Boat Fatigue Finally Got Us!

Firefly has been with us for a number of years now, and we truly love her. A project of her size though has issues that naturally come along with it. There’s of course, more going on behind the scenes than we reveal on camera. In many ways, we prefer that, but our silence does make it harder to understand why we aren’t working on Firefly as much as we’d like to. Repairing her is definitely taking much longer than we’d initially hoped. We’re nearing on three years now.

The biggest contenders are mine and my Mum’s health, which have both been getting worse in their own respective ways. We tend to be quite open about our health conditions on the channel, but we’re not always eager to admit when we might be doing worse than normal. We also often feel like a broken record.

Mum, for example, has a lot of issues when it comes to breathing. She’s in a wheelchair most of the time, because if she pushes herself too hard, her body gives up, and she’ll collapse, likely from a lack of oxygen. It happens. This means that it’s next to impossible to work on the boat if she’s on her own. We’ve found over the last few months that she’s struggling to catch her breath as she normally does, and her normal usually means she’s struggling anyway. She’s been getting worse.

That’s not even going into all the chronic pain she’s in on a daily basis. She’s been through multiple rounds of blood clots in her lungs, and her having to sit down to heal from them, meant that arthritis took hold, and she can’t effectively get rid of it. She’s hypermobile, and has nerve damage, too. We kayak to maintain where her health is currently at, hoping that she’s not getting any worse, but she’ll live with it for the rest of her life. Having to deal with that on a daily basis, is exhausting. She sleeps a lot in between our activities, and her work.

As for me, I’ve always been pretty open about my Crohn’s Disease. My condition has been making my life rather difficult over the last several months. It’s a weird feeling, because I can actively feel myself getting worse. I don’t have anywhere near the amount of energy I used to, and I’m relentlessly exhausted. There isn’t much energy there to do anything much beyond sleep, but it also doesn’t make much of a difference how much I sleep, as I can guarantee I’ll still be exhausted when I wake up. Chronic fatigue is not fun at all.

Other aspects of my condition have been getting worse too, but I’m less inclined to go into detail about those parts. Though, it is getting so bad now, that I’m now waiting for another rather large surgery. More of my intestine is diseased, and needs to be resected, and I’ll be having a stoma put in place too. It’ll take me a long time to heal from it, and considering the stoma bag is going to be a new lifestyle change, it’ll take me some time to get used to it, too.

Aside from health stuff, Mum and I both work full-time, too. We unfortunately don’t get paid from our videos yet, so we have to rely on our other sources of income instead, which take up a huge amount of our time. That, coupled with the exhaustion that Mum and I have to deal with lately, means our calendar is rather full.

To compound these issues, when we were working on Firefly regularly, it was hard to see the progress we were making. We’d put weeks worth of effort in, only for it to seem like we’d barely touched her. After several years of pouring everything you have into a project, only for it to feel like nothing has been done, it gets a bit disappointing after a while. Plus there’s all the bad weather and storms that have regularly stopped us from making any progress.

And after all of that, the boat is still a little wet inside. There are still small leaks we haven’t managed to seal. We think we know where the water is coming from now, but it can still be a bit exhausting to go around in circles after we thought the issues were fixed. Three years on, and we’re still trying to seal up all the leaks.

Through all of this, there is also the vast cost of her to think about as well. Not including the fees to keep her on the hard (which is the largest amount of her costs), the tools and supplies we need to actually fix her, end up building up, and costing a lot over time. Owning and repairing a project this large was obviously going to cost a lot, but I don’t think we fully realised back then what we were getting ourselves into. That, coupled with the fact we thought we weren’t seeing any progress with her, despite the amount of time spent with her, and our health issues on top; these things were definitely the leading culprits that led to us getting a little tired of the whole process.

This post definitely sounds rather negative, and almost like I’m leading up to telling you that we have gotten rid of her. Rest assured, Firefly is still ours, and we still love her very much. I just think that explaining all of the above hopefully puts into perspective some of the things we’ve been struggling with while we’ve been away. It helps us to write it, too! It’s easy for us to feel guilty that we’re not getting on with her like we want to be, but everyone gets boat building fatigue at some point, right?

The most important thing now is, that we’re more determined than ever to finish her.

The last thing we want is for all of this progress to mean nothing. All the filming, videos, hours spent scrubbing her, repairing anchor lockers, cutting wood, painting, mopping up water, dealing with an indifferent yard, paying through the nose to store her, and all the sanding. Oh, so much sanding, let’s not forget that. It needs to be completed, and we do not want our unfortunate state(s), to get in our way.

It can be difficult to look at her amongst all the boats she sits with day after day, and not think that she should be further along in her journey. Unfortunately, the hard truth is; we are disabled, and we’re trying to fix her on a rather tight budget. So it’s just going to have to take a little longer for her to be finished completely. That being said, there has definitely been a resurgence in us to get her finished and on the water as soon as possible, so, who knows?

We might just shock ourselves.

C