Storms

This week has been quite extraordinary for weather. We haven't had a 'Red' weather alert in living memory, but on Wednesday night the government issued such a warning, which means there is danger to life.

At around 4pm the wind started getting stronger and stronger. The surface of the canal was being whipped up, so that it looked like a fast flowing river and the boat was rocking alarmingly, with the ropes making horrible creaking noises. Luckily for us, the wind direction changed to an Easterly about an hour later and the wind was now blowing along the boat instead of across it. This meant that we no longer were being battered on the side, we just had to make sure that everything on the roof was secure. The rain was so heavy, that our mushrooms, (air vents on the top of the boat) started leaking. The worst thing was that the wind was blowing the smoke from our fire, back down the chimney into the boat, so to avoid being smoked out, we had to let the fire go out.

We decided to have an early night, hoping to get warm and cosy under the bed covers and sleep through the worst of it. Unfortunately, the howling wind and lashing rain pounding on the roof, kept us awake and quite jittery for most of the night.

On emerging for work early on Thursday morning, I was greeted with signs of absolute devastation. Many trees were down and in the seaside town where I work, many shops on the promenade had had windows blown in and there was sand and debris all over the road.

But .... there is always a silver lining! Our wood supply has been getting very low. In fact below is the last basket of seasoned wood we own.

 

 

On Friday morning I awoke to the dulcet tones of a chain saw being used close by. I looked out of the window and a tree was being felled in the lane opposite the marina.

 

 

As soon as they had finished and left, I rushed over, only to find that someone had got there before me. However, he only wanted the really big stuff and was loading massive trunks into his estate car. I was more interested in the smaller branches of which there were plenty. I loaded up three wheelbarrow loads and our wood store is now full again.





I also noticed that a tree had come down on a patch of land owned by one of our friends on the Allotments. He always lets us have any wood and there is loads there, so I don't think we will struggle for wood for a very long time.

 

Of course we will have to wait a year for it to be properly seasoned, but other casualties of the strong winds were fence panels belonging to friends of ours and these can be chopped up and burnt immediately.

 

With the weather being so severe, we have taken down our infra red camera. The otter has been active recently making a lot of noise around and under our boats, but has been frustratingly elusive when we have tried to capture him on film.

 

We have had some success with the kingfisher though, although again the fixed camera failed to take any pictures of him. On Monday, which was a beautiful day, I saw him four times. Once when he landed on the cleat at the front of our boat as I was standing in the bedroom. He was no more than two feet away and I saw him in all his glory. It was a wonderful sight as their colouring is so beautiful. However he saw me and quickly flew away. Later on I decided to go for a short walk as the weather was so lovely. I was crossing the bridge and saw him sitting on the end of next doors boat, just above our camera!! It was almost as if he knew the camera was there and was avoiding it. Here is the shot I took from the bridge. It's not very clear because of the distance, but you can see our camera set up under the bench.



 

The weather is still very unsettled and we are expecting more wind and rain. We are just so thankful to live on a boat as so many people in the south have been severely flooded. We saw a house on the news last night which was submerged up to the top of the front door. I have never seen such deep flooding.

Home owners on the Somerset levels were interviewed and were saying how they have had enough now after weeks of being under water. The Government didn't seem to show much interest and certainly those poor people have had very little assistance. Strange how now that the Home Counties have been flooded, the Government have been galvanised into action. Call me a cynic, but it smacks of helping out their rich cronies, while leaving the poor people in Somerset to suffer.

Hopefully the weather will improve soon. Last Monday was a gorgeous day and as I was cycling back from town along the tow path I heard a song thrush which is always a sign of hope.

Al

Stinking Minks and Pottering Otters

We have had a number of disturbances on the marina in recent weeks. Many boaters have commented on loud sploshing noises near the jetty and splashing under the boats late at night. It has to be something big.

