Granny Buttons

CanalPlan gets more (deserved) traffic

Bravo to CanalPlan, which has finally overtaken me to become No. 4 in the UK Waterways Site Rankings.

I don't know why it took so long.  It's silly for a simple blog to get so much traffic, when there are so many useful news and reference sites - like CanalPlan - that we can refer to every day.

CanalPlan is a much-underused resource, and everyone ought to turn to it when they plan a route or simply want to know more about a particular waterway.  It reminds me of Imray's Guide to the Inland Waterways, only in a handy smartphone/pocket PC format.

Just one observation.  I notice the official Canalplan link  is now www.canalplan.eu. 

Hmm.  I wonder if this is a foreign takeover.  Or perhaps a planned move by Nick to catalogue the entire European waterway system on his boat Mintball.

NB Titanic near Aldermaston

Narrowboat sunk in canal - Reading Chronicle

Last night, another canal boat sinking, and the paper's quick to report it:

Three young men had to abandon ship last night when the narrowboat they were on started to sink.

The men in their twenties were treated by paramedics after swimming to safety from the boat in the Kennet and Avon Canal at Padworth.

The fire brigade was called at 9pm but the boat had sunk completely before they arrived and so they do not know what caused the leak.

Every canal boater's nightmare, and guess what:  About the same time last night it nearly happened to me too! 

Coming from Newark yesterday, after seven hours at the tiller near sunset, I heard a most unusual rattle from the engine compartment.

I opened the back hatch - and saw the bottom of the bilge completely flooded to several inches, with the plastic drip container floating up and hitting the propeller drive plate.  Clearly I hadn't checked the grease gland before setting off, six hours before, and it had been getting worse. 

Worse still, when I switched on the bilge pump I saw the pipe had split, and most of the bilge water was simply being squirted back into the bilge.  I stopped quickly at a nearby disused wharf and made running repairs.  But unattended it could have ended in disaster.  In my case, much worse than with the River Kennet disaster, because I was on the fast, wide, deep River Trent, approaching Holme Lock near Nottingham.

This is how many of these disasters happen.  As with RMS Titanic, it's usually error piling up on error, compounded by unforeseen mechanical failure. 

Regular checks are essential.   I will be interested to hear the deeper story of the Kennet & Avon Canal sinking.  Four possibilities:

• Was it a truly unforeseen accident?  
• Was it a failure to carry out regular checks (as happened to me yesterday)? 
• Was it the understandable inexperience of hireboaters, making a common mistake - for example, forgetting to put back the weedhatch after unfouling the propeller. 
• Or was it - less approvingly, but you know how it can be - three young men enjoying cruising at dusk, and having too much of a good time? 

Unfortunately these stories are never followed up by the local papers.  I'd love to see interviews with these guys, a few weeks on.  If disaster ever strike me, and I survive, you'll be welcome to interview me and publish your thoughts.  In depth, as it were.

Incidentally Granny Buttons has one unusual physical feature in common with the Titanic.  It's to do with the last chimney/funnel right at the back.  Can you guess what it is?

 

(You'll get points for answering my last question, because it shows you read right to the end!)

Decent cider and Thrupp Wharf Marina

Down near Cosgrove, south of Stoke Bruerne and Yardley Gobion on the Grand Union Canal, the new website of Thrupp Wharf Marina has opened for browsing, and the marina itself is on target for opening on 1st October.

 They haven't got a blog, but there's a photo gallery of progress.  Excavation, piling and jetty supports having clearly been installed), flooding is supposed to begin. 

(Usually, on such occasions, the marina is then 'stanked off' (is that the right term) so that BW can check there are no leaks.  Andy Edwards of Khyamanzi wrote a couple of years back when Brinklow Marina opened, and he was the first moorer.  He was told he could come in immediately, but he'd be trapped for a month while they assessed if the new basin was watertight.)

When I last wrote about Thrupp Marina in May, I wrote:

... one facility that will mark it out from many other new marinas is an excellent ‘dining pub’  next-door.

The Navigation Inn will be a handy local watering hole for moorers, and has already garnered a reputation for the food served by rising star Dan Cameron, “a former chef with Gordon Ramsay at Maze” (it says here).  It’ll be a cut about the cafe or bar you usually see at new marinas.

