Not much work was done to my boat last weekend because of the combination of very hot weather and last minute work that I helped out doing on Nine Lives. I also spent time during the week finishing a variety of small jobs on Nine Lives, such as glassing in a rudder brace bulkhead and attaching the chainplates before the truck arrived on Thursday to load her up. We spent a lot of Tuesday getting it out of the shed and pushed around into place. Getting it out was easy, as straight run out but maneuvering it around to where we wanted to park it ready for the low loader to take it to the water took about 4 hours. I needed to keep working (my job) in between as well. Fortunately I had my laptop with me at the shed and was able to get the work I had to do done in between changing directions on the piano moving wheels each time we want to move the boat in a different direction. We also needed to pull it with a block and a car because it was just too heavy to push.

It was a great exercise seeing Nine Lives removed and launched. It showed me how mine will come out. My boat is a half a meter wider so the doorway will need opening that much more, but is not very difficult, and I also saw how impractical the piano moving wheels are, they only go one direction which adds a huge amount of difficulty to moving the boat. I will either have dolly wheels under the cradles that allow unidirectional movement or I will have a dolly made that suspends the boat from the bridgedeck to achieve the same thing. I am leaning toward making the cradles strong enough to take decent rotating wheels at this stage, but I dont have to worry about that for a year or so.