November 11, 2004.

Moving day is tomorrow! There is much still to do on the inside, but the outside is completed. I was up until after midnight last night, installing the main companionway sliding door. Its a good thing the move date got postponed 3 days by the crane company. I've been up until 2 AM many nights for the past several weeks, working at a more and more frantic pace as the moving deadline approached. The shelter MUST come down today. I was in a panic this morning over all the things I still wanted to complete, but am out of time. The rest will have to wait until after the move. Got some luck with the weather, and a couple of friends to help

Managed to get the thing down without falling off and hurting myself. Just suffering from total exhaustion after finishing the clean-up about 10 PM, and dropped into bed. (This is the earliest I've been to bed for at least a couple of months).

November 12, 2004. This is it, the 120 ton crane is here (about 7:45 AM), its BIG. There is another equally big truck hauling the counter weights for the crane, and a small truck with the rest of the rigging materials, spreader bars, and straps. Looks like we are fortunate again to have a day without rain.

It takes them over and hour to setup in position and move the counter weights from the flatbed truck onto the crane, then some time to rig all the spreader bars, cables and straps.

9:30 AM, the truck and trailer to haul the boat is here. I give him a quick briefing on where we are.

After about another hour of repositioning the spreaders and straps, and arranging some padding, they very gently take up some strain on the straps and start to ease it out of the cradle. We stop, and I run into the house to fetch two mooring lines which we use to lash the forward and aft straps together, as insurance against the forward strap slipping off, which was causing me quite a bit of worry. The hull has been sitting upright in the cradle for nearly 30 years without moving. Its been 32 years since I started the project, about 16 or 17 years of actually working on it. We ever so slowly ease it up a couple of inches, the straps groan, we let it dangle for a minute or two to make certain everything is stable. The strain gauges on the crane put the current weight at between 25,100 lbs, and 25,200 lbs. Just a little higher than my estimate of 24,000 lbs. I realized the other day I probably used about 600 lbs. of epoxy resin in the construction. The weight is about right for the design.

The move is on, slowly and gently, it swings out and toward the moving truck. I can't describe exactly what emotions I was feeling at the moment, but they were pretty intense.

It takes another 15 minutes or so to position it on the truck and get the side supports positioned and the straps removed, then the truck moves out in the roadway to finish his procedures, while the crane crew starts the process of removing the rigging and the counterweights from the crane and packing up.

We follow the boat to the boat yard (about 16 miles away). The good part is the location is only 1.25 miles from the floating home where we will moor it when it goes in the water next spring.

Off the trailer in the boat yard, where the travel lift looks much more secure than the lift with the crane.

Finally on the blocks and stands in the boat yard where it will stand until spring. While here I will install the rudder (the new one which I still have to fabricate in the next month), and the propeller and shafting and hook up the engine controls. Once in the water, we will move it about a mile to where we will be living, and I will be able to finish off the interior. The guy that runs the boatyard said he knows of a lot of boats that take 20 years to build, in fact another guy that built a smaller one in 20 years showed up at my door about a week ago to take a look at mine. He heard about it from the boat yard manager and had to check it out. He seem quite impressed with this one. The manager mentioned how it seems to take time, money, and ambition, to complete, and you usually find at least one of those is lacking. He usually finds he as a couple of boats in the yard that are more or less abandoned. Well, the water is just across the street now, so I need to keep the momentum going. The boat wants to float now, and we'll try to get it wet next spring. - Daniel