The big day dawns!

Ok, we'll start with the day before the big day:

Deep Thought, all 29 tons of her, is craned onto the trailer:

And leaves the Piper factory to head for Thames & Kennet Marina, Reading:

The following day we travel the arduous 30 minute journey to T&K, arriving around 0730, desperate not to miss anything, only to find that there are a couple of lifts scheduled before ours, so we head off into Caversham for coffee, returning just after 0900 to witness the action! My videos are too large to load into the blog so you'll have to make do with some stills:

It was interesting that the lift straps were left under the boat until the Piper guys had a good look inside to make sure all was well and no water was on the wrong side of the boat!!

We unloaded our car (full of important boaty stuff) aboard, then left Tom & Jim (Piper engineers) to go about checking all was well with everything. This allowed us to pop home again for a further load of important boaty stuff.

We returned and had a bit of trouble finding the boat, mainly because it was on it's way from the launch site to our mooring at Dreadnought Reach, we eventually caught up with it and stepped aboard for the first time with the boat on water!!

We went for a bit of a trip around the marina, I took the helm, turned around and manoeuvred, in reverse to our mooring. Deep Thought was very easy to handle and I was very happy with my first go at the wheel.

Tom gave us a final run through all of the systems, Jim ran through all of the snags, just a couple of small issues still to resolve, we signed the handover sheet and Deep Thought is all ours!!

We set about sorting the many boxes of gear that we loaded and sat down with a bottle of champagne for a well earned rest, before heading off to Waitrose for essential supplies!! Then our first dinner afloat! Happy Days!!