The pictures are from when I originally bought the boat, it was my first boat. 18 months later, I was just celebrating all the major expenditure of refurbishing it internally and externally when the big freeze and snow caused it to sink, in November 2010. Due to the weight of the deep layers of snow and ice weighing the boat down, water seeped in through an ice-fractured waste pipe outlet, that was normally around 110mm above the waterline. I was unaware of breaking the ice seal when stepping on and off board, before heading away for a few days.
An engineer should have been working on board and would have noticed the water well before it got to a dangerous level, but he couldn’t get near due to the depth of snow. Three days after leaving, I got a call to say it had sunk. Apparently, 28 other boats sank along that stretch of river, according to the insurance loss adjuster (who was surprisingly great and gutted for me, as it was just a freak accident, rather than my fault, though I always put corks in low level outlet now!).
Petes – House Boat