Indeed, British Waterways last year declared The Navigation Inn to be one of the country’s Top Ten Waterside Pubs.  I’m not sure what the award criteria were (I doubt real cider was on the list), but once that badge was on Dan Cameron’s jacket, planning permission for the marina was probably a shoo-in.

Tonight I rang the Navigation Inn and asked them: "Well, what ciders do you do?"  

The answer:  Strongbow on draught, and Magners, Magners Pear Cider and Bulmers Pear Cider in bottles. 

Oh dear.  How can a waterside pub be in the top ten nationwide if it doesn't doesn't do a real cider?

Strongbow and Magners certainly taste of cider.  But really good cider doesn't taste of cider; it tastes of apples.  And there's no such thing as 'pear cider'; the real drink made from pears is called perry.  How this has sneaked past the Advertising Standards Authority, I've no idea.

Can the first cider-loving moorers at Thrupp Wharf Marina please SWITCH ON THE LIGHTS AT THE NAVIGATION INN?

Further reading: UK Cider Wiki and BW Inland Marina Investment Guide.  I don't care what you say, I reckon they should be published together, perfect-bound.

London boat to rent highlights continuous mooring problem

There's a narrowboat for 'long term rent' in central London, on the Vivastreet classified ads site:

Narrow Boat for Longterm rent

They are asking £850 per month for NB Taldykorgan , and on the face of it (knowing the cost of apartments in central London) it seems like a good deal:

This boat has beautiful pine t/g on the walls and sealing and newly laid bamboo flooring. This boat needs to be seen to be believed it is 20 years old but it is immaculate and up to date.  ... spacious living room/ saloon ... villager solid fuel stove ... gas central heating, fold down writing bureau  ... twin sink ... washing machine ... pump out toilet ...  two-year-old Isuzu 42 Hp ... two 80-amp alternators ... 1000w inverter.

This boat is a beautiful, practical and comfortable live board for two sharing.

So far so good.  Sounds wonderful. Plenty of sweetness there.

Then the cod liver oil:

This is a cruising vessel, based in London, cruising the grand union canal from kensal green to Victoria Park. No Mooring available, accept winter moorings for 6 months of the year, arranged separately.

I'm sorry, but this is not my definition of 'a cruising vessel, based in London'.   It's bridge hopping, continuous mooring, space-hogging, towpath squatting, occupying mooring places that by rights ought to be available to true continuous cruisers and boats visiting London.  Kensal Green to Victoria Park is very nearly one 'neighbourhood' in the BW rules of continuous cruising, and with the shortage of moorings in London, it's just not fair for a boat to do this. 

[Official mooring rules for canal boats here.]

Added to which, they want to hog towpath winter moorings, making it just as hard for visitors to find space in the winter as the summer. 

That's even assuming that it's going to be rented out with the right insurance and licence.

When Granny Buttons was in the London area last winter, I moved gradually but continuously from Watford (where the Underground train network effectively begins) down the GU, across London and up to Hertford and Bishop's Stortford.   I was punctilious about moving regularly, and considered this the proper 'London area'.  Not just the Regent's Canal and the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal. 

The one place I couldn't find free visitor moorings was in this very central stretch where Taldykorgan is 'based', simply because there were so many boats abusing the system like this.  

Strange name, Taldykorgan.  Thanks to Google and Wikipedia's good offices, I quickly learned that it's a city in Kazakhstan. I'd imagine someone from that part of the world who'd just arrived in London and was looking for a place to stay would seize on this ad pretty quickly.

It's a bit like if I was to arrive in Kazakhstan and looked for a place to stay - I'd make a beeline for any  flat to rent that had ' Tardebigge' in its name and not know about any local peculiarities of living there. I'd simply assume I'd found a fellow-traveller and trust him to know the rules.

Salve Hello, IWA Festival 2009, to Redhill

In honour of the opening of the IWA National Waterways Festival today at Redhill, near Nottingham, here once again is my favourite photo of President, the king of the UK inland waterways.  

