When I signed up for a family house swap, I actually thought it was going to be a family HOUSE swap. You know, swapping a house. Now we apparently have to live on a boat for the next six weeks, and not a houseboat either. Oh, no – this is an actual boat-boat, one that needs to be taken out onto the sea as per the terms of the contract that I should’ve read a little bit more closely.
I thought it’d be a good experience for all of us. The agency DID say that we’d swap with people with a very different living situation to us, which was the whole point. I thought maybe we’d go and live in an apartment on the other side of town. Now I’m asking around the docks to see if any Melbourne outboard motor repair services can help us out because I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing.
The girls don’t like sailing, and my wife and I have never done anything like it. I’m having to learn on the fly, and the actual owners of the boat are incredibly unhelpful. They left sticky-notes all over the place explaining the general home things, like where to find the sugar, how the shower works and what they do with their rubbish (it’s bin night tonight on the docks, apparently, and the septic tank has to be emptied every week… great). But they sort of neglected to mention how this boat operates. Like, how do I raise the anchor winch? Is it a key system? What happens if there’s a storm, and does someone have to be here constantly while the boat is on the ocean?
Maybe they sent us to the wrong place, because we are NOT seafarers and the concept of getting anchor winch repairs in Melbourne has literally never occurred to me. That’s quite an extra expense, for something we didn’t know we were signed up for. I mean, it’s not like there’s a post-it note with a map to buried treasure that we can put towards the boat expenses.
-Spencer