Under her own power
A few hundred yards from the temporary slip to the permanent one — the first time Swallow moved with us aboard, and the first real test of an engine we were not sure about.
Draft — Michael to rewrite in his own words.
It is not much of a passage. A few hundred yards, entirely within the marina, on a calm morning chosen specifically for being calm. But it was the first time we moved her, and after several weeks of finding dead batteries and corroded cables, there was a genuine question about whether the engine would start at all.
It started. It ran the whole way. We came alongside the new berth without hitting anything, which on a boat I had never manoeuvred before, with a propeller missing a piece of one blade, felt like more of an achievement than the distance suggests.
The practical significance is larger than the distance. Until that morning, everything we wanted to do to the boat was constrained by needing to keep her movable. Now she is in her permanent berth, and the entire electrical system can come apart without anybody worrying about how we would get her across the marina if it did not go back together on schedule.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what happened next.