We have a friend who is a wild life field worker, so I texted her for advice. We have seen both Mink and Otters here last year, but we only got a glimpse and just once for each animal. Whatever we have now is a regular visitor, or could even be resident. Our friend has told us to look for black thin scat in which case it will be Mink, as they are apparently dirty compared to Otters.

This morning I heard a loud splosh down the jetty and went to investigate. In an empty berth between two boats, I saw the tell tale signs of an Otter, a line of bubbles on the surface. I stood very still and was rewarded a minute later by a brief sighting of an Otter head which just poked up out of the water for about a second before disappearing again.

Because it is quiet on a Sunday morning I suppose there is more likelihood of seeing it and a couple of other boaters saw it a few minutes later further down the Marina. We are determined to capture it on film, so Phil and I have bought an infra red motion camera and have positioned it at the end of the Jetty overnight. We will see what we get.....

In the meantime, I am determined to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow and stake it out with my camera.

Another boater says that the kingfisher's favourite fishing spot is from the boat next to him and he sees it every day, so again I'm going to stake it out.

Watch this space ...... Hoping to post photos in the near future!

Al

Cider with Sloesie (with apologies to Laurie Lee)

I arrived back after two months of working overseas on 22nd December and have spent the last few weeks acclimatising to the cold, wet dreary British weather.

One of the first things I did, was to decant all the Fruit that had been steeping in alcohol for the last three months. I made Raspberry Vodka, Damson and Sloe Gin, Blackberry Whiskey and Plum Brandy, all from organic fruit either off our allotment or foraged from the local hedgerows.

I hate wasting food, so I then had to decide what to do with the left over fruit. It is easy to use the damsons and Plums, I simply melt dark chocolate in a pan and dip them in it, coating them and leave them to cool. They make gorgeous chocolates. The raspberries were soon whisked up with some cream to make an alcoholic raspberry fool. Sloes though, are very bitter, even after sitting in spirits and sugar for many weeks. I was talking to a fellow boater who said he had heard that they go very well with cider and add a unique flavour if left for a couple of weeks. I needed no encouragement and they are currently steeping in small bottles of cider which I decanted. You can see them amongst the other fruit gins here:

We are now on our forth winter on the boat and a lot has changed in the way we go about things, as a result of what we have learnt. Our first winter was a 'baptism of fire', since the canal froze and we were iced in, after only four weeks of living afloat. That was a harsh winter and we struggled to keep warm and also had issues of damp and condensation. We have learnt so much through trial and error since then and now cope very well with whatever the weather throws at us. We have had a lot of rain this winter and I feel so sorry for the huge numbers of people whose homes have been flooded all over the country. Friends often email us to check that we are okay in such extreme weather, but of course, the higher the water gets, the higher we float, so we are not affected at all by heavy rain.

There are many things we have done to improve our winter living. Probably the most effective was the double glazing which Phil installed himself just by cutting and fitting acetate sheets and draft excluders to the windows. This has kept drafts out and the heat in. The other problem we have fixed, is the condensation and damp, the dehumidifier was an inspired buy. We check the humidity about twice a day on our 'weather station' which came with it and put it on for an hour or two if it gets above 70. It is amazing how full the tank gets and to know that all that water would have been hanging in the atmosphere and clinging to our clothes in the wardrobes. The other item which has proved useful is a small panel heater, which we have on twice a day, morning and evening and this just keeps the chill off the boat until we get the fire lit. We did worry about the expense of running these electrical gadgets, but with our most recent electricity bill coming to £41 for the coldest quarter of the year, we are no longer fretting about expense!

We are also much more efficient with our log burner. You can usually spot the new boaters in winter because they have all their doors open whatever the weather. It is very easy to overcook the fire and the boat can become unbearably hot even when it is freezing outside. We now use a mixture of coal and wood to keep it ticking over.

