Granny Buttons

Define: Project

There's a man in Nuneaton this week who's advertised on Apollo Duck, asking to buy a project boat:

Wanted for winter project, will consider anything in steel from a leaky shell to a fully fitted boat needing a refit, must have full standing room, cash waiting up to £5,000

Actually there's dozens of 'em for sale at any one time.  Just go to the narrowboat section of Apollo Duck and type 'project' into the search box.  There are 66 of them today.

A project, in canal boat terms, is a garden shed.  Its what a man takes on to get him out of the house.  A man's got to have a hobby, after all.

A 'project boat' is hopefully still afloat, or could be made so if given a little bit of sealant and a vigorous bilge pump.  'An ideal project boat' means that it has an old engine fitted, and with a few weeks care (and a new engine) the buyer might get it working and then they can start stripping out the decrepit cabin. 

'A perfect project boat' means that the owner's wife has finally persuaded him to sell the boat for whatever he can, so that she can get him back to his house to get his garden shed in order.

The following is a perfect example of a project boat.  It was recently sold on "the 'Duck" with the minimum of gloss (and the minimum of price - £1,250):

27 foot Narrowboat in need of love and attention (more attention than love!). Steel hull in good condition. Lister single cylinder engine in running order with electric start. Rainwater leaks through roof, mainly from missing roof handrail, has thoroughly soaked the interior. The rear deck woodwork is rotten and the cabin door has seen better days..... It is currently afloat but will have to be removed from its current mooring fairly quickly unless you have better negotiation skills than me! Will make a lovely weekender with some time (which I don't have.....) and effort. Can take pics and email them as requested. Open to offers, must sell soon!

Cut Life - story by story

My Cut Life category was designed for stories that I didn't really comment on, but which I thought were relevant and interesting to canal & waterway users.  Originally I thought I'd do it as a daily roundup, but I think now I should do it as a single story per post - makes individual stories easier to find later when they are archived.

News links

Private canal owner stops volunteers having a canal cleanup - Lowell (Massachussetts, USA) Sun
Yesterday morning (29/10) after two hours of clearing trash from the water at the Tremont Gate House, a group of 20 local volunteers were told via telephone to leave by representatives of Boott Hydropower Inc.  Boott Project Manager Jonathan Dollard said the company was not comfortable with citizens cleaning the privately-owned canal. Earlier this week, Bill Moreau, executive director of the Lowell Canalwater Cleaners (LCC) vowed to go ahead with the cleanup anyway.

Union Canal restaurant review - The Scotsman
You can obviously reach the Park Bistro by road, but the walk along the canal is part of the appeal. The canal renaissance is in its early days - the last part of the scheme at the city's Lochrin Basin is only under development. But if it's to succeed - as it has in many parts of England - it needs pubs, restaurants, moorings and their like to spring up along the banks. So the fact someone has been pioneering enough to open up on the canalside is to be applauded. And the bistro is just about the right distance from Linlithgow's pretty canal basin - it took us just under 45 minutes at a meandering pace.

Recollecting the joy of my canal dreams - Glasgow Herald
[Article about the Forth & Clyde & Union CanaIs as a cycle route]  I would like to compliment the British Waterways Board, a bureaucracy if ever there was one, but a body that does an absolutely wonderful job of keeping Scotland's canals in good order for the almost exclusive use of recreationalists ... my main reason for making this point is an experience open to most readers of The Herald: that of cycling from Edinburgh to Glasgow along the tow-path of the Union and the Forth and Clyde canals. ... on a sunny day, with an east wind, there can hardly be a more beautiful 55 miles of cycling in central Scotland. - Ian Mitchell

Spooky boat ride throws light on waterway ghosts - The Times
On Friday night, two boat loads of children and their parents huddled nervously in the pitch dark and damp in the middle of the 200-year-old tunnel, while a woman dressed as a witch told them tales of spooks and phantoms ... Alison Smith, 38, organised the Blisworth tunnel trip for the Waterways Trust.  As manager of the Canal Museum at Stoke Bruerne, Northamptonshire, she has heard all the stories about the tunnel many times and is a slightly nervous sceptic. “I haven’t seen anything, but I wouldn’t moor down there at night,” she said.

Cuckoo Wharf to Cambrian Wharf

I wandered around Cuckoo Wharf today, bridge to bridge, collecting more photos, before Christine and I took Granny up the eleven Aston and 13 Farmers Bridge locks to Cambrian Wharf.   This is one of the most fascinating urban stretches of canal in the country.  Lots of pics to show you, and it's worth a photo album in itself one day.

