Our lovely English weather is back to normal. Wet, windy and chilly days with occasional sunny spells. And nights cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

Like many other boaters at the marina, I have been toying with the idea of lighting my stove. I’ve resisted the temptation so far. The evenings on Orient are usually warm enough thanks to the sun’s heat during the day. However, the mornings are a little chilly.

My solution is to boil a kettle in the morning and leave the gas ring burning for ten minutes. Thanks to Orient’s effective spray foam insulation, my cabin heats up very quickly. The difference is remarkable compared to the heat retention on my old boat. James had polystyrene insulation. It’s a reasonable insulator but sometimes crumbles, leaving cold spots which quickly suck out the cabin heat.

My front deck view on warm evenings after a hard day at the marina

I purchased ten bags of coal briquettes in early April. I have six bags left thanks to effective insulation, global warming and the tendency to get hot and bothered when fellow boaters do silly things.

I started to write last week about odd behaviour that I have witnessed on the Calcutt flight of three locks. I had another exciting experience mid-week when I took a boat from the marina up through Calcutt bottom and middle locks to our wharf.

Usually, the first boat into a double lock goes in on the towpath side. The towpath side is the most practical side to use to work through a flight of locks. Boaters stick to their chosen position as they progress through a lock flight.

That’s the etiquette anyway.

As I negotiated our marina entrance, I noticed a narrowboat already in the lock on the towpath side. There was a free space next to it, but the offside gate was closed. A boater stood with his hands on his hips, staring at me as I tied up to the lock landing.

“Aren’t you coming in?” he asked, quite aggressively, I thought.

“Yes,” I replied, “but as I can’t get my boat over the gate, I need to tie up so that I can open it.” Cynthia always advised me to avoid sarcasm if possible.  It certainly didn’t appear to help matters with my new lock buddy.

He shook his head and shouted. “You don’t need to do that. Just push the gate open with your boat.”

There were several problems with his suggestion. Firstly, I didn’t have a bow fender on the customer’s boat that I was moving. Driving ten tons of steel into a couple of tons of oak wouldn’t do the boat or any of its internal fittings any favours. What’s more, the craft was quite small and light. If I tried to do what he suggested, there was a good chance that my little boat would bounce off the massive oak gate and bounce into his stern. As he didn’t look the friendliest man in the world, I didn’t think he would have appreciated that.

Just as importantly, as far as I was concerned, was the damage that I could do to the expensive lock gates. A pair can cost as much as £20,000. If a pair of gates are used carefully, they will last between 20 and 25 years. If narrowboats regularly ram them to save the owners a couple of minutes tying the boat up and opening them properly, the gates won’t last nearly as long.

So I tied my boat up to the lock landing, walked past the unhappy boater, negotiated the upstream gate, ran down the chamber’s opposite side, opened the offside gate and returned to my boat. The man was still standing with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face. I suspected that our three lock ascent wasn’t going to be filled with lively conversation.

Mr Unhappy gave me the kind of look that a seasoned boater usually reserves for complete novices, and walked to the upstream gate ready to raise his paddle. I brought my boat into the lock next to his, climbed the escape ladder holding my centreline, and tied it to a convenient bollard. By now, he had his windless on the paddle gear ready to let water into the empty lock. He looked at me impatiently, waiting for me to reach the paddle opposite him.

The etiquette in an ascending lock is for both upstream paddles to be raised very slowly initially. Quickly raising the paddles lets a torrent of water into the lock. The turbulence flow can rattle the boats together alarmingly. The water races to the downstream end of the lock and then surges back towards the upstream gates driving the boats forward like arrows from a bow. Any unsecured craft can ram the lock sill with great force and cause considerable damage to the boats, their fittings and their contents.

If I’m going through a lock flight with an experienced and responsible boater, I don’t bother tying up. I didn’t know this guy, and I didn’t particularly like his attitude, so securely tying Orient’s centreline was a worthwhile precaution.

I reached my paddle after closing the downstream gate behind my boat. “Aren’t you ready yet?”  my miserable lock partner asked, huffing in exasperation.

“I’m ready,” I replied, “but maybe you had better close the gate behind your boat before you let any water in.”

The unhappy man threw his windlass on the ground and stormed off to close his downstream gate, trying to hide his embarrassment at making such an obvious mistake.

