Busy Busy

Having had little comment on my previous blog, the waves of email enquiries asking for availability continues unabated.

I know everyone is busy, so the web site is designed to make searching for a holiday simple. It seems that it's either not simple enough or I've seriously underestimated how busy people are.


Fair Freedom
Work continues on Fair Freedom, finally towards an achieveable goal of this coming Friday.

Honestly, the sheer amount of effort that we have put into this boat (not to mention money spent and lost by not having her on hire) has been staggering. We anticipated an eight week sabatical for her in one of Ricko's sheds which turned out to be four months as every panel we examined hid away a wealth of horrors that couldn't be ignored.

Finally, though, she's in the water, complete with a total repaint, lots of fibre-glass repairs, refitted windows, replacement engine some new cabinetry and more.

We're still working on her in a frenzy and will post images soon.

Meanwhile, we've got two poorly engines to rebuild this week; again to a deadline.

Outboards
Our private work continues to increase, mostly with outboard repairs and servicing. Peter is a qualified and experienced outboard engineer and our name is getting round rather nicely. Many of the engines we look after are around the Barton Turf area, thanks to the trust vested in us by the Norfolk Punt Club who's engines we oversee these days.


We also look after much larger outboards like the 60hp commercial BigFoot engine from a Cromer fishing vessel that's down on it's luck right now.


Got a poorly outboard and need a quick fix? If we can't get it running properly within the time frame, we have one or two outboards that we can loan you to get you out of trouble.


That Sinking Feeling
A couple of weeks ago, we responded to a plea for a salvage pump at Woodbastwick staithe for a sports cruiser that was going down. Our 3inch pump was sent out and, along with a couple of 2inch pumps from the Broads Authority, the boat was saved. I thought we were going no need it for Spirit of Freedom on Saturday.

The report came though that the vessel had two inches of water in the cabins. Our immediate thought was that someone had left a tap running in the shower which subsequently overflowed. Oh how wrong you can be.

When we got to Thurne dyke, the poor thing was seriously back heavy. Not on the brink of going down, but certainly on the brink of damaging internal components. The engine was running and the customer was still sitting on the boat. Lifting an engine panel immediately showed the fault and the boat was saved; an exhaust pipe had split and all the cooling water was being ejected into the engine compartment rather than through the exhaust port.

We got there just in time really as the water level was about an inch off of all the eletronic devices in the engine bay; simple, inexpensive things like the Eberspacher heater, inverter, fuse panel, etc.

Oh, the fun of running a boat yard.