Whooo-Hoooo!!!!!

I am doing my happy dance!!!
2 years, 6 months and 15 days ago Blowin' Bubbles left The Royal Hamilton Yacht Club.  Today at 11:45 I motored back to our old slip.... I left St, Catharines just after 7am this morning.  It was a completely uneventful, flat calm motor back to Hamilton.  Along the way I put on the auto-helm and did a bunch of projects, scanning the horizon every 5 minutes or so...

So here are some of the basic details from our re-fit project.  I had the boat at the farm for 102 weeks.  During those 102 weeks I worked for 480 hours (give or take a few hours not recorded) on the boat.  During those 480 hours 19 (I hope I didn't miss anyone) different people helped in various ways.  My NUMBER ONE guy has been my father in law, Ed C. who has been there for me from the very start....  and drove me home from the boat today...  The other people who were instrumental in making this project even possible was Bill S. and his family, who own the farm and the trailer that I used.....   The other person who I need to thank more than everyone else is Shelley who has been there for me every step of the way.  While she did not spend many hours at the boat, she spent countless hours working to help pay for all of this and taking care of me at home (i.e. food and really dirty laundry) In the end, THANK YOU TO EVERYONE who has helped me with this project!

When we add up the costs, we budgeted $42,000 plus $8,000 for transportation ($50,000).  In the end we spent $48,900 plus $8,400 for transportation ($57,300).  We went over budget by just over 13%.  I think that isn't too bad.

Here is a breakdown by percentage of our re-fit project:

Remember that we decided to bring the boat to a farm 100 miles from the lake (and 10 miles from our home) instead of paying to keep the boat somewhere near the lake and pay storage.  If you take our transport costs (which include the cost to re-launch the boat this week) and divide them by the time spent at the farm, it works out to $350 per month.  I think that storage at a boat yard plus the time and cost of travel back and forth would have added up to much more than that.

When it comes to suppliers, our main supplier was Defender Industries (23%) ($13,100).  When I looked for a main supplier, I asked a number of places if they would be interested in offering me any kind of discount and Defender were the only ones who thought that would be a good idea....  That said,  we spread another 22% ($12,600) over 7 other "Marine" suppliers.  I should note that Fluid Powerhouse (6%, $3,400) not only did the work on our hydraulics, they also supplied our Blue Sea Panel, our Xantrax Inverter/Charger and a few other odds and ends because the owner's brother works for a Marine Distributor here in Canada.

Here is the breakdown of costs by supplier:

So, there you go.  I will be keeping this blog going as I continue to finish up different projects, however, We will start a new blog when we start our journey next year...  We will add a link to this blog when that happens.  CHEERS!