Communication is the key to a successful and harmonious lock flight passage with an unknown boat crew. My miserable lock partner seemed interested in neither conversation nor harmony. He surged out of the lock without a backward glance, narrowly missed the bow of an oncoming boat and clipped my front fender with his stern as he cut across me to switch sides in the next lock. At least he remembered to close his downstream gate this time. But not his upstream gate as he left the second lock.

I thought I would leave his misery behind as I reversed onto our wharf. Sadly he followed me to buy purchase diesel and seize another opportunity to spread light and joy. “That’s not very good, is it?” he asked no one in particular as he waved a dismissive hand and three of the company’s thirteen strong hire fleet moored on the wharf. “If you can’t rent out all of your boats at this time of the year you might as well give up!” He left before any of the wharf staff could wrap an anchor chain around his neck and toss him into the murky water beneath his rusty boat.

Happy Calcutt wharf staff with equally happy customers. Not all of them are quite so jolly.

The following day, I saw another mistake on the flight. This time, it wasn’t an error in technique, but a fundamental boat buying mistake.

Three or four months ago a widebeam boat was brought to Calcutt Boats by road transport and lowered into the marina.

The boat wasn’t really suitable for life on England’s inland waterways. It had been purchased for a song by a somewhat confused individual who planned to use it as a floating home as he cruised the canal network.

The boat had many faults. Widebeams are difficult enough to cruise in at the best of times. Most of the craft on the Midlands’ canals, even the wide canals, are narrowboats. They take similar lines along the waterway and through the canals’ many bridge holes. They plough a relatively deep and debris free channel along the waterway as they pass. Widebeam boats straddle this channel and often ground. They are also too wide to pass through bridge holes easily. Widebeam helmsmen negotiate bridge holes exceptionally carefully. Consequently, they pass through them at a snail’s pace, often resulting in a queue of inpatient narrowboat owners in their wake.

The new owner of this Dutch styled widebeam had several additional problems to contend with.

The most significant, perhaps, was the wheelhouse height. Most of the staff at Calcutt Boats, boaters who knew the local waterways very well indeed, were convinced that the new owner would be unable to negotiate all, or indeed any, of the local bridge holes.

What’s more, the engine didn’t work, the boat had no insulation, and there was no heating on board. In fact, the boat was nothing more than an empty shell once the new owner finished working on it.

He wasn’t aware of any of the problems he faced. His judgement was clouded by a complete lack of knowledge about boating on England’s inland waterways, a misplaced sense of optimism, and vast quantities of strong lager.

When the marina management discovered that the boat’s engine wasn’t working, they allowed the new owner to stay moored next to the slipway for a few days until he could resolve the problem. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any money to pay for someone to examine the engine, nor did he have either tools or knowledge to sort out the problem himself.

A routine developed over the following week. The enthusiastic owner would spend a couple of hours in the morning ripping the existing internal fittings apart and leaving them in untidy piles on the adjacent pontoon. A drink induced stupor would overtake him by mid-morning, and then he would spend the rest of the day sitting inside his empty shell surrounded by equally empty cans.

He hadn’t made any noticeable progress after his first week. In fact, the situation appeared to be worsening. He had removed most of the boats internal fittings, so the craft sat higher in the water, further reducing any chance of him negotiating the local bridges.

He didn’t have the inclination, or the ability, to pay for a mooring, so he was asked to leave. Over the following week, the poor guy poled his boat out of the marina, and then pulled it’s along the towpath for a couple of miles like an unsteady two-legged pit pony. He eventually found a convenient mooring. He had neither mooring pins nor a lump hammer on board so he could only stop where canalside objects offered anchor points for his bow and stern lines.  He stayed in the same place for several months, surrounded by cans of strong lager and a haze of fragrant smoke.

He tried to sell his white elephant during frequent visits to local pubs. No one was interested, especially as he was asking £10,000 for a boat which couldn’t move under its own steam.  Even if it could,  it wasn’t able to travel further than a couple of miles along the canals because of low bridges.

Anyway, he turned up at the marina entrance last week. He planned to tie up next to the slipway, but he didn’t get that far.

Calcutt Boats’ slipway is often booked by owners of craft which aren’t moored at the marina. This was one such reservation. A potential buyer reserved a day for a wide beam to be lifted out of the water so that it could be surveyed. We didn’t know then that this was the same boat.

