Finding and Converting A Ship Into A Showboat
The Stanhsalls obtained funds from The Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme, whereby a bank lends the money, and the UK government guarantees the loan. The SS Thekla was considered ideal. Everything had to be refurbished from the U-boat engine (left over from the Second World War, as mentioned above), to the leaky hydraulics to the winch for raising and lowering the anchors. In the summer of 1983, she set sail for Bristol on the opposite side of Britain, a city chosen because Vivian had once played there as frontman for The Bonzo Dog Band, and because Ki liked the site and sound of the place.
Fresh out of dry dock with her bottom scraped, she was covered in a new coat of black paint and white paint over her original colors of pale blue and white, with red chosen for the stack. With all the ironwork and welding accomplished, the SS Thekla sailed 732 nautical miles (1,356 km) to Bristol in six days and six nights.
Read more about this topic: The Thekla
Famous quotes containing the words finding, converting and/or ship:
“Lais is now no lover of the glass,
seeing no more the face as once it was,
wishing to see that face and finding this.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“But Nature is no sentimentalist,—does not cosset or pamper us. We must see the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)