Our wood supply is holding up. A number of our friends live in Blackpool, where the notoriously strong winter winds often take out panels of their garden fencing. These are more often than not beyond repair once they have been blown about a bit, so we get invited to chop them up and take them away and they make perfect kindling. Another friend is a builder and always has a plentiful supply of pallets for soft wood and our log store of foraged wood provides the rest. We have used about 3/4 of our wood so far and I haven't had the opportunity to replenish it this year. This is partly due to the fact that Jack the Whippet is no longer with us and on our walks I would often to be one of the first to spot tow path tree felling. I rarely walk along the tow path now. We heard on the grapevine of a massive tree felling exercise up by the motorway at the weekend. An entire wood was being cleared to make way for the new motorway link. We drove up there yesterday with the chainsaw and some bags, only to find that the locals had got there first and the place was completely cleared! Ah well, such is life!

I hope to post a bit more frequently now that I am back and have caught up, so watch this space!

Al :)



 

Preparing for Winter and other news

I haven't posted for a long time for a number of reasons, one of which is that I have been busy preparing to travel overseas next week for a seven week work commitment.

The other reason is that I have been rather low of spirits recently. The lovely Jack the Whippet died a few weeks ago and even though he wasn't my dog, it hit me very hard. I miss him dreadfully, not least because I no longer have an excuse to get out and have refreshing walks along the tow path any more. I went out last week in search of Sloes to make my usual sloe gin, but I felt quite lonely without Jack to talk to or interact with. He was such a character and he had a very special place in my heart and always will do. RIP Jack the Whippet.

Recent weeks have been full of activity as I want to make sure everything is 'shipshape' before I go away. The weather has been very variable recently and we have been meaning to take the boat out to turn her around so that the stern entrance is adjacent to the end of the jetty for easy access. However there has always been something that has prevented us from doing it. Ideally I wanted to tie it in with a night out on the tow path, but we have been too busy to even think about that. I did manage to have my usual few days away in the middle of nowhere though, as a treat before I travel far away. This time, we couldn't book in at our usual place, but found somewhere equally comfortable where we could have some great walks and also which had a great red squirrel population in the grounds.

We finally managed to get time to turn the boat around yesterday, but didn't even get a chance to have a trip down the canal. We just steered her out into the cut, turned around and came straight back in again. However, we are now nicely set up for winter, with the back canopy on and an extra room to boot!

Here she is as she was....

Now turned around .......

.......... and now with the canopy on









We have an extra room ....

This brings me to the endless problem of damp. Over the last three years, since we moved to the boat, it has been a constant battle for us. When we first moved onto the boat, we used to have to wipe down all windows every cold morning as they were soaking wet. Then we installed our own 'Heath Robinson' style of double glazing which has worked really well. This did not prevent the wardrobes getting damp and, although everyone told me that my clothes did not smell, I was very aware of the musty damp smell and in deep winter also the sooty smell from the wood burner. The real test of this was when we went away and we stayed in a hotel. The smell of my clothes really came into sharp relief then. The great news is that I have been away several times this last month staying in hotels and my clothes did not smell at all. This is entirely due to the dehumidifier we bought last year. It is definitely the best item a boater can ever invest in, it costs about 10p an hour to run and as ours came with a 'weather station' it tells us the precise humidity of the room it is in. There are times when the humidity is as high as 90 (virtually raining!) and we do use it a lot, but it is worth it's weight in gold and has kept the boat and our wardrobes dry and warm.

Now 10p an hour may seem like a lot, but with energy bills hitting the news recently, we couldn't help but feel very happy with our situation on the boat. We were paying huge amounts each month to the energy companies for our gas and electricity when we lived in a house and many people are struggling with this now. There are estimates that people will die this winter from the cold, because they cannot afford the heating bills. I believe this will happen and I am also shocked at the number of working people who are now having to use food banks in our country, because they cannot afford to feed their families. This is the state we are in, with the rich - poor divide getting bigger. I don't wish to get all political in this blog, but I have to say that it sickens me! I see a wide range of life now and there are definitely people who are playing the system and not willing to pay their way, I have lived near to people like that and I find it frustrating to witness. However, I also see the other side, where very rich people are grasping, arrogant and equally selfish. Both are wrong, but there are a lot of people in the middle who are genuinely struggling and I don't have any answers for them. We are lucky, in that we have a wood store full of foraged wood which will keep us warm for the winter, we use gas from a bottle which costs very little and our electricity use again is minimal as we use very few appliances which warrant it

