I wont say we got bored quicker than we thought, more that we figured it was going to be easier to do it sooner rather than later. Shortening that story a bit we decided in December 2015 that we would put the boat on the market and see what happened. End result from that was we settled on a sale in mid April 2016 and booked tickets for coming to Europe around the same time.
We flew over to London in early July and spent a week looking around London and Norwich before heading over to Netherlands. A couple of weeks driving around and then found Ardella, had a survey done, put in an offer and then she was ours.
There was a couple of things that needed to be fixed and of course by then everyone was on their summer holidays. We motored a couple of hours to a decent marina where we could wait a couple of weeks before she came out of the water and had the work done. From there we stayed mainly in the Friesland province for 7 weeks or so logging 70 engine hours. A very nice introduction to canal boating in Netherlands and met some lovely (and helpful) people.
At the end of October (really too cold by then) we left the boat in Lemmer and went to Wales to watch the Wallabies play Wales at Cardiff before heading home to work for the summer.
While we've been back in Australia working for the summer we've caught up with family and friends, birthdays, xmas, a funeral, a wedding, a lot of work and we've also had the bathroom on the boat redone. A crazy toilet that you needed to be a contortionist to use has been fixed completely and a shower added. The underwater side of things has been sanded back, primed and repainted so it should be good for a couple of years. Over here instead of leaving the boat in the water all year round we pull it out of the water, it gets a wash down and then goes in to a shed for the winter.
One last job (well, it's a boat, there's never a last job) is to have the gearbox looked at. We're leaking oil at the rate of about half a litre every 5 hrs of running time. Means the bilge gets extra oil and we need to pump it out every so often and each day that we're moving I need to get under the floor and top up the oil. A bit of a pain but manageable. Worse case is that we will motor to a place around the centre of Holland and have the gearbox removed and overhauled. The boat wont need to come out of the water and it should only take a week or so.
