a bit more about the little boat

29 May

I ended the last blog about The Little Boat with a pic of our Bri making some shelves and fitting her out, but there was lots more work to be done on the outside of TLB.

When we bought the boat, the engine and gear box were out. The engine needed repositioning and fitting along with a new prop shaft and propeller. The engine also needed painting and tidying up, so we took a vote with our neighbours on which colour to paint it, and gold won, much to Brian’s disgust lol. For those of you that are interested, the engine is a 2 pot Lister engine, the kind of engine that runs a dumper truck on construction sites.

It was important to us to have the boat as self sufficient as possible. We bought some secondhand solar panels from a boaty friend of ours, so we could make as much use of the sun as possible. Bri made a box for the roof for the solar panels to live on, and there is also storage underneath for deckchairs, the parasol, and any other outdoors stuff. We need to utilise as much space as possible.

We have a solar control panel that sits inside the boat, and it monitors all of the electrical input from the sun, showing how much voltage is available for me to use for my sewing machine, charging and lights. One thing I can’t do from the solar power is run an iron. I have to use power from the big boat to do this with the engine running. (One of the reasons I dislike ironing).

The Little Boat also needed a new rudder as the old one was rotten, so Bri made this, and welded on the anchor that he had cnc’d out at a local metal fabricators. It’s a bit of a talking point to other boaters when they see the anchor sitting just out of the top of the water.

Whilst the boat was out of the water a space needed to be made to house the gas bottle. This has now been painted and doubles up as an outdoor little table - because everything has to have more than one use on a boat. (in my eyes).

We also needed some steps down into the boat, as there weren’t any. Bri, built these heavy duty steps from old scaffold planks. They also lift up so he has another access through to the engine. This may sound daft, but I really like these steps, I love sitting on these when the sun is shining through the boat, and sometimes when I am working in here Bri comes in with a cuppa and sits there chatting to me.

Next up was painting the outside of the boat. Originally we were going to go with the same colour scheme of the bigger boat, however commonsense prevailed, we already had some dark grey paint, and to spend another £100 on paint seemed a bit silly, so we used what we had - and it has turned out alright.

To finish off this blog, here is a picture of the hull being drilled out for the sink outlet. Math’s isn’t Brian’s strongest point (he said that), so it was a bit touch and go that he had drilled it in the right place…….. lol.