I say goodbye to Birdham Pool and hello to Tihany

When I got my first quote for transporting Elizabeth Jane to the Balaton (£7000, and I won’t say who from) I almost abandoned the idea of moving her. I decided that it must be possible to find someone who could do it for less and a friend suggested www.shiply.com This is a great website where you list what you want shipped from anywhere to anywhere and then sit back and wait for shippers to bid for your business. It allows shippers to carry a load on a return trip that otherwise would be empty and, of course, costs less than a special trip. Of course, you need to be flexible on dates but, within a few weeks, I was happy to have her moved any time.

 

My first choice would have been a company that was collecting a boat from Slovenia and would drop mine off on their way there. Sadly, that delivery fell through so I decided that the next best offer on price and reputation was South West Boat Transport, based in Plymouth (www.boat-transportation.co.uk/), who agreed to move her for £4000, including VAT. We agreed that Elizabeth Jane would be collected from Birdham on Friday 8^th May 2009 and she would arrive in Tihany on Monday 11^th.

 

I decided that I would need a week to get her ready for the trip and flew back to the UK the weekend before. I had asked for her mast to be unstepped and for her to be moored alongside the quay (berths at Birdham are mainly stern-to) and when I arrived she was sitting in a temporary berth with her mast on trestles. Now began the painful task of clearing all her gear, deciding what to keep and what to dispose of, and then re-stowing what would be going with her.

 

Like so many people I am an inveterate keeper of things that ‘might come in useful one day’. Because I had had Elizabeth Jane restored from a virtual wreck a few years before, this habit was hard to break. By the time I had emptied the lockers, fore-peak, space under the berths, and the quarter berths, and every last thing was spread out on the quay I realised that I was going to have to make some hard choices. Was I ever going to fit the rather large windlass (found in a skip some years before)? Probably not: I wasn’t going to anchor in tidal waters or depths over four metres for the foreseeable future. What about the Hillyard hand-pump, originally fitted to a much larger boat but which I had planned (at some point, when I got round to it) to fit in the cockpit (just as soon as I had resolved the problem of where to make the holes and how to avoid the quarter berths)? Again, probably not. And then there were all the part tins of paint, half-full containers of white spirit, rusty wire brushes, the bags of sand paper (with just enough life in the pieces to make it a sin to throw them away), the box of bronze fittings (various) that you just never knew might be just the thing, even though most were from much bigger boats and there wasn’t a matching pair of anything. A week? Was this going to be long enough?

 

And so it went on. What had seemed great treasures now became just so much weight to carry the thousand miles or so to Hungary. The interesting thing was, that rather like the reformed smoker who becomes the most avid campaigner against the weed, once I began to discard stuff I became a hardened minimalist. I have a friend who goes through her wardrobe every spring and packs anything that she hasn’t worn for a year for the Oxfam shop. I adopted a similar approach. If it had been in a locker for so long that I had forgotten I had it, it went. I made piles of stuff to be given away, stuff to sell, and stuff for the skip. (Strangely, the skip pile was very popular with other boat owners who, presumably, were the weak sort who keep stuff ‘in case it might come in useful one day’: I scorn such people…)

 

With the help of a chum I cleared everything within three days and was left with a much-reduced quantity of gear for re-stowing. While I had been clearing and sorting, the supports for the mast were being made and the tanks drained, and by Thursday morning I was pretty much ready for the off.

 

Friday arrived damp and grey, and I hadn’t much to do but wait for the transport. Apart from an anxious moment when I thought that the crane operator was going to go home before the trailer arrived (resolved with soft words and twenty quid) all went well. About 5.30 pm I waved goodbye to my boat and tried to put all thought of her journey from my mind. Strangely enough, my strongest emotion was not fear for the boat but emptiness inside as I drove out of Birdham, my happy home for so long, probably for the last time. I can report that by the time I arrived at the friends who were putting me up before my flight home to Budapest, all such feelings had passed; all I could think of was meeting Elizabeth Jane in Tihany on Monday morning.

 

Back home in Budapest I woke up on Monday to a beautiful warm and sunny day. My dear friend,Tamás Kiss, picked me up in his car at 7.30 in the morning and we drove out of the city on the M7 towards Lake Balaton. The road was almost empty and we made good time to Siófok, on the south side at the narrowest part of the of the lake, where we would get the ferry across to Tihany, on the north side. The trip across is about fifteen minutes and the marina is less than a kilometre from the ferry. Just after 9.30 we drove in to the marina to see Elizabeth Jane sitting on the trailer waiting to be unloaded.