Kids and houseboats

Guest post today from Moomin! He wrote about our liveaboard life for a school report and it didn’t come out sounding like this guy’s. It’s good to know that Moomin noticed the old sailmaker was a bit “off” since actually the sailmaker was drunk as hell and was raised as a neo-nazi and talked constantly about “overcoming” his racism and I can’t even go into the details of all that because this is a G-rated blog and the sailmaker’s overcoming techniques and conversation were not rated G. Sooo with that stellar introduction, here’s Moomin’s report on what it’s like for kids to live on a houseboat!

The Second Chance

I was amazed when I first saw my mom’s houseboat. It was almost a year ago when I first started coming to it. Mom had rented the boat (the Second Chance, it was called) from someone else, and I hope we have it for a long time! It has a small porch in back and a small pilothouse up top that opens up to the roof of the porch. It’s also a great place to play, as long as you don’t mess with the controls. There’s even a hatch in the front end of the boat (my room) that goes to the lower roof, and that’s not all.

Another thing: every room is covered in furry green carpet. Those rooms include my mom’s and my bedrooms, which are practically all bed. However, I should not just tell you about the boat itself.

There is more to this than how the boat looks. The S.C. is in Pete’s Harbor, Slip 6, along with other boats like the Hannah Lee II, who are good friends with us. Strangely, all of us can tell the tide just by looking at the bridge connecting to the dock. That’s because the dock always floats, so when the tide goes down, the bridge tilts down. When the water goes up, the bridge levels. However, this tide table wasn’t very useful, since our engines were broken down and we didn’t have any other boats. That is, at the start we didn’t.

Now we have three more boats: The Daisy, the No Brakes, and the Water Bug. The Daisy we had gotten from an old sail maker (nobody said it, but we all thought he was weird or crazy). It was 3 things at once: a sailboat, a rowboat, and a motorboat. Mom had gotten the kayaks from an actual company. Now, every boat is all fun!

We read “Kidnapped” some more last night and got to the point where David Balfour is trapped on a little island. With Moomin’s awareness of the tide, I feel sure he wouldn’t have been trapped for long!

I wonder if he will still think every boat is all fun when we haul the kayaks out of the water and scrub the seaweed off?!

Someday I’d like to live on a boat with working engines and go cruising all over the San Francisco Bay and the Delta.