The light finally dawned when the widebeam owner, two hours later than anticipated, walked into our reception reeking of booze and marijuana.

He told us that he had a problem with his engine which, he claimed, had been working for most of his journey. The frustrated surveyor had been waiting for an hour for the boat to arrive. He offered to try to pinpoint the problem.

The surveyor returned half an hour later, shaking his head in dismay.

“There is no point in even lifting the boat out of the water,” he explained. It’s in an awful state. I’m going to recommend to my client that he doesn’t waste his money on a survey.”

The surveyor phoned the potential buyer and then drove away. He left the dejected widebeam owner tied to the Calcutt flight bottom lock landing. His immediate problem was to appease the CRT employee who told him to move his boat. The unsteady guy pulled his floating skip up through the three flight lock and then tied his boat to the lock landing bollards.

He left after three days. He won’t, can’t, go far. No doubt I’ll meet him on my next Discovery Day cruise.

My week ended with a treat. Calcutt Boats hosted a Mikron Theatre performance, Redcoats, on Friday night.

The actors arrived mid-afternoon in their 1937 workboat, Tyseley. Actors love a bit of attention, so they didn’t mind the crowd which gathered to watch them attempt to fight their way through the marina entrance against a strengthening gale. They weren’t so keen on the driving rain which worsened as the day progressed.

The forecast for the evening was dire, but in the proper theatrical fashion they declared, “The show must go on!” And it did, aided by a couple of marquees and an afternoon of hard work from Calcutt Boats and Mikron employees.

Given the weather forecast and reality, the evening was a huge success. Many guests brought their own chairs. The rest used mismatched seating from around the marina. All were able to sit in relative comfort and enjoy the show.

I had the pleasure of manning the ice cream and cold drinks stand. Needless to say, I wasn’t rushed off my feet. With nothing else to do, the nearby supply of wine and Pimms was too much of a temptation. The concession stand was too far away to hear a word the actors said over the wind and driving rain, so we relaxed and drank and marvelled at the surreal scene in front of us.

On a mid summer’s evening, one hundred and twelve theatre lovers sat huddled in coats and hats in a wind-whipped tent trying and failing to hear the dialogue from a quartet of determined actors in front of them. One elderly lady complained of cold hands. She enjoyed most of the evening wearing a pair of marigold rubber gloves we found in the office kitchen. Rain drummed on the tent roof, canvas snapped taught, and guy ropes strained against sudden gusts. Daylight failed, the weather worsened, and the show went on.

I don’t know whether I have low expectations these days. Maybe I was anaesthetised by countless glasses of red, or made merry by my partner in wine, Jason, but I haven’t had so much fun for a long time. I’m really looking forward to next year’s performance.

After a bottle (or two) of wine I was very pleased with this shot of the Redcoats audience

This week I was going to begin my A-Z series of everything to do with narrowboats. There was too much happening on the waterways to distract me. I’m hoping for a less interesting week ahead. Maybe then I can concentrate on writing about everything beginning with the letter A.

I’ll raise a glass to the next week then, and the sincere hope that your lifestyle brings you as much pleasure as mine does to me.

A clear sky after heavy rain

Oh, for a boat with opening windows. The recent heatwave baked me to a crisp. The saving grace was that mosquitoes were notable by their absence. That was fortunate considering that I had to sleep with every hatch and door thrown wide open in the hopeless quest for a cooler craft.

The nighttime heat became so insufferable that I slept on the tiny boatman’s cabin cross bed curled like a hibernating hedgehog. The main bedroom, devoid of nearby doors or hatches of opening hatches felt like a sauna. Orient’s mooring is stern to the prevailing south-westerly. I left the back doors open as well as the door between the boatman’s cabin and the engine room. Then I also ensured that the engine room hatches were ajar, so I was cooled by the brisk breeze flowing through the boat.

My bedding colour indicates the recent nighttime temperature in my poorly ventilated bedroom

I fell asleep one sultry night soothed by the buffeting breeze, happy as a pig in shit until a storm raced across the marina. The howling gale didn’t wake me, nor did the creak of mooring lines stretched close to breaking point or the angry honking of thirty wind-tossed Canada Geese. It was the machine gun rat-a-tat-tat of pea-sized raindrops hurled into my bedding by the shrieking wind.

