Fran and I have moved a number of times in our married life, in fact, at least five times. As the years have crept by the subject of moving to a retirement community have kept coming up. After all, two people living in a four bedroom home didn’t make a lot of sense. My objection was always that I would have to give up my boat shop. Upon visiting a retirement community about a mile away, they made an offer I couldn’t refuse. They would convert a garage and some extra space adjacent to it into a boat shop. It turned out that this space was about equal to the usable space in my present shop. So we signed up and a moving date was set for May 3.
So here’s how the move of a partially completed guideboat went. I must say the movers were very conscious about insuring that the boat moved without a scratch. Here’s the boat waiting to be moved.
Here’s a view of the movers inspecting the boat and deciding how to safely move it to the truck. They can take it out through a sliding glass door.
Next step was to remove the hull from the strongback, and start moving it out.
Starting through the door.
Here goes the hull through the door.
I’m sure the movers were not sure the hull would go through the door this easily. They probably uttered a silent sigh of relief. Now, on to the truck…
Next comes the strongback. It was given to me by my Uncle Donald, and it is made of Georgia yellow pine, I’m told. He spotted it in the bottom of a burned out mill in New Hampshire, and asked if he could have it. The powers that be said “Sure, if you can get it out of there, you can have it!” Now Uncle Don was not a man to be easily deterred, and somehow he got it out.
The strongback is enormous and very heavy. The movers quickly realized it was going to be quite a job getting it out of the shop and up the hill to the truck. So here we go…
So it starts moving towards the door.
Meanwhile, the hull rests safely in a truck entirely devoted to it and the strongback.
The strongback arrives and then is strapped in.
We arrive at the new shop location and start moving in.
Here’s the shop after moving power tools, benches and other equipment are moved into the new space.
So the move went without a hitch, although as you can imagine there is still some organization to be done.
This boat and its shop are located some four hundred miles south of the town of Long Lake, in the Adirondack mountains of New York. The completed boat will eventually make its way north there. Fran and I have been associated with Long Lake for nearly thirty years. We have grown quite fond of the town and believe that it represents certain special qualities. We have always lived near large cities, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Big cities swallow up their satellite towns by imparting on to them the big city’s culture, overwhelming the character of the smaller entity. This is not so in the towns in the Adirondacks which are far away from metropolitan areas. They have their own unique characteristics. We have begun to realize what special characteristics they show. So from time to time, we will highlight how Long Lake, a town of nine hundred people, exhibits its own personality. These essays on Long Lake will be interspersed with the usual boating topics of this blog. We hope you enjoy them.