第18章 Refloat

The Tuesday was the refloat and it took eleven days of preparation and about forty minutes of crane. I want to describe the preparation because I have spent twenty-five years around boats and the preparation is the whole of it, and nobody ever writes about the preparation, and it is the only part of this I am actually good at, and the only part of it that I am good at in the way I was good at in 2016 and in 2019, which is to say properly, with other people's money and other people's time and a written list. I have a list. I have a list for everything. I made a list for the refloat and it ran to four pages and it had about ninety items on it and it is the first list I have made since February that is not a list of things I am frightened of. The nine days: Blocking. She has to sit level, and to sit level on a hard you shim the way you shim a table, and the way you do it is not with bits of scrap. I had four hardwood shims cut in the workshop in April, before the ringworm was found, before any of it, and I had cut them for a job in March that has still not happened, and I put them under her and she came up to the line and I got her within four millimetres across forty-one feet, which is a number I am not going to explain to a non-technical person and which is the thing I am proudest of this year. The underwater stuff. I took the three-blade prop off and examined it, which took an hour and a half and which is a job that looks like nothing and that saves you four hundred pounds. It was fine. Two of the three blades had the anodising gone at the tips and that is not a fault, that is a thing that tells you how much mud is in the cut. The shaft seal weeps. The shaft seal always weeps. The shaft seal is a thing you can live with for a year and then a thing you cannot live with. The weed. Every single blade, every single prop, and I mean the entire boat. Two days with a long scraper and a bucket, and I did the underwater body with a long handled brush from a stage, which is a filthy job and I was in the water to my chest in a canal in June, and there is nobody in this story who deserves that, and I did it anyway, four times, over four days, and the second time she was coming out and the third time she was going in and the fourth time was because I could not leave it. The gas. This is the thing that kills people. A petrol generator in an enclosed boat in an enclosed boatyard on a warm evening is how a man of sixty-four died in Wolverhampton, and it is on every notice in every yard in the country. I hired a gas man. Not a man to check the system — a man to do the system, all of it, hoses, clips, the RCD, the earth, the whole lot, and a certificate, and I paid him and I did not haggle and I would have paid him twice. The system. Freshwater is four-inch now, on brackets, above the sole, where it was in 2011. Waste is four-inch, above the sole, on the other side, and it is the only pipe on the boat that is properly supported and I did that with 2001 aluminium and a drill and a jig I made in the workshop in 2015 that nobody knows about. The wiring. This is the part I put right and I am not going to let anybody tell me it is a small part. I rewired the entire boat over two days in April and May. Thirty-one metres of 7-core, blue, yellow, red, black and white, in a trunking run on the inside of the deckhead, clipped every 300 millimetres, and every earth is now a bonding strap and not a screw in a deckhead, and there are two RCDs on the board, and a proper main switch with a fuse holder, and every light on that boat is now on a cable rather than on a fitting. The reason is not safety. The reason is that a man of forty-four cannot do that work twice, and I did it in 2011 with a man of twenty-four and he did it wrong in one specific way and the boat carried a fault on the earth for thirteen years and I did not find it until a surveyor put a multimeter on the front deck light in a car park in March and told me she had a dead earth on a bonding strap that was a piece of solder and a wire. Bram's note. *Proper earth, not a screw in the deckhead. She will tell you.* I did that in the February, at half past eleven at night, on my own, on a boat I did not own, and I have never told anyone except her, and I am not going to, and the boat now has it done properly and the reason it is done properly is a dead man and a woman who looked at a light in a garden in 1994. The eleven days ended. Everything was on a list and everything on the list got ticked, and I ticked about eighty of the ninety items and I did not tick four, and the four were the ones that need money, and the money is not there yet, and the money is the September invoice and the October invoice and the November one and the surveyor's final account in July. The refloat itself: the crane came at ten past eight on a Tuesday in the last week of June, at Anderry Wharf, which is a mile from the yard, and the crane hire was two hundred and ten pounds, which is a fifth of what the boat is worth, and I paid it, and Ruth paid half, and Dev let the boat stay on his hard for a month for nothing, which he would deny. It took forty minutes. People never believe that. It is a boat that has been out of the water for a month, forty-one feet, twenty-two tonnes, and it goes back in on a Tuesday morning in forty minutes, and the work is done in the lifting, not in the crane. You get the lifting strap round, you take the weight, you get her off the blocks, you swing her, you set her down on a mark, you fill the sump, and you are done, and the whole of the following day is washing down the hard and hosing the tarpaulin. I got her into the water at ten forty and the water came up the hull and I stood on the bank and watched a boat go back into a canal and I did not feel anything at all for about four minutes, which I understand now is what people mean. What I felt was this, and I want to set it down exactly. At ten forty-one the crane unhooked and swung away and the water had come up over the line I had marked on the dock, and I was standing on the bank with the tape in my pocket, and I did the thing I always do, which is the thing I do instead of feeling, and I got the tape out and I put the end on the bank and I put the float on the water and I read the line, and I wrote a number in a book, and the number was right, and I got the float back and coiled the tape, and then I stood there on a bank on a Tuesday morning in July and started to cry in a way I have not cried since I was nineteen years old. There was a boat going past. It was very slow. And the people on it looked at me, and I waved, which I do not do. The boat went on up the cut and went round the bend and I stood on the bank and let it happen for about ninety seconds, and then I stopped, and got my tissues out of the side pocket of the rucksack, and blew my nose like a woman who has got a cold, and put the tissues away, and walked to the yard. Teddy was in the booth. She gave me a coffee without being asked and without a word, and I sat on the stool and looked at the yard and said: "I sold it back to him." She stopped, and looked at me, and I had not meant to say it, and she did not ask me what I meant. "He's not on the register," I said. "He can't be on the register without the mooring, and he can't have the mooring because there's no tenancy reference for him in Anderry, and the tenancy reference takes three months and a landlord, and a man who lives in a flat in Anderry with a dead wife is not a reference, so there is no way for him to ever be on that boat again, and the boat is mine, and the boat is mine for ever, and there is nothing I can do about that, and I did it to him." "That's the sentence you didn't say in a car park," said Teddy Vilar. "Yes." "Right," said Teddy, and picked up a cloth, and started to wipe the counter, and said, to the counter, "Then the third letter isn't a letter, is it."