We tied up on the far side of the Flapper and Firkin.  My! but the Flapper and Firkin is getting to be a tatty pub these days.  Bottles and glasses floating in the canal around the basin - all over the basin, not just by Granny Buttons - and broken glass on the surrounding pavement.  It's the only pub they could have come from, let's be honest. 

And, let's also be honest, the pub doesn't look well cared-for, with weeds sprouting out of the paving surround and the whole looking like it could do with a coat or two of paint.  I don't know who owns the Flapper & Firkin these days, but the Firkin chain is no longer listed as one of Allied Domecq's brands, and indeed seems to be more vibrant and active in North America, where it has a sophisticated web site with John Cleese-alike voiceover.  The one in Birmingham seems to be a hole for drinking, little more.

Cuckoo Wharf to Cambrian Wharf

I wandered around Cuckoo Wharf today, bridge to bridge, collecting more photos, before Christine and I took Granny up the eleven Aston and 13 Farmers Bridge locks to Cambrian Wharf.   This is one of the most fascinating urban stretches of canal in the country.  Lots of pics to show you, and it's worth a photo album in itself one day.

We tied up on the far side of the Flapper and Firkin.  My!, but the Flapper and Firkin is getting to be a tatty pub these days!  Bottles and glasses floating in the canal around the basin - all over the basin, not just by Granny Buttons - and broken glass on the surrounding pavement.  It's the only pub they could have come from, let's be honest. 

And, let's also be honest, the pub doesn't look well cared-for, with weeds sprouting out of the paving surround.  I don't know who owns the Flapper & Firkin these days, but it's no longer listed as one of Allied Domecq's brands.  Seems to be a hole for drinking, little more.

The clocks went back last night, giving us a nominal lie-in (much treasured by Christine).

Fazeley to Cuckoo Wharf

14 1/2 miles and 14 locks.  Paul Balmer joined Christine and me today, experimenting with time lapse photography.  We made good time, 11am to 5.30pm, a bit faster than the expected Canalplan time of almost 8 hours.  And that included time to sink a pint at the Dog & Doublet.

There's a great wintertime photo of the Dog & Doublet here. Compare with my autumnal photo today.

We tied up at Cuckoo Wharf at dusk.  It's nominally 'residential' moorings, but there's only one liveaboard boat here.  I wonder if there are spaces for other boats?  Seems like a good place to stay, very secure.

DIY Red Diesel from MB Enviro Fuels

"Boat owners can make their own biodiesel to beat the red diesel ban", says a press release from startup MB Enviro Fuels of Cheltenham.  The company is promoting a £4,000 'home' (or boatyard?) machine - the 150LE Personal Biodiesel Processor - that will convert vegetable oil (new or used) into biodiesel. 

The company reckons you can produce your own diesel - including all duty paid - for about 50p a litre.  That's not bad, considering Sue says she filled up No Problem yesterday for 46p/litre.  She missed out on all the fun of making her own diesel, of course, and that fun must surely be worth more than 4p/litre.

There's a PDF downloadable here which gives all the details.  MB is doing public demos every Monday in November. John Chard of Stokie ought to go; well, after he's reported to us all next week on how tomorrow's meeting went, at Sharpness Docker's Club, with local Stroud MP David Drew.  And Matthew Barnes, the 'MB' of the company name, ought to go to John's meeting in return.

The Eastern Daily Press covered this story today as well.

[Addition: I've just noticed that the '50p/litre' cost estimate includes the duty, so that's actually pretty good - works out at half of what Sue paid Anglo Welsh for her fill-up yesterday]

Graffiti-B-Gon! says GU cleanup barge

Last week I wrote about how the Catch The Rain blog noticed that graffiti had been cleaned off Osterley Lock within a day, and exclaimed "how's that for efficiency!"   Today the Ham & High reports on a new 'clean-up' barge being operated by Westminster Council on the Grand Union Canal.  Are the two stories related? 

A barge is being used to carry out Westminster Council's first ever blitz at the Grand Union Canal. Over 10 days, a team will scrub as much spray paint from the walls bordering the canal as the council cleans from central London in a year. The barge, borrowed from British Waterways, allows contractors to access sites previously unreachable with heavy-duty cleaning tools and generators.

News links

Newbold Tunnel swathed in rainbow light - BBC
Ten groups of red, blue and green floodlights have been installed in the Newbold Tunnel on the Oxford Canal, in Rugby, to create the effect. The lights are being switched on as part of the town's Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, celebrations, but will remain for some months. British Waterways and the borough council funded the £195,000 scheme.

