The first steps? Well, I bought a boat.

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 latter of whom are at the time of writing this actually at a higher latitude than me, going up the coast of Norway.

Anyway, the boat. I initially wanted one more than 10m or 33ft in lenght for permanent residence. This one is not nor will I be moving in it for the winter. It is 8,1m or 27ft long. Made of fiberglass here in Finland and the model is called Sea-bee 27 lady. The 2 meters that are lacking from my original wish are luckily taken away by there being no separate rear cabin. This is fine for me since well I don't really need one for as long as I am solo-boating. For friends I have on it a sofa and a table that turns into a bed as is normal on boats. For any people beyond friends that wish to join me on board, well the front cabin has space for two... or three if things get REALLY spicy. There are also the normal facilities inside like a toilet, a stove and a fridge. I did not measure the diesel and fresh water tank yet so not sure how many liters I have of those but I do know the boat came with a full fuel tank unless the meter is broken. It did start when tested so at least it is definitely not empty. Suppose I could post a picture of it here to, here you go:

Drydocked at the moment but me and my brother checked it out fairly throughoutly and verified all the essential systems work. It has been sitting on the stands for a season but regardless of that, almost all of the things worked perfectly and the rest of them I can easily fix myself. The engine fired up almost instantly as well so after I do some perhaps unnecessary but precautiounary maintenance on it in the spring I should be quite set for the next season.

Now for the history, well this was sold to me by the heir of the owner. The owner had unfortunately passed away due to a quite sudden illness and the heir did not have much of the information regarding the boat, having moved to another part of the country a while ago. I did ask if he wanted me to write anything about the owner or the boat here and got out of him, freely translated, the statement that the owner loved to be on the water, loved this boat and treated it "like a son". This was after the money and other paperwork had changed hands so I'm sure it was heartfelt, not a sales pitch. I promised to continue it being taken good care of, too.

The boat having been in good hands part got reassured to me by all of the things a facebook message by someone who was by marriage, (very) extended family of him but did know some history about it, namely how the interior had come to be in its current shape. A quote (translated): "yeah he head fixed up the interior wood panels in his sauna and even put varnish on them" which does seem accurate, the interior is in magnificent condition. I do need to replace the radio with one that supports bluetooth but I broke a car in december so I'll use the one I took from that before selling it to the scrapper.

There are, of course, things that do not work. Namely, heating. the heater is in the boat but it is in a plastic bag in 3 parts. the condition is, well, unknown. I am probably going to take it home, see if it fires up and if not just sell it for spare parts. Luckily the heat ducting for all cabins is already installed so I can just install a heater easily. And that is something I definitely will do since I want to extend the boat season as much as possible.

In the next blogpost, I'll be talking about some of the upgrades I intend to install on the boat, about its name and whether it'll get a renaming ceremony and a couple other things.Thanks for reading this one!

ps. here is how it looks now, I replaced the torn up tarps. The storm that happened as I am writing this on 21.11.2020 might have broken these though, I think I might need to invest in some heavier ones and probably also get someone to help me to install said heavy ones