Living On a Boat – One of Life’s Adventure’s
We are, I reckon, a pretty ‘One off’ family with a considerable number of bullet points to our profile!
E.g. We have three daughters who all became musicians, all pianists and all with secondary musical achievements, furthermore we have never had TV .
MV Thorntree
But if we are going to step outside the norm, let’s do it in style…
So once upon a time I came back home to be greeted by, “Our offer on the boat is accepted!”
What!!!??? I had, with some relief given up on the crazy idea hatched up on one rainy Sunday afternoon to sell up and live on a boat. Plan A was a large ‘ready to convert’ MFV (Scottish Motor Fishing Vessel – Drift Netter) lying near Skye, Scotland. Further reflection saved us from that idea
Plan B was a similar – but already converted to live aboard, an MFV lying in Essex, on the River Blackwater. We had viewed the vessel, impressive in parts but ‘my area’ the engine room was a mess. The accommodation was neat and sparkling and smelling heavily of Lavender Polish! Our offer was refused, phew, relief!
But Celia, whilst I was out had an impulse to try again, and it was accepted – subject to our selling our house.
Then – I felt fate betrayed me at the time – we sold the house!
We then sold everything just about (Celia amazed me on that score) except books which got stashed away in friends’ attics and cellars. And one memorable day we packed all that was left into a van and my amazingly commodious Citroen XM (lovely car)! and off we set to arrive, completely exhausted, at the berth in Essex.
We were greeted by the owner – and huge thunder clouds! The first priority was to get the bed linen onto the boat before the threatened deluge. So, tired as we were, we unloaded as much as we could stow away as quick as possible. Then it rained, hard, with thunder and lightning!
But something Celia and I will always treasure, the girls had bought us some special candles and gave them to us aover our first meal aboard with a letter which, frankly, made us cry. They thanked us for buying such a lovely boat and providing such an exciting home. They are loving and thoughtful daughters.
We soon discovered one of the delights of living aboard, a certain closeness to the elements and cloths were deployed to absorb the several rain drop areas around the deck-head (ceiling, which is something else on a boat). “Ah, the dry weather we’ve been having, she’ll soon tighten up.” We were assured – but not so re-assured. “Ah, a Welsh boat!” some wise acre remarked, “compleate with leaks!” Hmmph!
And so we dwelt on this boat for nearly two years. We gradually let go by renting a flat and finally we sold the boat and bought a house again.
Now the first impressions were quite contrary to reality. The sparkling accommodation hid a multitude of sins, whilst the messy engine room actually contained a superb V8 Perkins (Caterpillar) Diesel of considerable power and smoothness, a very fine engine indeed!
Here’s picture, pity it’s against the light because I had just completely burnt off all the paint, recaulked and seamed her and a fresh repaint job. She looked pretty good – a huge labour on my behalf I might say and a very close encounter with Essex Mud. The latter gave me quite a new view of ‘nature’ and the value to wild life of mud. Did you know that mud can sing? Well when its alive with worms etc, it does! And it can look very beautiful to in the right light/sky conditions and be very peaceful too, I rest my case for saltings mud!
Life on board was essentially happy, we had a berth at the end of a somewhat dilapidated run of staging so we were right out in the river and on the other side of that there were ‘saltings’ with attendant bird life. The boat was very cosy and had efficient and attractive diesel fired heaters (you could boil a kettle or bake potatoes in foil on them too)!
Celia and I gave up the Masters and Mate’s double berth up for’ard to our two younger daughters and we used a pull out berth situated in the deck house aft of the wheelhouse. From here we had a great view of the stars and I could teach Celia the names of some constellations (‘clusters’ as she called them). No TV – we were the TV! We were also the subject of visiting artists who would draw and paint our boat!
As we had so much stuff aboard we didn’t ‘go out’ much in her as packing away for sea was a too big a job, but we went out on occasion to avoid becoming ‘stick-in-the-muds’!
Mentally it’s quite different living on a boat. You feel definitely ‘removed’ from the rest of the world and the mundane things of living don’t seem to impinge in the same way as when you are stuck in your house. We became adopted the boatyard folk especially ‘John’ a traditional boatbuilder of huge experience. We also were adopted by Boris the yard cat. Boris was a very special cat, he was initially totally intrigued by our stereo system on board, upon first hearing it he looked fascinated and searched around for the source of the sounds of the normally classical music of BBC Radio 3.
The acoustics on the boat were fantastic for stereo music, which we could have playing at ‘proper volume’ and a memorable occasion was when we had a request on Radio 3, (Brian Kay of the King’s Singers) played. It aws for Benjamin Britten’s “Sea Interlude” from his opera “Peter Grimes” with the most ferocious and heart searing storm ever set down to music. What an amazing piece that is!
A Classic Plywood Boat, 16ft, 55hp outboard, planing hull!
To the right is a picture of a little 16ft Cabin Cruiser that I just rescued from being cut up. I had always admired it’s friendly but purposeful shape and wanted to ‘get her going’ as she had a nasty example of rot in the transom. One day I found someone working on her, stripping gear out and stopped to chat. He was the owner and had decided to have her scrapped! Oh dear, I’ll buy her off you, I declared and for a few hundred pounds for the gear and trailer and the big outboard ‘in abeyance’ she was mine!
I set to, in between ‘heavy’ jobs on the MFV , knocked out the rotten transom, cleaned up and repaired the associated framework, bought some good thick marine ply and fitted a new transom. Did I feel proud of that! Boatyard crew inspecting and ‘OK’ about it too. My aeromodelling experience certainly came into play here.
As you can see from the picture, she came up very prettily and we had serious fun with that little boat! 20 knots was exciting and, to anyone watching, highly surprising! Mind you, one had to be pointing in the right direction when you put her in gear, no clutch, just in and off! And, no, going astern never pulled the transom off either! Water Cress (as she was called by the previous owner for an especially romantic reason) only drew a very few inches, with the o/b lifted, which meant we could creep over very shallow ground and this enabled us to go to a neighbouring marina, have tea with friends and come back, just clearing a causeway, all on a tide. That was fun, as was a 3AM start for a lovely summer’s day excursion, subject of an acclaimed essay by one of my daughters!