Well, it's a 'king' if you discount Monarch and Empress, both of which have nobler pedigree in their names alone (although perhaps less venerable ancestry).

The picture was taken at the opening of the IWA Festival in Burton of (oh, is that the time already?) 2004, fully FIVE years ago.   President was at that moment waiting at Horninglow Basin for the Mayor of Burton, who was coming along to open the Festival. 

The crew member taking forty twenty winks at the bow was Nick Haynes, President Membership Secretary of the Friends of President.

I don't know who the cyclist was, but - as in many of my photographs - he popped along obligingly at just the right time.  Some times I feel I'm part of a huge series of tableaux where I'm being positioned along with loads of other people.  My role is just to point the camera in their direction, and ... snap!

Canal Music, Lisa Knapp and Leafcutter John

Canal Music takes the scenic route  - The Guardian

A fascinating - slightly pretentious but well-written - article in the Guardian today by Will Hodgkinson, discussing the upcoming Canal Music tour by 'Leafcutter John' Burton and the yummy Lisa Knapp.

They are travelling from London to Birmingham on NB Chiswick, starting at the London Canal Museum on 9th Sept, via Stoke Bruerne, Braunston and Hatton Locks, and ending in Birmingham on 30th Sept. 

Neither Burton nor Knapp know quite what the performances will consist of, yet beyond that they will definitely feature hydrophones and fiddles, but if the spirit of British waterways is somehow captured, they will have done their job.

"There's a sense that canals are the habitats of the underdog. And they're traditionally hidden, as if repressed," says Burton, as the Chiswick leaves the bank to chug upriver. "We're hoping to represent that."

"They have danger, too," says Knapp. "People are always getting drunk and falling into them and drowning."

"So that's a love of the underdog, repression and drunkenness in one place," concludes Burton. "It's all very British."

'Hydrophones?'  They may well need them, and I do hope they reach Birmingham OK via 'the scenic route'. 

The last time I saw Chiswick, last year, it was stemmed up - stuck aground - outside the 'scenic route' to London via Braunston Tunnel' due to a landslip. 

I later heard it had to got down to London via the Oxford Canal and the Thames.  Chiswick has a big draught of about 3 ft, I'm told.  They've not fixed the landslip in the year since.

Mind you, I wouldn't mind being stemmed up for a year if the lovely (and lovely-sounding) Lisa Knapp was aboard.

Aqua Narrowboats seems to be touched with gold.

Aqua Narrowboats seems to be touched with gold.  Obviously I have to say that, because I've just bought a little canalside house at Willington, near their base at Mercia Marina,  and I'm going to be their neighbour, and I don't want to fall out with them.  

But since Justin and Jane Hudson-Olroyd ('H-O' aka 'Aqua', geddit?) started their little one-boat hire business five years ago, they do seem to have fallen on their feet. 

They were perhaps the first boat-hire business to write a blog, recording the building of their second boat, (H3O) - here's the first post - in January 2007.

As I said in my first post about Aqua, a few months later,

...nothing compares to reading a regularly updated blog, and you really get an authentic feel of peeking inside the business with Justin's blog.  He set it up as a way of documenting the build of the second boat (called, ahem, H₃O), and last week he announced it had gone on its maiden hire voyage on the Leicester Ring. 

You won't find a better 'walkthrough' of a hireboat anywhere.  You can find out more about H₃O than any other hireboat, and it should inspire you with confidence.

At the IWA National Waterways Festival this weekend you'll see their first 'bespoke' privately built narrowboat, called Eunoia. 

(I think this means 'sane', or normal-minded, although Bruce of NB Sanity, himself a clinical psychologist, can perhaps define it more closely.) 

And it appears to be the first boat where the boatbuilder himself blogs the build.  Read the construction of Eunoia starting here.  This is terrifically confidence-inspiring.

If I was going to pick holes, I'd prefer to see a more punctuated blog with many more (and shorter) posts.  But it's a huge improvement on any other boatbuild I've ever seen!

(I took a walkthrough of Eunoia a couple of months back, and I have to say the build construction was pretty impressive.) 

Meanwhile, Mr & Mrs H2O are already planning their first shared ownership boat, with an approximate cost of about £9,000 per share.   The open nature of the build means I'd be very confident of buying one of these.

