The Privilege of Friendship.

For the first time in ages last weekend I had company at the boat, first Jan, then Pete joined me for a couple of days of big work in preparation for the coming winter. As you can see, we finally got the first insulation into the cabin and wheelhouse. I’d designed the structure to be fitted with 50mm celotex first, to be followed by a layer of rockwool. I’m currently doing some work on a building site and you’ll never guess what the site agent was about to put in the skip… As A: we’re as poor as church mice right now and B: I’m not that stupid, I kindly offered to save the site agent a bit of space in his (admittedly empty, but that’s not the point) bin. Two midweek dashes to Littlehampton later and Jan and I had plenty of lovely insulation to play with at the weekend, and enough to not only do the proper job for free, but also a bunch of leftovers to jam around the steel bulkhead at the back of the cabin (underneath the windows) temporarily while we save up for proper sprayfoam.

Speaking of which, before we can sprayfoam out the hull all the battening has to go in, which is why we spent Sunday emptying the engine room of all the 2x4 that we’d stashed from taking the tent down at Saxon Wharf, ripping it in half to make 2x2, and throwing it through the planer to clean it up a little. All this required making huge piles of timber on the island that we’re moored to, and of course I checked the tide times. But come high water we found ourselves with pause to reflect that sometimes the amount of tide can vary considerably from predictions. Today it turned out, was going to be one of those days. My little book clearly said ‘Sun 4th October HW1300 5.8m’ and I know it takes a six metre tide to begin to flood the little path that leads to Wendy Ann. So I was a little surprised when we found ourselves moving all the piles of wood to higher ground in a bit of a hurry and then wondering if the planer/thicknesser would float away. Even the fishermen with whom I share the island remarked upon the large amount of water kicking about, and between us we reckoned that we were looking at a tide of maybe 6.3 metres or more.


There was no point being upset about the enforced break in proceedings, on the contrary- my attitude was 'bugger, my workshop's flooded... what fun!'. After packing things that needed to stay dry away, and whilst lunch was warming up on the stove I decided to celebrate being in waterworld again by going for a little swim around Wendy Ann. Christ it was cold.



Now we’ve got a large amount of battening, maybe enough to do the whole forward accommodation/galley part of the hull, but before I can go mad for Hilti guns I’m going to have to treat it all with timber preservative which will be a days work in itself I’d imagine, but it’s one big step closer all the same. Whilst the frankly enormous pile of timber was out of the boat and that big silly tide was up, we did manage to lower a load of iron ballasts into the bilges from the floor of the engine room which they’d occupied since our launch. As they weigh well in excess of 150kg each and there were sixteen of them, I’d had no chance of moving them before now without friendly, and strongman assistance. Peterkin and Jan true friends, my thanks to you both.