The Interim

I'm a littel heavy on the text here, but don't worry, the pictures are here too!

A lot of stuff has happened since I made my last entry in this "epic".  When I started to build this boat, we lived in a small house on a small lot in the city.  It had been rehabilitated, and was for sale.  It had been for sale for a long time.  I had a lot of discretionary time on my hands, so building a boat, and writing about it were two things I did to fill my recreational time.  But things change, and as is so often the case, they change dramatically and quickly.

In June of '99, we sold our house.  It was a great day when we signed the papers.  We had lived there for a little over 15 years, 12 years longer than we had intended.  I was a country boy, and I never got used to the city, even after all that time.  Packing and moving took over all of my time, and the boat sat unfinished.  This wasn't a regular move though.  We did it differently than most people, and we had a privilege many people never get.  We were moving into my grandfather's house, temporarily, for free.  He has passed away in Dec of '98, at the ripe old age of 97.  My father still owned the house, and was still sorting through the accumulation of 97 years.  He told us to move in, take care of the place, pay our bills, and look for teh house we wanted.  What a deal!

We put most of our stuff in storage, took what we needed, and off we went to grandpa's house.  Of course, one of the things we took with us was the boat.  I didn't have a lot to do at grandpa's house in the way of fixing things up.  I didn't even have to cut the grass, as a neighbor who was busy ingratiating himself with my father wanted to continue keeping the grounds.  I did, however, spend most of my free time looking for a house with my wife and kids.  We weren't looking for just any house, we wanted an old beater of a house that could be rehabbed into something we wanted.  I was able to get a fair amount of work done on the boat, but fall came, and it still wasn't ready for launch.

We found the house of our dreams in October.  It is an old stone farmhouse built in the early 1800s, and while it was in better shape than most of the other places we saw, it still needed a lot of work.  It came on 3 1/2 acres, and had several outbuildings, one which was destined to become my shop.  While we were very excited and motivated to get into the place, I saw my free time for the next 20 years evaporating before my eyes.

Work began on the old place immediately.  we gutted it, and started running new electric, both in the house and in the shop.  We spent almost every day, and most weekends working on the place.  As spring approached, I had a long serious conversation with my wife, and we agreed that we needed to finish the boat, and that we would finish it this year.  In addition to ourselves, I had a newspaper reporter who had been waiting patiently for almost two years to chronicle my adventures for an article in the local interest section.

Suffice to say, things were hectic.  I did not get a lot of time in any one segment to work on the boat, alhtough I did get frequent short times.  Everything was in an uproar, with moving, rehabbing, unpacking, putting stuff back into other storage, blah blah blah.  I didn't get many pictures taken, at least until launch day itself, and even then, it was my first mate who did all the photographing.  We don't have a lot of pics, and none of them are real close up, but we have what we have.

We do have an adventure to tell though, so read on...