Thunder crashed, lightning flashed, and the boatman’s cabin felt like the inside of an industrial washing machine. A washing machine without a dryer. The storm disappeared far more quickly than the water soaked into my duvet. I didn’t mind too much. The wet bedding cooled me, aiding a restless sleep filled with disturbing dreams about nighttime childhood accidents.

The heatwave reached its unpleasant peak on an energy-sapping marina workday. Working in direct sunlight was as dangerous as it was exhausting. As the thermometer climbed past thirty degrees, I trudged into our seven-acre wood to do some gentle tree trimming and to work on a personal project for my much-missed wife.

I bought a picnic bench in Cynthia’s memory a few months ago. I placed it on the lawn next to Orient, overlooking Calcutt Bottom lock. In hindsight, I realised that Cynthia would have appreciated our woodland tranquillity more than the often stressed shouts of virgin lock negotiators.

Cynthia’s memorial picnic table perfectly positioned for quiet reflection

The thermometer peaked at thirty-six degrees, an unbearable temperature for the fragile English constitution. But, by the end of the day, I had cleared a space on the woodland fringe and installed Cynthia’s table overlooking an adjacent meadow. My reward for working through such a challenging day was a peaceful evening picnic sitting at my new table. Pigeons fluttered in the oak above me, and an owl hooted softly. The real treat arrived as the light failed. As I popped the top off my fourth bottle of dewed beer, I watched the quivering progress of a nervous muntjac deer on a narrow footpath deeper in the woods. A little slice of heaven here at Calcutt.

Predictably, our English heatwave was followed by days on the cut cool enough to wear hats and coats. And on one memorable and very wet Discovery Day cruise last weekend, cold enough to warrant lighting my stove.

My guests for the day, Christ and Ali, followed their pre-cruise instructions to the letter. “It’s an English summer,” I wrote, “so bring plenty of layers and a waterproof coat.” They did, but there are waterproof coats suitable for a walk in a park or a quick trip to the shops, and there are those that will keep you dry if a fire hose is turned on you. Those are the type you need if you want to remain comfortable as you stand on the exposed stern of a narrowboat for hours on end.

I invested in a bomb proof set of trawlermen’s waterproofs many years ago. The bottoms, with their bib and shoulder straps, make me look like a DayGlo hillbilly. Worn with a jacket of the same material and a pair of insulated wellington boots, I can keep dry and comfortable all day in the hardest rain. Chris and Ali could not. They were both soaked to the skin by lunchtime. So, on an English summer’s day in late July, I threw a handful of kindling into my Morso Squirrel stove, topped it with a pile of coal briquettes and lit a fire for the first time since early May.

There was a silver lining to Chris and Ali’s dark cloud. While they enjoyed an unexpected hour basking in the welcome heat from a glowing stove, I had the pleasure of steering my own boat. I’ve cruised the route between Braunston and Napton junctions over three hundred times. The scenery is beautiful and, because the contour canal twists and turns through countless blind bends, there’s excitement at every turn. I love the route, but not all boaters enjoy their cruises on this section quite so much.

I hosted three consecutive Discovery Day cruises recently on a canal which is popular with crews on narrowboats hired from nearby bases. Although some hirers have more knowledge and practical skills than many narrowboat owners, a worrying number are complete novices. They’re beginners who receive little in the way of helmsmanship training before being unleashed onto the waiting waterways. It’s these hapless helmsmen and women, and sometimes children, who liven up my training days considerably. Here, for your education and entertainment, is a selection of antics and accidents from my recent Discovery Day cruises.

The Oxford is a contour canal. Its route follows the landscape’s twists and turns rather than enjoying the dubious advantage for leisure cruisers of travelling in a straight line through lock flights, high embankments and deep cuttings. The canal has more tight curves than a bowl filled with spaghetti. There are endless opportunities for entertainment at every blind bend and skewed bridge hole. The scenery is magnificent if you can take a wary eye off the waterway long enough to enjoy it.
The canal’s circuitous route, combined with the waterway’s popularity, is a heart-stopping challenge for virgin helmsmen and women. Trembling holidaymakers who have recently been given a leaflet detailing lock procedure, the keys to a seventy feet long boat and very little practical training. They’re told, “If you want the boat to go one way, steer in the opposite direction” and the unleashed on the waiting world. Steering is hard enough for the uninitiated, but novice crews also have to take a self-taught crash course in waterways etiquette, rules and regulations.