There are now an increasing number of people who visit our marina with a clear view to living as cheaply as possible. A number of times in the past few weeks, we have had people turning up asking if there are boats for sale, because they have been told that living on a boat is cheap. Not on this marina it isn't!!

Our marina is definitely the most expensive on this canal and probably the most expensive in the whole of the north of England and the facilities are very very limited. Why do we stay then, you may well ask? Well many people have left, voting with their feet ( or should I say engine). The one thing that our landlords have as a lever, is that local councils are becoming more aware of people living on their boats when they shouldn't be and they are evicting them with very little notice. This is correct and is probably an effective scare tactic. Boat owners like ourselves are looking for legitimacy and security and we support residential status. However many other boaters are happy to take their chances and our marina has been emptying as a result, despite our marina manager confidently stating that there is a waiting list to fill the empty spaces.

The problem is that the prices are high, (probably more than you would pay for a well appointed rented property) and the facilities are not good. Our toilet and shower block are in good working order but are primitive compared with the kind of facility offered by, for instance the caravan and camping sites these days. We were promised that the marina would be dredged this summer since it is completely silted up with many boats sitting on a bed of mud - it hasn't happened to date. Some of our post occasionally arrives soaking wet because the main post box leaks - this has been reported for the best part of a year but no effective action has been taken to rectify it. We feel that we are paying a lot of money just to be within the law and that the money is definitely not being reinvested in enhanced facilities, apart from a few new storage boxes. However, other private marinas are slow to follow suit by offering official approved residential status.We can't wait for that to happen because it will open up the market and add some competition and maybe our current landlords will be forced to review their prices as a result.

So .... I will not be posting for a while as I will be on the other side of the world. In the meantime I will miss the beauty of where I live:

I'm hoping to see these roses at the end of our jetty bloom before I go .......

I will be back on Christmas Eve and will post again in the new year, so stick with me for more winter views on boating life!

Al :)

Another Trip Out and some Boat Maintenance

We had the opportunity for a day trip a few days ago, when as promised, we sailed our neighbour's boat through the locks down to the sea basin to be lifted out of the water.

Here she is moored up by one of the locks:

She is a lovely little boat and very easy to handle, so despite the wind blowing us about at times, it was an easy trip, almost without incident. However, one error on our part made us re-evaluate how we do things.... When we enter a lock, the person on the tow path uses the central line to help stabilise the boat while the water level drops. On leaving the lock, the line is passed back to the steerer. This has always worked well for us in the past, as it gives us both good control of the boat and if ever there is a problem, the steerer can throw this line to the person on the tow path.

However, at one lock Phil threw the rope short and it fell into the canal at the side of the boat. This is where I made a fundamental mistake. I should have immediately thrown the gear into neutral, but instead I reached over to try and get it out of the water.... too late, the rope wrapped itself around the propeller and brought the boat immediately to a halt. It took us half an hour to extricate the rope from around the prop via the weed hatch, ( a small compartment at the back of the boat, which enables you to access the prop and clear out weed and other things which get snagged on it). That was a lesson learnt. We are starting to feel like experienced boaters, but there is still plenty to be learnt, particularly on safety issues such as that.

Another area where we feel we are gaining expertise is our allotment, which has gone from this at the beginning of the year .....

......  to this










and this .......













We have had an abundance of Onions, Beetroot, Broad, French and Runner beans, Lettuce, Gooseberries, Apples and Raspberries. In addition I entered some of these in the village show and won 3 first prizes and 2 third prizes.

