Busy, busy...

19th & 20th January

It’s been a couple of days that have involved quite a lot of activity, considering it is supposed to be the quiet time of year. Yesterday, we got up fairly promptly and finished the cleaning before Paul Smith from ABNB arrived, almost exactly on time.

His visit went very smoothly and we were impressed with his professional approach. He had said it would take five hours, which seemed a lot, but it did indeed work out almost exactly; he arrived just after 10.30 and left just after half three. A lot of photographs were taken and he made careful sketches of both the floor plan and the side view.

I think Andrew Denny has commented in his Granny Buttons blog about the high charges boat brokers make; 6% of £60,000 is £3,600 after all, which is quite a contrast with the 1.5 to 2% that an estate agent would charge. It must be borne in mind, though, that a thorough broker like ABNB will also perform some of the functions of the solicitor in a house purchase.

We had to show Paul the documentation that establishes our ownership of the boat, and when the sale is made they will manage the cash transfer from buyer to seller. If necessary, we will have at least three months free mooring at Crick if the boat hasn’t sold by the time we need to move her from our winter mooring here.

On his advice, we have set an asking price of £63,000; in future any enquiries about viewing Sanity should be directed via ABNB; contact details are on their web site.

Naturally, after the excitements of the day we had a quiet evening. The good news is that the ice is retreating very quickly now and we are confident of being able to move the boat on Friday. In fact we would probably be able to move the boat tomorrow, but there is a lot of wind forecast and so it makes sense to shop tomorrow and water and diesel on Friday.

This morning, Sheila went off for a hair appointment. I spent a bit of the morning changing the home page of our web site to direct inquiries about buying Sanity to ABNB.

As well as Paul Smith, another welcome visitor yesterday was the sludge tanker, which pumped out all the marina's septic tanks. By the time Sheila came back with a new hairdo, I had almost finished pumping out Sanity’s tank, giving us one less thing to worry about. Sheila gave me a hand to finish off after which we had a quiet collapse in the saloon for coffee and then lunch.

I finally solved the problem of the DVD disk which will not play in Apple DVD player. There is a useful freeware program called VLC which will play almost any audio or video format on a Mac. Using this, we’ve been able to watch most of the extras that came with The Colour of Magic.

The retreat of the ice and confidence about getting more water means that we feel able to use the boat shower again; Sheila had one yesterday and I’m just off to get one now.