Happy Kantara Day!

PS Those who have purchased "Hints and tips for life with your feet under water" please go to the Addendum Blog (link at the end of the book) to see my latest update Update to Chapter 2 – Software.

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Today is Kantara Day for us. Eleven years ago today, September 2nd, Grace and I took possession of Narrowboat Kantara, and sailed her out of ABNB's tiny marina to her new home in the one at Yelvertoft. Then began our wonderful life with our feet under water. I blogged the next day.

Now we REALLY start!

We could actually have hoped for a colder day yesterday, the day Kantara was handed over to us. We allowed two hours for a one and a quarter hour journey, and it took three hours, a large chunk of which was spent sitting in a jam on the road from hell - the M1 - in very hot weather. So we arrived late at Crick, to meet Bob, the last owner of Kantara, a lovely man who had lived with his wife full-time in the boat until poor health had forced them to sell. He clearly loves Kantara, and his greatest wish now for her was that someone else would love her as much, and be as happy in her as he had been. We think that describes us well.

Bob spent a good deal of time with us, explaining all sorts of details, and making sure that we had all the information we needed to get the best out of Kantara. After he left, having given us his contact details and assured us that we were to feel free to get in touch with him if we needed any help, we drove to Yelvertoft Marina, left the car there, and walked back to ABNB in Crick to collect Kantara and sail her back to the mooring we had booked at Yelvertoft. It was a good feeling, knowing that she was now actually ours.

Then began the process of unloading the car, and getting things into the boat, listing the things we had overlooked and would need to pick up from home the next time we return. Time flew, and we realised we had not eaten since we munched a sandwich on the M1, so we had to stop to prepare and eat a meal, and drink a bottle of wine Bob had so kindly left for us (along with some port and a bottle of a fiery spirit we had never seen before), before falling into bed, exhausted.

And here we are, 10:20 on Saturday evening, sitting in the moorers' lounge in the marina - the best place to connect to the wi-fi - a lot closer to being ready to cruise a bit. We are in no special hurry. We want to be as comfortable as possible when we start to cruise, and not be irritated by some detail we have overlooked. The biggest challenge at the moment is getting our 3G router and antenna set up properly, so that both of us can get the best possible Internet connection for our laptop computers. I tried this evening before we ate, but I think I was just too tired, and I had to give up. But there's time to do that - I don't go back to school on Monday!

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We went back to see Kantara yesterday. Not for long. The new central heating system has to be run for at least an hour every month. We could have opted to have a remote control device installed so that we could do that from here in the house, but the boat sits in an area where neither phone nor broadband signals are entirely dependable, and we would never be able to guarantee that we had actually turned the heating on or off again. No problem. It's not a huge journey from here to there, and it's always good to look in on the boat from time to time. And some of the time we'll already be with her.

September 2nd is rather like a birthday or wedding anniversary. It marks the start of something very special, and we feel very privileged to have had those eleven years of taking our boaty home around the country. And we've not stopped yet, but at the moment we're about to have a new bathroom fitted in our house. After that, the shower room - if we're not completely broke!

You know where we'd rather be, right?