Also, meanwhile, they are running a competition to celebrate their 5th birthday, where you can win a short break on one of their boats next spring:

To enter just e-mail us with your name, age, email address and indicate which option would be of most interest to you: narrowboat holidays, boat sharing, a bespoke boat or DIY boat-build.  

I'm not sure if this is a random draw, or if they are going to give it to the person who looks hungry enough.  There's no option for you to say 'Hey, I don't know, I just want to win a weekend afloat on your boat, OK?'

Inland Waterways Festival 2009 site

Yesterday I stopped over at the site in Redhill for the 2009 IWA Festival.  Just wanted to see how the setup was going, and it was a chance to wander round before the crowds get there, and the security gets too hot.

Must say, it's one of the most dramatic settings for any IWA festival, and the ominous, lowering clouds just added to the grandeur of the power station backdrop.   If the clouds don't leak and the River Soar doesn't spill its banks, I think this year's festival could be a triumph. 

Ratcliffe on Soar power station is one of the largest in the UK, with a peak capacity of two gigawatts, enough to supply power for two million people (it says on the E-on website).   It's a coal-fired system, so it's been a target of environmental groups recently (April Telegraph report here).

More surprisingly, it also has an active fan club on Flickr, although I think that's more to do with its photographic appeal. 

(Incidentally, I can't think of any more counter-productive protest than stopping a power station.  I mean, what's the first thing the protestors will want to do when they get home after a hard day's protesting and getting arrested?  Yes, that's right, put on the kettle!  And this power station can cope with two million 666,666.67 kettles simultaneously, which is a LOT of protesting.)

[OK, Halfie, I take your point. Kettles average 3kW.  I was assuming climate change protesters would be using special low-power kettles.]

Naples has Vesuvius, Edinburgh has the Castle and Arthur's Seat, and so it is with the IWA Festival; there's nothing like a dramatic backdrop to set the scene.

The colourful marquee in the main picture will be hosting a circus, or is that a series of circuses?  The outline 'what's on' details are here.  

I went to see the 'Waterspace' setup, where Michael Moorse of NB Guelrose was helping bring in working boat Swallow along with motor Nuneaton and butty Brighton when I met him.  

Mike is blogging about the event each day here.   He will be a (the?) Harbourmaster for the Festival when his setup work is done. 

Convoy up the Trent to Newark

Yesterday I went from Torksey to Newark.  I was keen to get within a day's cruising of the IWA Festival this coming weekend.
Boy, I never expected the river to be this busy.  A lot of traffic today, particularly of boats travelling upstream to the Festival.  At one time I counted seven narrowboats going upstream simultaneously.

This resulted in a number of near-misses, especially since several large, fully laden gravel barges were coming downstream at the same time. 

In the picture above, I was convinced that NB James Arthur would collide with the gravel barge. It was testament to my obsession that I was more concerned with capturing the moment of impact than steering out of the way myself.   Of course, nothing did happen - they managed to avoid each other safely, albeit narrowly.

A closer shave was between the boat going downstream that passed me very closely and then nearly collided - really - with the one behind me.  

I kept photographing that near-miss too, but unfortunately missed the bit where the guy following me was windmilling his arms in anger at the other boater.

Torksey to Newark is a heck of a distance, taking much more time than I'd budgeted.  Starting out at 10:30am, I didn't reach Newark Town Wharf until nearly six hours later.

River Witham disappoints me in its repetitiveness; sheep delight me in theirs

Boston to Lincoln is perhaps one of the dullest stretches I've ever cruised.  A whole day's worth of the same sort of stuff.

It's not the scenery that depresses.   Rather, its the unremitting lack of variety.  Hour upon hour of long, straight reaches, the same sort of embankment punctuated every three or four miles by similar pontoon moorings and identical-looking drainage canal gates.  This is EMPTY countryside, as you'll see if you look at a map of the area.  It's not wilderness; it's intensively farmed.  But anywhere you break down will be a long way away.

Ooh look, here comes another BEND, how exciting! 

And to emphasise the grinding similarity, every 1,094 yards there's a sign telling you how many kilometres before you reach ... somewhere.

