A long journey to her new port

9 hours it took to drive the boat overland home to her port across the island, is quicker than a 5 day sail.

The journey started off like the ending of the Titanic movie, took us nearly 3 hours to just hook up a boat onto the 4wd, coupler was rusted solid and a good hour of hammering it and pouring lubricant into it to finally get it to work.

The cover on the boat was shredded over the cockpit which left the cockpit in a bit of a mess with leaves etc. The rest of the boat cover buckled a few stainless steel guide posts on the deck and part of the boat cover was wrapped around the axle of the trailer.


So after those 3 hours to couple and remove the cover we hit the road, 1 km, yes 1 km later the tyre blew on the trailer and the next tyre started smoking badly, we limped into the service station at Kettering to find a rude non Australian behind the counter who refused to help us, we then crawled to the next town and got told a 14km drive to the next town was needed to find a mechanic to fix the trailer.
This was after 4pm, as we pulled into the mechanic shop in Margate we had a mechanics van pull up beside us, he mentioned he noticed our trailer issue and went into his workshop, got two mechanics on the job right away. Spare wheel was fitted, grease added to the smoking bearing and i was told to drive no faster than 70km an hour back home.

Trailer has 4 wheels on two axles, mechanic said if the bearing fails you will still make it home on 3 wheels, we got home on 4 wheels doing 60km an hour, arrived just on Midnight. So all up on the day we left home at 530am and got back here 19 hours later,

Boat was worth all the effort to get her here, she is in good condition, the outboard motor is not shifting out of neutral but does run fine in neutral, looks like a cable from the tiller to the motor is broken, a cheap fix, the flares that came with the boat sale were out of date March 2015, so i have to dispose of them and the cockpit needs a good clean up to remove the tree litter, the outside white of the boat is faded and needs repainting but still i love the boat and am very thankful to the former owner for selling me this wonderful cruiser. Also i added a battery, found the internal lights working fine and the 27MHZ radio is working fine as well.