My usual training cruise is from Napton to Braunston junction with a turn in Braunston marina entrance. We return along the same route and then finish the day with two passages through the Calcutt flight of three locks, one down and later, one up.

It’s on our journey home and in the locks that we meet most of the new hirers. Mid-afternoon is usually when the madness begins. Novice Black Prince, Napton Narrowboats and Calcutt Boats hirers are often still coming to terms with a counter-intuitive steering system when they reach their journey’s first pinch point. The canal narrows until two boats cannot pass easily. Braunston bound boats have to forge their way through muddy shallows close to canalside banks of hawthorn and bramble and risk sweeping their roofs clean with low hanging willow, oak and ash.

Experienced crews usually hold back and wait in open water before the pinch point until the towpath hugging approaching boats have passed. Many novice hirers do not. We met a procession of four such craft last weekend, lead by a quivering wretch and his caustic wife.

The man bounced his holiday home from bank to bank as he approached us. Then, in a desperate attempt to avoid slamming headfirst into our bow, he ploughed deep into the offside undergrowth. With a panicked push on the Morse control, accelerator to landlubbers, he managed to get the stern in too, wedging his boat firmly on a shallow mudflat. “Didn’t you listen, you idiot? His adoring wife screamed, alternately punching him in his left arm and gesturing wildly with her hands. If you want to go THAT WAY, you push that brass pole the other way! It’s not rocket science!” 

For all her helpful advice, she didn’t seem keen to demonstrate her recently acquired expertise. To be fair, she didn’t have much free time with all the effort she put into humiliating her husband.

We don’t have to rely on narrowboat novices for entertainment. On the approach to Braunston are the idyllic garden moorings at Wolfhampcote. Each mooring owner has purchased a parcel of farmland and created an expansive narrowboat garden. Some have spent almost as much on the land and its decoration as they have on their boats. The gardens tend to reflect the condition of the craft on them. The smallholdings range from the kind of elaborately designed and equipped gardens you would expect to see behind a bricks and mortar home, to unkempt jungles partially hiding piles of rotting wood and dozens of scavenging chickens. 

Many boats are permanently tethered to their garden moorings. Some might not even be capable of moving. They range from massive wide beams to tiny narrowboats. One, a pocket-sized aluminium Sea Otter, is too small to use for most boaters to use for anything other than a brief day trip. There’s an exception nearby. It’s a short and scruffy cruiser with opaque windows and a steady trickle of grey smoke from its dirty chimney.

There’s a wide beam with what looks like a garden shed built over its wheelhouse towards the middle section of garden moorings. There’s always been enough room for two boats to pass here. The recent appearance of a continuous moorer on the towpath opposite made the gap a little tight, but two-way traffic was still possible with care. Then another boat turned up a few weeks ago. The owner has tied his craft alongside the wide beam, effectively restricting the navigation to one-way traffic. To make matters more interesting, he’s tied a tatty rowing boat, laden to the gunwales with useless crap, by a single line to his stern.

The canal between Napton and Braunston junctions is a busy route. There are 2,500 boats moored in marinas within a ten-mile radius. It’s a pretty route too with plenty of pleasant and peaceful moorings with gorgeous views and hedgerows filled with blackberries in late summer. A single file bottleneck further restricted by a swinging rowing boat is not popular with time-starved narrowboat owners trying to enjoy a few days on the cut, far away from hectic real life. Sometimes they are too busy and impatient to wait.

There are plenty of obstructions like this up and down the network. Boaters negotiate them using common sense and a degree of consideration for fellow waterways enthusiasts. Most of the time.

On a wet and windy day last week I watched what can happen when two bullish and inconsiderate boaters meet. We were part of a steady procession of boats cruising in both directions. We gently nosed into the narrow gap and pushed the swinging rowing boat to one side. We engaged in some gentle banter with the kindly helmsman who held off to let us pass and then carried on our merry way.

