Sometimes boats sink

It’s said that a boat is merely a hole in the water that you throw money into. That phrase certainly came to mind when I spotted the 4-story sized industrial crane out the back of Sean’s Bar.

It would seem that Sean’s boat sunk overnight. It’s something that every boat owner prays won’t happen to them. Personally, being generally adverse to spending any amount of time on large bodies of water, I feel this is a tangible, deterring risk one should take into serious consideration before deciding to purchase a floating home.

The ordeal of lifting it back from the riverbed and carting it away for repairs took most of the evening and shut down the western side of Athlone town. I popped down with a neighbour to check out the spectacle.

That’s the big crane there to your right.

To make matters worse, once they got the boat up, out and loaded onto the back of a truck, it took them hours to maneuver that truck back out. There it is below there, after hours of inching back and forth to the great amusement of the punters at Seans and the Castle, just whiskering between the Castle inn and the streetlamps.

On a scale of one to not brilliant . . . I think this situation is definitely a not brilliant.