From the ashes

The comment 'bit of a tub to manouvre' strikes fear into his neighbour next door :rolleyes:

As you say lots of work gone on over the last months.
 
I've spoken to the new owners a couple of times, they seem a couple of nice guys, full of enthusiasm. One was telling me how he used to sail on her many years ago. They've put a lot of work into what was looking an increasingly derelict boat. She's a nice looking boat and it's great to see her looking well cared for and back afloat :encouragement:
 
I suspect the project was a bit too time consuming and that other priorities gained leverage ..like triathons ;-) I find that with boats you've got to keep using them to keep the fire of interest alive and a boat like this is not one to nip out for a quick sail on with every trip being a bit of a mission partic on the east coast where lots of the marinas etc are quite tight for a boat of that nature.
 
Excellent. That's really good to see. My wife and I were at Shotley a couple of weeks or so ago and she looked about ready to go in.

Incidentally it reminds me of a thread a couple of weeks ago about luck and name changing. So please be prepared for post-creep.
We sold our previous boat (SO29. 2) to a chap in Burnham and bought a Maxi 1000 from the Hanse broker in Hamble in about April 2016. Boat name: Phoenix (so not completely OT, see).
As we bought from a dealer she came with a three months general warranty, including engine gearbox etc.. Great stuff.
Three months later the warranty company rang me up and asked if I wanted to extend it beyond July. As we'd motored perfectly up from the Solent (wind was perfectly easterly until Dover, then north-easterly), then sailed for three months, and had just about learnt the boat etc., I guessed we'd be OK, so declined to extend at what would be my cost.
About a fortnight later (August), we whizzed back into Shotley on free-flow through the lock, coasted past our pontoon and reversed nicely into our berth.
Except, on trying to nudge forward to settle her in on the very last manoeuvre, all power failed. Everything had siezed up; saildrive-engine -everything!
Out she came a week later; the yard identified nothing majorly wrong except a seizure and replaced those bits that looked like they need replacing. Ouch. Very expensive and just two weeks out of the three month warranty! This was all in early August last year.
I can't put this down to anything but bad luck, and - by then - we'd not changed her name...

I'm sure there's a reason why there are so many boats named Phoenix out there but I'm lost on it. My wife and I were first amused by, then tired of explaining we weren't this Phoenix or that Phoenix when we came in somewhere. However, being sea-fearing sea-fairers we decided not to 'change' her name but merely anglicised it to avoid any bad luck. So we 'changed' her name to Firebird and very pleased we are too with it, and her.
However, as Frank Carson would have put it, 'Come here there's more'.
Just after a year after the failure of the sail drive unit, ie now in the second half of August 2017 (past the standard 12 month warranty that new Volvo Penta components might come with), we were pulling onto a pontoon at Brightlingsea and exactly the same thing happened again. Everything siezed: no TX movement, engine dead and not able to be turn. Very fortunately we hit nothing and with some good crew we manhandled her parallel with moored vessels, down with the flood and to a vacant berth.
Then I left it to the Volvo folk there (French), just about avoiding throwing the keys away in disgust. The ongoing long and short of it was that it cost us another £5k for) this time A complete new sail drive. Double ouch.
So does changing a name produce bad luck?
Of course not, but I might be persuaded that Mystic Meg works for Volvo Penta.
On the plus side, we might not have had the name-changing ceremony, but we had two bonus launch parties!
 
Neil must have put an enormous amount of work into Phoenix, it looks as if somebody else will be finishing the project, I suspect that this is reasonably common.

It must be incredibly hard to sustain the level of hard graft to get a project boat sorted and ready for living aboard. Our boat was in good condition when we bought it but it still took three years to get it ready for cruising long distance.
 
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