The craft approaching us and the narrowboat following us didn’t fare quite so well. Neither helmsman had the time nor the inclination to wait for the other. They both ploughed determinedly into the gap. The two boats bounced off each other’s bows and sideswiped the boats moored either side of them. They clanged together again and scraped slowly forward until they stopped, wedged into a space too small to pass. The owners, no first-time hirers here, shouted obscenities at each other until one grew up a little and reversed enough to allow the oncoming boat through. They managed to resist fisticuffs as they passed, but I could hear their caustic exchange hundreds of feet away. Neither seemed to understand the concept of a relaxing cruise.

Despite the goings-on on the cut, our two passages through the Calcutt flight of three locks are often even more entertaining. The Calcutt flight the first set of locks facing many inexperienced crews. It’s also the first time their helmsman has needed to stop since his handover instruction. An instruction which rarely covers the niceties of stopping a twenty-tonne waterborne tank.

The helmsman’s initial ploy is to steer the boat’s front end close to the concrete-clad towpath. A crew member jumps ashore holding a bow rope as though his life depends on it. The bow hits the lock landing in an explosion of concrete dust. In a knee jerk reaction to the collision, the helmsman slams the boat into reverse hoping to undo the damage he’s already done. All he achieves is to slowly and surely pull the crew member who’s furiously tugging the bow line closer to the cut. Another guy onboard tells the helmsman to swing the stern into the bank. He does it at full throttle. Because a narrowboat pivots on its centre, as the helmsman unleashes forty horsepower in a spray of white water and the stern swings rapidly towards the bank, his bow hauling crew member slides towards the cut alarmingly. To prevent an unexpected early morning dip, the bow hauler releases his rope. Like a wildly swinging compass needle, the front of the boat shoots away from the lock landing, causing the back to slam into another section of concrete and topple the aft deck crew like dominoes. Once the novice boaters regain their feet, they leap onto the towpath and make short work of tying their temporary floating home to the lock landing. They use every rope they can find. Then they breathe a collective sigh of relief, laugh and joke about their first narrowboat adventure and then gaze at the double lock gates in front of them with a mixture of awe and fear. They dimly remember something about raising and lowering paddles and the sudden and horrible death which awaits them if they anger the dreaded lock cill.

There’s so much that can go wrong in a lock if it’s mishandled that something usually goes awry on a novice crew’s first passage. The hirers go through with experienced boaters if they’re lucky. If there’s no one about they’ll do their best. On occasion in the past, on a descending passage, their best efforts have resulted in some colourful language from Calcutt’s band of happy engineers.

New crews on Napton Narrowboats and Black Price boats don’t often get a physical lock instruction. They’re given the theory but not the practice. But after an early start and a long drive to collect their boats, holiday hirers are too tired to absorb everything they are told about their temporary charge. They’re shown a bewildering variety of switches for different features and functions. Hirers have to learn how to check their engines every morning. They also need to understand the shutdown procedure at the end of the day. They have to come to terms with the onboard utility limitations, especially concerning the electrical supply. There’s no wonder then that they forget the odd detail, like the importance of lowering a lock paddle once its done its job.

A lock flight left with some or all of the paddles raised by an inexperienced crew is not unusual. Calcutt Boats’ wharf, home to the company’s hire fleet and brokerage, is between Calcutt Top and Middle locks. There a steep concrete slope running down from the canal to the engineering workshop, a workspace which our oily engineers understandably like to keep dry.
Two pairs of raised paddles in the top lock allow a raging torrent into the small wharf pound. During the first few years I worked at Calcutt, the engineers’ angry shouts heralded the arrival of a canal tsunami racing down the hill into their oily domain. The wharf would flood in a matter of minutes. So quickly in fact that the engineers would usually catch the offending hirers in the next lock and offer them some much-needed paddle closing advice.

The engineers impromptu bathing stopped a few years ago when CRT contractors repairing a crumbling lock base on the Calcutt flight installed a concrete step along the wharf edge. Misbehaving boaters flood the towpath these days instead of the workshops, and our engineers don’t bathe quite so often.

That’s it for now. As is often the case these days, I’m out of time. I could write a book about the antics I’ve seen on the cut close to home and on the lock flight a stone’s throw from my mooring. All is quiet at 6 am on a wet and windy Sunday morning. The first happy band of boaters will appear in a couple of hours when I leave Orient for another day at the marina. I’ll tell you more about their cruising catastrophes next time.

Another dramatic sky over Calcutt Boats