The Flight of Wendy Ann 2

We woke to see the world slipping by the cabin porthole. That’s not right I thought, then I thought ‘ Drat, I knew I was crap at mooring boats- we’re adrift!’ I stumbled from sweaty cabin into harsh morning sun and the smiling visage of Matt, Saxon Wharf’s manager bloke, who was leaning from Wendy’s stern spring and dragging the boat forward into the lifting dock. Blimey what time is it? Only seven in the morning and we’re creeping toward the open arms of the strops hanging from the hoist. Bloody hell it’s time to get off.
B and I stood like bedraggled gypsies on the pontoon wearing flip flops and dredging the sleep from our eyes; watching Wendy Ann being expertly guided into position. The strops went taught all round and slowly Wendy rose gracefully in a direction that boats rarely travel. There was nothing to it and thankfully no need for the divers that we’d been warned we might have to call should events below the waterline develop in a wrong way. Luckily we’d done the homework/guessing combination about right- having marked the extent of the bilge keels on the hull in dirty white spray paint that gave the appearance of our having been visited accurately by a very ill gull. So there wasn’t much to do except smoke roll ups and observe. We observed half our anchor to be missing, somewhere along the dinosaur coast it’d dropped off, having rusted away too much, thus proving itself non commissionable in a decisive manner and gone to join the bones at the bottom of the sea. We observed the frankly embarrassing state of our bowfender, it completed the whippet on a string look of our venture (a week later whilst removing it for disposal I found a dead fish trapped inside its tendrils).
Once our boat was safely up and over the boys set her down, still cradled in the hoist- onto a pair of temporary blocks. The nasty fouling was pressure washed from the hull and the air smelled strongly of barnacle soup, then it was time for tea and nail biting, I’d already spotted something that didn’t look right about her keel at stern, from a distance it appeared missing (!) and on closer inspection I realised there was indeed a six foot long, six inch wide hole… We’d only stayed afloat because there was concrete filling the bottom of our hull above this. Get a proper survey before you buy a boat kids! Let’s just say there were a lot of interesting expressions worn by the faces of the staff at Saxon Wharf that morning. Wendy was going to be accommodated on the opposite side of the yard to the lifting dock so the hoist moves to allow this. With glacial speed our boat, which suddenly looked tiny, floated across the apron. God do these guys know what they’re doing. Never mind hand signals, hardly a word exchanged through the whole transit, hoist driver and banksmen seemed to communicate by a subtle telepathy.
Wendy Ann 2 was chocked up on massive oak blocks and an old ladder was kindly donated so we could get on and off. All over by lunchtime and that was that, hands were shaken, sighs of relief exhaled and our boat stood firmly on dry land.
Then the fun really began.