Moving House Queensland Style

Having arrived at Magnetic Island, our northerly prize for this year, we wasted no time in catching a bus from our anchorage at Horseshoe Bay across to Picnic Bay on the Southern side. Upon our return from a tasty pub lunch, the anchorage had a couple of very industrial looking vessels making their way through the 60-70 boats anchored out. Whatever was going on, we wondered?

The Bloke introduced himself to Sandra who was taking a greater than ordinary interest. “That’s my house!” she declared. 

A barge was being maneuvered around by a tug boat. The cargo included 2 prime movers each towing half a timber house. 

At 9pm there was to be a king high tide and the barge was being positioned to use the extra water depth to come as close to shore as possible. The trucks would be off loaded and the half houses driven to their destination where stumps, acrow props, rollers and such were already in place to support and position the building parts. 

Building a house on Magnetic Island is expensive since all the materials must first be transported from the mainland (Townsville). The construction workers usually need to be accommodated on the island too. All this substantially escalates the cost of building a new home. Queensland has a ready supply of timber homes that were fashionable last century but left unloved or in the way of some kind of urban renewal. These homes can be sold and removed by house movers - the literal kind- they relocate the entire house. It’s a high scale recycling industry. There are industrial lots on the fringes of cities that are a virtual show space of rescued timber homes. All one need do is choose one. Sandra told us that $175,000 was what it cost her to buy one of these homes and it included the re-location and the reassembly. All she needed was a block of land. 




Navigation lights confirm that this is still a marine vessel. Pylons were lowered to secure a part of the barge to the sea bed.

The workers needed only to wait for the tide to rise.

The ramp being lowered to enable the prime movers to get onto the beach.




By morning the barge had gone The trucks took the vehicle ferry back to the mainland. Evidently this is a common process along the more remote north coast. And that folks is a story about moving house in North Queensland. Brilliant!

Everything is Broken on your Boat.

Dave on Mercedes is full of witty commentary and said “Everything is broken on your boat; you just don’t know it yet”. This bit of cockpit wisdom is reinforced almost daily because as hard as we try to always be diligent with maintenance and be pre-emptive, stuff just keeps failing. Everyday The Bloke wakes and asks “I wonder what’s going to break today?”.

We spent a few days at Airlie Beach. The lock for the washboard - effectively our front door, broke. The lock came away with the key in it and the latch in the locked position. Luckily tools are in the lazerette in the cockpit and it was fortunately an easy fix.

Then another thing. The Bloke went ashore in the dinghy to buy fuel. The outboard fired up on the first pull on the outward journey. The outboard wouldn’t start for the return trip and I was met at the stern by a hot and bothered skipper who’d just rowed 1km back to the boat. 

The repair was assisted by a full rummage through the F@&k Box and whilst the spark plugs were replaced with the 2 new ones we held in our ever expanding ‘spares’ tub, The Bloke is still none the wiser as to what exactly he might have ‘touched’ to get the outboard operational again. However, so far so good. 

When raising the dinghy one morning, the bridle from which it’s suspended broke. Luckily, this happened only inches into the lift and The Elf (the dinghy) was undamaged. Cause? - The splice in the dynema rope gave up. It’s only 6 months old and was professionally spliced. Go figure!

A few days later we heard the bilge pump going and it wasn’t stopping. The hot water tank has an overflow hose draining directly into the bilge sump and seeing as we’d motored a for a couple of hours, due to wind failing to eventuate, we half expected the float switch to activate the pump. But we didn’t expect the pump to keep working without actually pumping. A job for tomorrow. There would be a chandler in Bowen, the next large town, in the event of  a part needing to be sourced.

In lieu of going for a walk at Cape Upstart, the pump was removed and dismantled. My job was to clean the parts and look it over, The Bloke had a much more interesting and unexpected task - locating one of the slide clips that secure the hoses to the pump. Inexplicably, Mr Murphy was on duty and a clip fell deep behind the nearby Hot Water storage drum. Or so we thought. The drum, not only heavy from it’s contents of 40L of water was also warm. 

The Bloke was not getting warm in his hunt for the missing clip however. In fact, he was beginning to think it had fallen into an electrical conduit that runs from one side of the boat to the other.   Out came the endoscope camera to assist with the hunt. 

Sadly the search wasn’t rewarded with finding the pesky part. It was very much looking like a  cable-tie and gaffer tape improvisation until The Bloke successfully ‘manufactured’ a substitute from a thick rubber washer. Genius!

In the meantime I cleaned the pump components and discovered why the pump was failing to suck and runing without stopping.


A small part of the sponge we’d previously used to clean the bilge had been sucked into the pump and caused the flap to remain slightly open. The pump couldn’t therefore pressurise, preventing the contents of the bilge  from emptying even though the float switch was triggering it. The sponge piece was a  ‘Goldilocks’ size. Big enough to keep the flap open yet not small enough to be sucked out with the bilge water and just the right size to create chaos!

Dave is quite right. Everything is broken and often you don’t even know how it could have happened. Although it probably has something to do with Murphy’s Law!