None of the kilometre signs say which distance is being measured, although we eventually learned it was Lincoln's Brayford Pool, where the river joins the Foss Dyke Navigation.  Boston Sluice's is No. 51.

That regularity of signs (along with their being 'km-posts' instead of mileposts) only increased my irritation with the lack of variety of the whole navigation.  Unlike the old canal signs, they don't say to what they are counting down.

Still, this minimalist countryside does mean that certain occasions stand out.  One such time was near Southrey, where we came across a flock of sheep, walking single file on the embankment.   Dozens of them, perhaps a hundred against the sunset, trailing out at least a quarter-mile.

I've had animals in near rows before - for instance the 'curious cows' of a couple of years back - but the sheep in a row seemed more significant because they seemed to sum up the Witham Navigation: those km-posts, all compressed into a quarter-mile. 

And do you know, I just realised: Fifty-one opportunities, and I forgot to get a single photograph of a Witham km-post.

Boston Lock, electricity on shoreline and tweeting keepers

I visited the Boston lock keeper yesterday to pay for my four day stay on the moorings, before setting off for Lincoln. 

It was £6.85/night, or £32/week with a shoreline available at only 7p/unit, which I thought was quite reasonable.  Indeed, the electricity was ridiculously cheap, apparently because BW signed a fixed-term fixed-price for electricity supply and are forbidden from charging more.  And it was done on an honour system - you were asked to take before/after readings and tell the lockie how many units you were used.

Shorelines are a rare and wonderful bonus, especially since the  extra tax on red diesel came in and everyone is supposed to know and keep detailed records of how much of their fuel is being spent on 'non-propulsion'.  But realistically, BW just can't fund shoreline points unless the price is higher.

For the two nights I used electricity I consumed 7 units, most of which was spent in boosting the battery and using the immersion heater for hot water.

One physical problem with Boston's moorings is that they've been built for shorter cruisers.  Mooring and tying up a narrowboat at the pontoons is tricky, especially when the wind's blowing, as they are so short.

Boston lockie Mike Moran was talkative and friendly, and we quickly wandered off-topic from waterways to computers (his experience of them goes back almost four decades) and on to BW's current adoption of social networking.  BW lockkeepers, he says, are now being encouraged to communicate via Twitter, and his own is @boslock.

It's early days - I might have been the first boater he told about his Twitter account -  and he'd only done one tweet when I arrived.

I think he should say the actual lock times - that would be very useful.  In his case, because Boston Lock is only about 56ft long, and longer boats such as Granny Buttons have to go through with both gates open, when the tide's 'on the level', thus timing your arrival is critical.

Boston Lock doesn't take credit cards. This was a problem for me, because I recently lost my bank card and couldn't get any cash out this weekend.  Bother.  I had to borrow cash from Christine.  I didn't dare ask if PayPal or direct transfer via phone banking was an option.  For all Mike's expertise with computers, I'm not sure how expert he is at navigating through BW's bureaucracy when it comes to modern online banking. 

By the way, my apologies for the incompetently-taken photo of Mike. It took some courage to ask if he'd mind having his photo taken, and he quickly adopted a stiff, formal pose.  I should have perhaps photographed him leaning against the doorframe or at his desk, in relaxed conversation, to convey his friendly attitude to us. 

My friend the wind

 

One abiding memory of my trip across the Fens (from Peterborough to Denver Sluice) last weekend was that since my last visit, seven years ago, the farmers have planted a new crop:  The wind. 

Wind turbines are everywhere.  I counted fifty or more on the horizon, and surely there were more.

Traditional crop rotation has it that farmers planted two different crops, followed by a 'fallow' year, where nothing was harvested at all.

There's no fallow year now.  They had wheat on one side, potatoes on the other, and in any empty field they'd stuck windmills.

When I last came this way it was a dull landscape and I didn't notice anything beyond the raised banks of the canals, dykes and rivers.  But this time the windmills stood out.

I was particularly captivated by the seventeen clustered in a field near March (Map location here in the colourful quilt of Fens fields.)