Of course, the allotment involves a lot of hard work and its success depends on regular maintenance. This is also the secret of an incident free boating life and although I may have mentioned tasks that need doing on a regular basis before, I thought that I would set them out all in one place here, along with the frequency that they need doing. However, do bear in mind that these are tasks that we do living on a Marina. The frequency and type of task could be different depending on circumstances.

Here we go ......

Daily

Empty the cassette toilet. (Many people will try to reduce this unpleasant task, by using public toilets whenever they can).

Sweep out. Quite a lot of debris can be brought onto the boat, especially when out cruising and you are entering the boat from a muddy towpath.

In winter, clean and lay the fireplace, chop wood and kindling, fill the coal scuttles.

Weekly

Fill the water tank with fresh water.

Run the engine.

Check battery charging performance.

Monthly

Check the gas bottle. We do this by attaching a luggage weighing strap to the handle. Phil lifts the bottle while I check the reading. We know how much a full bottle and an empty one weighs, so can gauge very well how much is left.

Sweep out the chimney in winter.

Bi-Monthly

Give the cassette toilets a full chemical clean, soaking them in solution for 24 hours.

Put sterilising tablets in the water tank.

Yearly

Change the water filter.

Touch up paint work.

Every Three years

Lift the boat out of the water, clean and black the bottom and replace the sacrificial anodes (these are small metal alloy plates attached to the hull which have a more active voltage, so the anode corrodes in preference to the metal of the structure, thereby protecting the hull from corrosion). We plan to do all this next summer.

Empty and fully clean out and sterilise the water tank.

I think that is everything, but if I think of anything else, I will post it here.

I cannot stress enough how regular maintenance is a feature of trouble free boating. Unfortunately the same cannot always be said for the canal as a whole. We have had quite a disruptive summer due to low water levels, which may be inevitable as a result of the warm weather we have had, but doesn't really excuse the fact that many boats have become stuck on the bottom, in silt and mud when cruising the canal. Added to this, a number of boats are so firmly stuck in their moorings that they cannot get out of the marina. We have put in a request for the canal and marina to be dredged and I will keep you posted on progress .....

Bye for now

Al

Out and About

It's getting near to the end of my holiday period now and the time has just flown. Germany was lovely, I visited Cologne, Bonn and Aachen and met up with old friends which was a joy.

Wildlife news on the marina is that the attentive mother who had the late brood of ducklings continues to look after her brood despite losing two to predators. One of these is our local heron and I watched a tremendous battle of wills on the towpath a few days ago as she faced him off:

Her little ducklings seemed quite oblivious to the danger they were in:

 

Amazingly she managed to chase him off despite him being much bigger and she looks quite rightly

very proud of herself:                                                                                                                              

News on the Marina is that quite a number of people have left, or will be leaving soon, for a variety of reasons, ranging from the increased expense of residential status, to being too old and infirm to carry on. This latter reason applies to our lovely neighbours who have reluctantly decided to throw in the towel as they are just not fit enough to take the boat out any more. We will miss them a great deal as they are lovely people, generous, open and sincere, but we will keep in touch with them. We have offered to take their boat up to the sea basin this week where it can be lifted out of the water and loaded onto a lorry to be taken to the Midlands to be sold. They can't bear to see it coming out of the water, because it would be so emotional for them, and we fully understand that sentiment.

All the new people seem to be fitting in well and we have just tidied up the communal area of the marina and bought a new Chiminea and Barbecue, so we will be having a party on the bank holiday weekend and hopefully that will enable us to get to know the new people better.

We took the opportunity of some fine weather to have a few days out on the water this last week and managed to explore as far north as you can go.

We travelled over the huge Lune Aquaduct for the first time:



There was a spectacular view of the city castle from half way across:
















The views across Morecambe bay and the Lake District were lovely:

We saw a wide variety of wildlife .....


