A Welcome Return To Narrowboat Life
Phew! That was exciting. Since my last proper narrowboat post, a little over two years ago, Cynthia and I have been very, very busy.
I sold my lovely narrowboat, James No 194 and left England’s historic canal network for a life of happy exploration on mainland Europe. We clocked up twenty-seven thousand miles through eleven countries. You can read about our motorhome travels on this blog. We purchased a Dutch cruiser for waterways exploration in Holland, sold that, bought another, and cruised a thousand miles through a landscape filled with flat fields, spinning windmills and endless rows of multicoloured tulips. We fought bureaucratic nonsense at every turn, trying to secure permission for Cynthia to stay in the country.
We failed again, and again and again.
We travelled and we wined and dined like royalty for eighteen glorious months and then, on a very sad day last April, realised that I needed to do some work to pay the bills. I found a mooring at a prominent boatyard in North Holland and employment painting their customer’s ridiculously expensive boats.
That’s when the rot began to set in.
My job is well-paid work by boatyard standards, but there’s only so much pleasure a man in his late fifties can get from crawling around under a variety of posh steel cruisers splashing himself liberally with toxic antifouling paint. The fact that I can’t speak the language and quickly became apprenticed to an unskilled eighteen-year-old didn’t help either.
Much as I have been frustrated by my working life, Cynthia’s plight has been worse.
She can’t drive our five and a half tonne motorhome on her now expired American driving license so she’s been stuck on our boat moored in an expanse of concrete and steel with no one to talk to.
And believe me, my wife likes to talk.
An old hip injury means that walking anywhere causes her pain. Nor can she cycle to interesting places to spend the day while I am at work. The distances are just too great. Isolation in a cold and damp boat for days on end has begun to affect her health. Her only break from the monotony has been weekend trips to a nearby bio grocery store. It’s a sad life when the highlight of your week is buying groceries.
Cynthia, understandably, has been even unhappier than me.
The Dutch boaters at Kempers Watersports have put their boats to bed for the winter. They’ve gone from here…
…to here. Should we ever get our Hymer back we’ll have nowhere to park
Fortunately for both of us, Cynthia realised the futility in living as we did. My wife is very good at hunting for solutions. She realised we needed to change. She suggested, hopefully, and maybe a little fearfully, that the best course of action would be for us to move back to good old Blighty. That was the situation two weeks ago. Our plans have moved on apace since then. The good news for us, and possibly for you if you like reading about life on England’s muddy ditches, is that we should be back in the UK very soon.
Here’s the beginning of the next chapter in our nomadic lives…
Everything on board is either wet or very damp. Cynthia and I are damp too, as are our spirits. This fancy Linssen of ours is as much use as a winter live aboard craft as a chocolate fireguard.
It just doesn’t work.
The boat is big enough to live on comfortably. It’s thirty-five-foot length and twelve-foot beam gives us four hundred and twenty square feet of living space. Which is a shame given that we can’t use most of it.
Cynthia dressed for a relaxing afternoon in our cosy wheelhouse
The cabins at either end of the boat are too cold and damp to consider using for sleeping. We have heat in neither room. As the thermometer sinks steadily towards zero – Thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit for Cynthia, she comes from a country which hasn’t embraced decimal anything yet – we’re compressed into a smaller and smaller living space.
We now spend most of our time crammed like sardines into the galley area, a space encompassing just sixty square feet. There’s a dinette which converts into a spacious bed. Spacious unless you share it with your significant other, two large dogs and a kitchen. Ever positive Cynthia tries to look on the bright side of everything. “At least now I can sit on the bed while I’m cooking,” she told me last week as she sat on the duvet stirring a pot of lentil stew. A few days later my wife shared another gem. “We don’t have to spend money on getting another fridge installed,” she enthused, “I can use either of the bedrooms or the bathroom to keep our food cool”. But even Cynthia, the lady who can find a silver lining in any black cloud, can’t think of anything positive to say about the damp.
Huddled in our combined bedroom, dining room and kitchen.
We have more than our fair share of windows. Our cockpit alone has eleven picture windows, more than many narrowboats twice the length. In addition to the vast expanse of cockpit glass, we have a dozen portholes. All twenty-three windows are single glazed. They suck heat out of the boat faster than we can make it. Not that we can make it very quickly.
The condensation is awful. Any time-served boater knows that this unwanted moisture is an unhappy union between inferior insulation, insufficient heating and poor ventilation. We are cursed with all three.
When we were researching suitable liveaboard Dutch boats, we called Linssen Yacht’s head office to ask if our St Joseph Vlet is insulated. We were assured that it is. I would very much like to meet that man I spoke to on the phone, take him to one of the country’s many working canalside windmills and tie him by his testicles to a spinning sail. The insulation on the few cabin wall sections of our floating fridge not covered by single panes of glass is tissue thin. If we are brave enough to lay on the mortician’s slab which masquerades as a double bed in the boat’s small aft cabin, we can watch clouds of moisture-laden breath drift towards the ceiling. Our exhalations form swelling beads which grow until they pop and then fall as cold rain upon our musty quilt.
That’s why we don’t sleep there any more.