They looked magical in the dusk of a fine evening.  It's been said that wind turbines are hell to live near, with a 'whoosh-whoosh' that gets on your nerves and stops you sleeping.  Well, they weren't silent, but the wind last weekend was blowing hard and I had to turn the boat's engine off to hear the turbines at all. 

I spent the night at the nearby Marmont Priory Lock, and the next morning I asked the lady lock keeper about these mighty modern mills.  Did she object to them?  

"No, no, they are fine!" she said.  "I don't know why people complain about them.  I think they are quite beautiful, really.  And at least they haven't put a big Tesco shed there."

I was surprised to hear this.  I'd imagined that locals would hate the windmills with more passion than the Daily Mail could convey in in a headline.

Actually, while I'm not sure I love them, they do, at least, seem preferably to the giant iron pylons striding the countryside.

When I turned off Granny's engine on Saturday night, while there was a vague whoosh-whoosh-whoosh in the distance it certainly wasn't as prominent as the rustling leaves of nearby trees, or the roar of wind against my ears.

I wonder - could you harness the energy in rustling leaves?  How about a false tree with thousands of mini-turbine leaves, each one generating enough power for an ipod or a torch battery?   Just a thought.

Similar eviction stories both leave me tantalised

A couple of blog posts/tweets this week got me intrigued.

On Twitter, @cashicks (Caroline Hicks?) wrote:  

British Waterways selling our homes over our heads.Does anyone care apart from us?Make our day

Meanwhile, the lady writing A Daily Blog of Infinite Tedium (Sarah Cottle?) spotted a really odd houseboat (on the Kennet & Avon  near Bath) and wrote:

Apparently the British Waterways people don’t like this boat… I do.

(That's a boat?)

Clearly these are two separate people/groups being evicted in some way by BW, but I can't find out more about them.

I zoomed into the picture of the 'houseboat', read the phone number and dialled it.  Turns out it's a guy called Ian who says BW is trying to remove the boat because he hasn't got an official mooring for it.  The boat is the 'Alice D' and presumably doesn't go anywhere.  Ian has a phone and reads texts, but doesn't do anything online, so it was only chance that led me to him.  He sounded uncertain as to whether his case has been covered by the media, but said ITV 'might have done something on their website'.

By using Twitter, Cashicks is also popping up in my long-running searches for 'British Waterways', but doesn't leave any way for people to contact her.

With both these cases I'd like to find out more, but can't.   I felt a bit intrusive asking more of Ian, but largely because I didn't have the time to research his case, not because he wants it to be private - he doesn't.  If I had to marshal his arguments for him, I'd run out of time and let him down.  

What can anyone else tell me about these cases?

Tweeting vicar loved his Union Canal holiday in Scotland

The vicar of Oadby - a Leicester suburban village a couple of miles from the upper limit of the Grand Union canal near Kilsby Bridge - tweets as @SimonJHarvey. 

(The excellent and informative blog of his church, St. Pauls, is here, by the way.)

Last week he took a canal holiday on the Union Canal, between Edinburgh and Falkirk, and used it as a base for seeing some Edinburgh shows.  Hiring a boat sounds like a great way of getting accommodation during the Festival.

Anyway, I was interested in his series of tweets from the canal, which featured a litany of problems, including: 

Moored in a boat-jam outside Falkirk tunnel while police retrieve a body from the canal. :-(

Me, "They've found some poor soul in the canal". Woman in shop, "Not again!" - Hard town this.

Rain has fallen for ten hours. I'm on my 3rd pair of trousers today. If canal overflows, we'll sail back down the A74.

But it didn't sound all disaster or tragedy, because he concluded:

Splendid holiday on the Union Canal in Scotland. British Waterways Board staff amazingly helpful, friendly and courteous.

This is a common feature of waterways holidays.  Rain, holdups, hassles; but provided any tragedy doesn't strikes you personally you can return refreshed, and you'll remember even the irritations fondly.  They are the pearls in the canal holiday's oyster. 

At times like this Twitter seems cast in the mould of the holiday postcard.  It's a personal message, albeit a public one at the same time.   Come to think of it, a vicar's job is to spread the Word, and Twitter's a great way do it, provided the Word is less than 140 characters.