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Winter

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Been a few months. Well, unsurprisingly not much has happened with the boat since it still is still at drydock. A lot of things have happened outside it though! I've bought a lot of equipment that will be installed on it. I'm going to make a completely separate post about those later. The biggest thing though, I suppose, was that I chose to refresh and improve my navigation skills by taking a course at a local institute. The name of the course is, freely translated, archipelago navigator. It was quite interesting and while I might not end up using some parts of what was taught most of it will come in handy during next summer. It included knowledge of international maritime rules, depth charts, navigation by visible land features, the different sea chart markers, lighthouses etc etc. I would recommend anyone and everyone interested in being the captain of a boat of any size go and take it as well. There is also a further course "coastal navigator" which I might take in
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The first steps? Well, I bought a boat.

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A lot happened between the last post and this. I went to see almost as many boats as I did apartments before buying the one I live in currently. I did manage to find one and bought it. A while before this I also called the chairperson of the board of the houseboaters association of Finland and a few other people about as basic things as choosing what material would I like my first (and/or my second) boat to be constructed of. Things were... interesting. Upon research I noticed if someone mentions ferrocement on the suomi24 discussion board which is like a place for... the common people things go wild, maybe because of this one person I talked to and with whom I  might do a live interview with later. That'll be interesting. Yep, did research on those and many other things. I also watched a lot of youtube videos. There seem to be rather few by motor vessels but the sailing ones did give me a lot of insight. Special shoutouts to the youtube channels of the boats Delos and Uma, the lat
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About viability

 Is it even possible to live on a boat? Well the short answer is obviously yes since people have been doing it for quite a while now. The other pressing question is of course is it possible here in Finland? To that the answer is "Yes, kindus of". Lets get into that. The first obvious challenge compared to say the Netherlands is the climate. Even in southern Finland, despite the best efforts of climate change, as I write this in 2020 we do still get temperatures down to -20 degrees celsius or even lower than that. Being as most boats are not very well if at all insulated this of course poses a problem. Luckily we've come a long way from using sawdust and old newspapers as insulation and compact closed cell foam etc can be used. This of course does require pretty much redoing the interior of the boat unless I find one that someone already did the work on. Another related one is ice. I was surprised when I did research this that actually being frozen in is not the end of a h
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You what now?

Yeah. This isn't exactly a new idea for me so lets start with a delve into the past and my background. Those who know me doing unusual things is nothing special for me but if you, the reader, are someone who stumbled upon this from whatever search engine rules the world at the time... welcome! This blog aims to document my project of determining whether it is viable for me to live on a boat in Finland and if so going forward from there. If it goes through, this will probably be a multi-year project and might span multiple vessels. Content will be mainly in the form of text but also occasionally pictures and videos, either recorded or livestreamed. I will try to future proof it so that someone reading this 10 years from now can use it to avoid whatever mistakes I make because from the research I've done into the viability of the project already (more about that in posts) there are many resources which have unfortunately been unable to do so. But I'm getting ahead of myself s
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