Free Chinese meals for a year for home buyers in Sandwell - Wolverhampton Express & Star
Property developers in Sandwell are...offering a free Chinese meal every month for a year to anyone who reserves a flat at the Waterside development on Oldbury's Titford Road this weekend. The deal from developers Harron Homes, is aimed at sweetening potential buyers as the housing market sours.

Granny from Fazeley to Birmingham this weekend

Observant people might have noticed there's not been a lot of movement on my 'cruising log'.  Small wonder. Granny's been stationary a long time.  Later today I'll rejoin my boat, which has been lonely for three weeks.  And I'll be in trouble with British Waterways, because it's on a seven-day mooring, right opposite their Peel Wharf offices at Fazeley! (see right for nighttime shot - Granny's bow is on the right of the picture) 

This is the longest I've left my boat since my little cardiac peturbation in January, and I'm feeling guilty about it.  And this time I have no valid excuse.  Certainly this time I've broken the official continuous cruising guidance, that insist I move neighbourhoods every fortnight.  Let alone the clearly marked '7-day mooring' sign right above the boat.  Bang to rights, guv.

The smell of burning wood on a narrowboat

Graham Chastney writes of the little 'count your blessings' things that delight him, in his blog 'Happenings'. 

One of them is the smell of burning wood.  And in a post on Monday he uses as an example, the canal narrowboat he spotted on the Lancaster Canal last week:

Over the weekend Sue, Emily and myself (Jonathan was away on a youth weekend) went for a walk along the Lancaster Canal. It was one of those Sunday afternoon walks, which for us means – short.  While we were walking a barge passed us.  I love to see barges. This one had something extra though. He was burning his log stove. 

The smell of burning wood always brings memories flooding back. All sorts of memories.  When I was young we had a real fire at home. It was really a coal fire, but it burnt wood just as well. We had central heating so we didn’t need to light it for the warmth, we lit it for the experience.  Lighting the fire always bought with it a sense of achievement, because everything that we burnt we had worked to gather. ...

... The joy of a wood fire seems to have passed down the generations too. Jonathan always has a story to tell about the fire whenever he returns from Scout Camp.  Smell is a powerful sense. The way that it connects together memories is a real blessing.

I must admit, a log fire on a canal boat is charming.  Granny has a diesel heater, and while its blue hat of flame is reassuring and warming when it's cold outside, there's always a faint whiff of diesel in the cabin. And diesel is so - well, so 'mechanical'.  A wood fire is 'organic', and feels half-alive.  Plus you get the smoke, and when done contre-jour it gives the photographers their money-shot, as here in Graham's picture.

News links

Canal-boat couple find place to moor - Runcorn & Widnes Weekly News
An elderly couple who were living on a canal boat decided to up sticks and settle on dry land after seeing a new housing development in Runcorn. [Now, that's a 'man bites dog' story!]

Pet dog drowned in canal - The Sun
A sick dog owner who murdered a Rottweiler in a gangland-style execution is being hunted. The healthy ten-year-old animal was dumped in a canal with two lead weights tied to its collar.
(The local council website describes the area as one of its top ten local walks, 'a very pleasant level walk'.  Not for the doggie, it wasn't!)

Service problems on this blog. And Tanglewood.

I've had quite a few problems with slow posting on this blog recently.  Sometimes it can take a looo-ng time to save a post, and I've lost a few quite long & good posts when Typepad crashed on me.  At times there have been problems for readers reaching it too.   

But I won't be moving from Typepad.  The co-founder of the service did a post today on these problems (on her own blog, naturally), and I think her openness is refreshing. 

Every Granny Buttons post compulsorily has a waterways-related link, and here's today's:

NB Tanglewood, a boat on the Llangollen canal owned by Dave & Jen Edwards, but managed by Anglo-Welsh under their 'sponsorship scheme'.  This is where you buy the boat and own it, but it's managed and rented out by Anglo-Welsh.  And you get the lion's share of the rental income, and get to use it for two weeks a year in the off-season.  I presume that's a good deal, although it doesn't sound it to me, the way they describe it.  Two weeks in winter?

Grey Nomad restarts cruising blog

Ralph's had his arm twisted and his lugholes bent flat:

Due to popular demand - well actually it's a couple of mates who won't stop whinging - I've re-started the blog.  As before, the address is http://www.20six.co.uk/greynomad.