Cruising The Lancaster Canal

Cruising Narrowboat, Lancaster Canal, originally uploaded by Bay Photographic.

Even though the weather can't make its mind up (not quite four seasons in one day, but bright sunshine, hail, rain, then sunshine again in the space of an hour today) I have been making progress with 'Shrimp'.
Thanks to the 'Shippodrome' at the marina I have had a week of working on her in the dry, relative warmth of the great indoors and I have managed to...er... wire up the navigation lights and polish the hull a bit.
Why is it that doing anything to a boat takes so long? I might have hoped to have been ringing up the BSS inspector by now and asking him to come and run his rulebook over 'Shrimp', but at this rate I may as well leave it until the autumn when he isn't so busy.
It's not that I waste time socialising (in fact my unsocial nature is legendary) or that I have to keep going home for tools and materials. The marina shop has more than enough cable, bus bars and bulbs to facilitate my needs, and as I am shortly going to have my salary paid directly to their account each month, I don't even have to worry about paying for things.
But nonetheless, progress, as they say in Terminal 5, is a little slow.
I have to go back again tomorrow and finish off the wiring and then I can start painting the underwater hull in epoxy primer. Four times. Then twice with antifoul. Then there's the small but significant issue of compliance. That might take a while...
Fortunately, I rather enjoy all this sort of thing. I would far rather be in a big cold shed working out how to fit a fire extinguisher to an Orkney Longliner than queueing for the ski lift in Val d'Isere.
Perhaps that's why it all takes so long.