Vigornia
the new boat


Vigornia as bought.  Click on image to enlarge.


Vigornia as repainted. Click on images to enlarge.

And the name?  Apparently, Vigornia is the old Roman name for Worcester

Paintwork on Vigornia is again by Lawrence Burn at Fenny Boat Services

 We purchased Vigornia in April 2000.  We'd been playing around with ideas along the lines of "if we were to build a new boat, what would we include?"  This is problematic, as most fanciful designs will only fit a shell of 120 feet or thereabouts.  We had a few ideas:
More living space
A traditional style shell
An old engine with lots of brass bits to polish
A washing machine
A generator
A cross bed

One day,  idly surfing the web while downloading e-mail, I found Vigornia for sale on brokerage at ABNB.  This appeared to offer most of the features that we were looking for and so a snap decision was made to take a look.  As the majority of our needs were met, we ended up buying Vigornia and finding a new home for Swanmore.  We  decided that we didn't care too much for the original colour scheme, but otherwise everything was fine.  Vigornia was built for long distance cruising and for a short while was used as the previous owner's almost permanent home.

Best of all, we now have a Lister CRK3 engine.  This is a recently marinised engine built by Lister and based on a block originally intended for the immediately post war Fordson tractor.  It is a 3¼ litre, 3 cylinder direct injection engine running through a Newage gearbox and turning a 22 inch propellor.  Typical canal cruising speeds are achieved at around 800 rpm.  It looks like an old engine, sounds like an old engine, but is only 3 years old and parts are easily obtained.

However, the next boat (there is always a next boat) will have a Russell Newbery or a "proper" old Lister with even more brass and green paint!

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