ten years would still work without a hitch, and that the supposedly stainless steel case was leaking from a crack - due to rust. Joy oh joy. We've got a welder coming along tomorrow who will hopefully fix the problem, and in the meantime we are hot water-less. The downsides to boat life are making themselves all too apparent so far.

On the bright side, the boat is completely transformed. When you look at photos from when we bought it, it's barely recognisable. Admittedly, from behind the differences aren't enormous.

Before

After

         

But once you get inside, the changes are a bit more dramatic.

The saloon - before 

The saloon - after

And when you go down into the hulls, she starts to look like a completely different boat - and not just because of the cats that feature heavily in my photos. For example, looking forward through our cabin, in the starboard hull:

Or the galley in the port hull:

What was once a pretty unpleasant heads (toilet) and back cabin is now my beloved book nook and Peter's mini workroom:

It took us a surprisingly long time staring at some of these old photos to work out which bit of our boat we were looking at.

And in place of a fairly unnecessary fifth cabin, we now have a much more appealing looking en suite heads.

Given that I had next to no part in it, I feel fairly comfortable saying that it's quite an incredible transformation. But the very best part is this:

Disco lights! On a boat!

OK, realistically we'll never actually use them, but if ever we need to host a slightly retro party we are set. 

And, frankly, does anything else really matter?