Opening a window or two and heating a room is usually an effective condensation reducer. Unless the space in question is on a 1984 Linssen yacht designed by a man who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. He thoughtlessly designed the porthole frame with a two-inch wide lip running around the window’s exterior. Any falling rain is channelled through the window into the cabin beyond. With no top hopper, the only way to ventilate a room is by swinging the porthole inwards on its single hinge. We left the windows open for ventilation in a summer storm on one of our first nights onboard. The experience was like standing under a power shower on its highest setting. Rain during this record-breaking summer has been rare. We were able to open the windows regularly to keep the boat thoroughly ventilated. Now the rain has returned. We can only open two of our twenty-three windows without running the risk of sinking.
The final nail in the coffin of our onboard comfort is the shit heating system. It’s a refurbished diesel burner which smokes rather than burns. Most of the smoke is ejected from the boat via the exhaust. Enough of it filters through the boards above the engine to turn the cabin interior into a nineteenth-century London smog. Even if we can get the heater started, a hit and miss affair at best, we stand a real chance of poisoning ourselves. Needless to say, we can’t risk using it.
Our emergency heating is provided by a one-kilowatt electric heater. Because the boat’s wiring was installed by an electrician with the technical competence of a starfish, even if we’re using the marina’s electrical supply, we can only use appliances which the boat’s inverter can handle. A typical narrowboat’s solid fuel stove heat output is seven kilowatts, seven times the heat we have at our disposal.
We are constantly cold and damp. Boating is no fun on the Dutch waterways on craft incapable of dealing with winter weather. Very few over here are built for overnight stays when there’s a nip in the air. Even less are suitable or are used for living on board full time.
Our Dutch marina has mostly empty berths now. Of the five hundred moorings here, only two of them have boats with people living on board. There’s Cynthia and me and a crazy old guy who either heats or drinks meths to keep warm. The only thing keeping us going at the moment is the knowledge that our time living in a meat locker is coming to an end.
We’ve almost bought a narrowboat. We’ve paid a deposit and agreed to buy it subject to survey. The hurdle we need to overcome first is actually getting to England to see the boat.
The reason we’re currently living like Eskimos is that our motorhome is at a Nottingham dealership being repaired. It’s thirty-one months into a thirty-six-month warranty. We had a list of relatively minor repairs to make before the warranty expires. The most important was the odometer. Our Hymer records the distance in kilometres at a rate which is enthusiastic but inaccurate. The problem reared its ugly head when we were foolish enough to ask a rural French garage to change a light bulb on a Friday afternoon following a two-hour liquid lunch break. The clock has been adding one kilometre every second since then when the ignition is turned on, regardless of the vehicle’s movement. The current total is six hundred and thirty-five thousand kilometres, three hundred and ninety-four thousand miles. We have to use the sale proceeds from our motorhome to buy our new boat. We will struggle to attract potential buyers if the vehicle appears to have been driven sixteen times around the Earth.
I’m waiting for a call before I can return to England to collect our Hymer. Then I can drive to Chester to see our new home. Providing there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the boat I’ll sign on the dotted line. We’ll have a boat but, as often seems the case these days, I’ll have a wife in a different country. I will need to return to her, take our stuff off our Dutch boat and then sail it six hours north to our broker in Zaandam. Once the craft is safely on its new berth, cleaned and polished to perfection, I need to prepare myself for a ten-hour drive from Aalsmeer back to Chester. Then I’m going to light my first coal fire in two years and dive head first into a bottle of merlot.
That’s the plan anyway.
Our further hope is that we can move our boat down the Shroppie to the Grand Union at Napton Junction. The route will involve waiting for seven pre-Christmas stoppages to be completed. They need to be finished on time to allow us to complete the rest of our journey before several New Year stoppages begin. Any delay in opening these stretches of the waterway will leave us in the middle of nowhere until the spring. We aren’t terribly keen on that happening.
Oh, I forgot to mention the boat.
It’s a beautiful 61’6” traditional stern Steve Hudson boat, currently moored at Tattenhall Marina. I’ll tell you all about it next week. Here’s a sneaky peak through the front doors. What do you think?
The bow deck view of our new home, perfect apart from the space-wasting captain’s chairs.
An easy engine for me to work on, providing Cynthia shows me which end to hold the spanner.
A comfortable cabin for Discovery Day guests in chilly weather. The range will be on full blast.
Discovery Day Update
With my marina work all but finished for the season I’ve had plenty of time to focus what I’m going to do back in the UK. And, thanks to Cynthia, that will be what I do best; talking passionately and at length about narrowboats and life on England’s inland waterways.
I had a phenomenal response to last week’s email. I asked you, my newsletter subscribers, if you would be interested in joining me for a relaxed day of helmsmanship instruction and learning everything necessary to live a comfortable, safe and relaxed life on the water.
The answer was a resounding “Yes PLEASE!”
I’ve recreated and rewritten my old Discovery Day booking system and decided on next year’s dates. I will be hosting my experience days during the first two weeks of April, June, August, October and December 2019. I don’t want to jump the gun until Orient has had a successful out of water survey. I’m hoping to arrange that next week sometime. The very minute my unofficial surveyor gives me the green light, I’ll email a link to my calendar to everyone who has already expressed an interest. If you want to know more and haven’t yet logged your interest by clicking on either of the links in the last two emails from me, let me know by clicking here. (You don’t need to bother if you clicked on the Discovery Day link in this post’s introductory email) I’ll add you to the list of people to be notified as soon as the booking system is live.
