Isabella Unleashed

At first there was a trailer project.... then came....

The Boat Project

Having successfully retrieved Vacancier from her moorings in Annecy I was immediately faced with another problem, what am I going to do with her? I couldn't tow her home as I already had a trailer on the back, I was thinking of taking her to Norway but that would mean no trailer and also there isn't a great deal of wind there.

So I decided to have a rake around on eBay and see what was available for the little money I had left. At first I found a nice little 4 seater boat with 20hp engine and trailer but after negotiations with the owner I decided against it for two reasons, No1 was back to the trailer situation and No2 it went for £670 which was way out of my budget.

Eventually I found a 'project boat' in Biggleswade of all places. It had a trailer but it was so far gone it would be no use anyway. The beauty of this boat was its size, 9ft with only two seats. In my head I figured it would fit on my original trailer solving that problem at least, also for £250 I could collect it there and then all in with a 12.5hp West Bend Outboard.

I phoned Dad and off he went down to the marina to collect it. No sooner had he got it home he was on the case getting the paintwork done. I got back from France shortly after and the two of us set to work on getting her presentable. Colin Martin, a friend of dad's took the engine apart and gave her a good service, including some tricky engineering work on the gear shift mechanism.

Within the week she was almost finished and looking good too. We then stripped her down again and flipped her onto the trailer ready for Norway.

Initial tests in the water were fun but fraught with problems, Gavin had come up from Sweden to help out and soon discovered we had not undone the air intake for the fuel tank. This at least made the engine run constantly for a change. Further work was carried out on the spark plugs after we discovered lip balm is no substitute for grease. WD40 works much better! The HT Leads were re fitted and after some tweaking with some screw on the front of the engine she was flying across the Fjords in no time.

We are just waiting now for the rain to stop before venturing further aFjord....