Life Afloat

A damaged culvert brought part of the Grand Union canal to a stop last week. Unfortunately I’d left Bristol Fashion in the middle of the closed section of the canal. After work I found a British Waterways dredger under the bridge next to the Turning Point pub, blocking the entrance. At the next bridge men in overalls milled around putting up barriers. Further on, Cowley Lock was closed and padlocked.

The next morning British Waterways sent me a text message at 9.57am asking me to move the boat by 10.30am. As if that was going to happen! That afternoon I took a couple of hours off work and took the boat through the lock. A steady stream of well-painted and polished boats was headed at speed in the opposite direction, trying to reach Little Venice in time for the Canal Cavalcade this weekend. There were quite a few pairs of working boats among them.

Going under the damaged bridge, water was spurting out and there was a huge plastic hose in the water. I was asked to kill the engine and drift through so as not to damage it.

It was interesting to watch as divers went into the water and constructed a dam made of scaffolding and plastic sheets. The owner of narrowboat Tafelberg has some photos of this at www.tafelblog.com.

At midday on Saturday the lock was re-opened and a queue of boats good-humouredly negotiated their way through, just in time to rush to the Cavalcade. Bet they were glad there are no more locks all the way to Little Venice.

I went to the Malt Shovel pub last night for a meal (calves liver and bacon is good) and at closing time walked back to the boat. Walking along the boat to bed I put my bare foot down on soggy carpet. Investigating I found the bilge full to the brim with water.

Panic! Man the lifeboats! Cowards and non-swimmers first…

No cause for alarm. Found the cause easily enough. A pipe was disconnected and the contents of the water holding tank were fast pouring out inside the boat. A water pump vibrates in use and the pipe must have worked itself loose when I’d had a shower earlier. Fixing it was simply a case of twisting two bits of plastic tight together – the difficult bit was lying on the floor, contorting my body to reach inside a small hatch under the shower, shining in a torch and… you really need to be a multi-armed, see-in-the-dark midget to do this stuff.

I tried emptying the water using a mug, then a cake tin, then a huge sponge. It took hours. I’ve had the central heating on full at night, all the windows open all day trying to dry out the bilge.

Still it could have been much worse.

I use my blog to talk about the experience of living aboard. Other people keep a blog as a log of their journeys; some record their experiences of building a boat; some spread towpath news. But who are these blogging boaters?

Take a look at the Granny Buttons website, written by Andrew Denny. As well as being an interesting read in itself, his blog has a list of boating bloggers in the UK and abroad. You can also find recent blog posts about narrowboats at www.technorati.com/tag/narrowboats and photos at www.flickr.com/photos/tags/narrowboat.

Personal favourite boating blogs? Maybe www.bigbadboatblog.blogspot.com and www.balmaha.blog.co.uk.

Some boats make me envious – wide beam barges with bright shiny paintwork; some boats impress – beautiful old wooden cruisers, and some boats really make me smile. These are a few of the latter:

Three brightly coloured boats moored near Regent’s Park,

Nemesis is a very modish boat. Can’t help wondering what the interior is like,

Shed looks like… a shed,

And Philona in Little Venice is a classy boat, with its illustrations of dancers and musicians,

And as for this one, on the Thames near Brentford? Words fail me…

Lately I’ve been feeling embarrassed at all the scrape marks and rust on the lower half of Bristol Fashion. Not to mention the initials in silver spray-paint where some kid tagged the boat in Camden last weekend. Not exactly ship-shape. So this evening I started painting her.

Before getting started I read a few books and looked for advice on the Internet, from Phil Speight’s page among others. I’m sure he puts a lovely finish on a boat but it seems like an awful lot of hard work to me. So I ignored all the advice, found a pot of leftover dark green paint in a cupboard and just slapped it all over. In two hours I managed to get one side of the boat done and it already looks so much better. Tomorrow I need to turn the boat round and do the other side.

The name of the boat isn’t anywhere visible and I’m thinking about getting a sign writer to put it on the sides of the cabin. Roses and castles are for traditional boats; should a dutch barge style boat have tulips and windmills instead?

Living on a boat, I have most of the facilities you’d find in a house: they just work a little differently and require more thinking ahead.

There’s a large water tank at the front of the boat which I refill every two weeks or so and provides all I need to shower, cook, clean, heat the radiator and drink. There are taps at many mooring spots along the canals.

The diesel engine does much more than just enable me to drive the boat. Running the engine for about three quarters of an hour heats enough water for a decent shower. While running it also charges up one starter battery and two 90 amp hour leisure batteries so I can switch on the lights, watch tv and use a computer. If stationary, I usually run the engine for about two hours a night to produce enough electricity; this can prove awkward if I’ve not returned to the boat till late because it’s considered bad manners to have a noisy diesel engine running late at night if there are other boats nearby. Boaters can buy red diesel at about 50p a litre. I topped up with diesel yesterday and bought 70 litres (the tank capacity is 200 litres) – £35 is not bad going for two months’ use.

Bristol Fashion has gas central heating: a boiler gives me hot water and warms the radiator. The boiler is the single item on the boat that’s given me the most problems but then I believe that’s also true of many houses. Next boat I’ll get a solid fuel stove instead. There are two 13kg Calor gas bottles on the boat so that if one runs out I can switch to the other; they cost about £17 each and in winter I can easily get through one a week. For safety, gas cannisters are stored in a metal locker at the front of the boat. Running out of gas, or worse a boiler breakdown, is no joke in winter: a narrowboat’s steel shell does not keep in the heat very well.

Marinas sell fuel and gas but not all boats want, or are able, to travel there and back for it. Fortunately two working boats, Ara and Aphrodite, crewed by Barney and Jane, cruise around the London canals and sell diesel, calor gas, firewood and coal to boats on the way.

When towpath walkers stop to chat they always have two questions: the first could be about anything at all but the second is always about sewage. My theory is that’s what they really wanted to know but didn’t want to appear rude! The toilet on Bristol Fashion is a dump-through into a holding tank affair. At marinas and various moorings they have pump-out facility which does exactly what it says: every so often you moor up, stick their hose into the tank and press a switch and… that’s quite enough on that topic.

Little Venice is one of my favourite places to moor for a few days. It’s near Paddington station from where I can catch a train to work; there’s an interesting and ever-changing line of boats along the towpath and attractive houseboats on the other side; and conveniently it’s at the junction of two canals so I can head off in whichever direction the fancy takes me. There’s a floating puppet theatre and the Waterside cafe nearby and the Canal Cavalcade from Saturday 29th April to Monday 1st May.

It’s proving difficult to get a wireless connection in Little Venice. There are plenty of networks available near the canal, some secured, some not, but they keep switching on and off as I’m trying to get work done. Plus in order to use the computer off the inverter I have to run the engine for several hours to make enough electricity. Perhaps my desire to live on a boat wasn’t such a good idea, since I’m a website designer.

Chatted to the owner of a smartly painted wide-beam boat about the vandalism that has plagued Little Venice this last year. Kids throwing gravel, kicking windows and using catapults. Many of the boats here have makeshift shutters over their windows. Last week while I was in Seattle the galley window was smashed but whether it was an accident or vandalism I’ll never know.