Here are some fledgling Martins just 'branching out':

 

 

 

On our first morning two swans came to visit at the duck hatch.

 

 



 On giving them some bread, they invited the rest of the family for breakfast!

We saw lots of youngsters out with mum, including this moorhen .....









......... and these geese

 

 

This teenager looks a bit gangly!





                                                                            




At last I got my picture of a Kingfisher. He was sitting on this post as we approached in the boat, so I managed to get this picture, but it was from quite far away.







This was the early morning view out of our window after a night on the tow path. The morning light was beautiful:

We had to travel under the motorway here:

 

 

but otherwise it was a peaceful and enjoyable jaunt out.

More news soon.......

Al :)

Summer Holidays!

Finally I have finished a long work stint, travelling all over the UK with very few actual days off, (when I wasn't working I was travelling). I love my job, but it is very intense and I have little time for anything else during those 6-8 weeks periods.

However, once they are over I do get a long period of time off and I'm not due to start work again now until September, so hopefully I shall have time to give regular updates on my boating life.

It was an absolute joy to wake up on my first morning back at the boat to this lovely view from our bedroom window:

Here is the same view with the sun setting behind it:






















I sat out on the stern with a glass of wine the other night until quite late and it was lovely to sit and be so close to nature. The moon was quite magnificent:

Having neglected the boat over the past few weeks, we set to and washed her down on one side and then decided to take her out to the nearest turning point (winding hole) and bring her back in to the mooring the other way, so that we could wash the other side. The weather has been on our side with glorious sunshine every day for two weeks now. We had a difficult job getting the boat off our mooring as the canal is so shallow with all the hot weather that we were stuck to the bottom which is very silted up at the best of times. Dredging the marina and the canal costs money, which in the current economic climate is scarce, so maintenance jobs just get ignored. Consequently everybody who has tried to take their boat out this week, (6 of us in total) have had to enlist the collective muscle on the marina, to manually pull the boats out into the swim. That has not done my back any good at all!

In addition to the problem of the shallowness of the water, we soon realised that we were making very little progress. We are now experienced enough to recognise the cause of many problems and we diagnosed a snarled propeller. As soon as we found a clear stretch of towpath, we moored up and opened up the weed hatch. There, completely clogging the prop, was an old rug that had been on the stern deck which had mysteriously gone missing during the winter gales. I had not believed at the time, that it could possibly have been blown into the canal from inside our canopy, but that is clearly what had happened and it took us a good hour of cutting and pulling to get all the entangled material out and to free up the prop. Having done this, all was so much easier and we cruised up to the winding hole and I did a text book turn, despite there being a boat moored up in the hole which partially blocked my access. This should never happen and I gave the owner a very dirty look! We cruised back and again, smoothly and effortlessly slipped into our mooring, which pleased me because I had made a terrible fist of getting out, due to the snarled prop and had felt the eyes of half the marina and moored up boaters opposite, on me. I could almost feel them thinking 'she doesn't know what she's doing'!

People are starting to complain that it is too hot, but I love it! On some days last week it was too hot to touch the outside of the boat. I put some tomatoes on a baking tray on the roof and by the end of the day they were dried! (Home made sundried tomatoes are the best!).

There has been a proliferation of wild life recently with a moor hen enjoying taking a rest on a weed island in the middle of the canal:

A heron is a regular visitor:

A duck has given birth quite late in the year to a brood of ducklings:

She is a very attentive mother and watches over them all the time:

 

 
 

You may be able to see the chicks underneath her:

 

We had some excitement a few days ago when a cow escaped out of the field opposite and started wandering down the tow path:

I am going to Cologne next week for a short holiday and to meet up with an old friend from Japan, who I was at college with in Detmold. She speaks very little English and I don't speak Japanese, so we meet in Germany because that is a common language in which we can converse.

When I return we are hoping to do a lot of cruising, going north over the Viaduct and up to the furthest corner of the canal and also travelling up to the sea basin, where we love to spend at least a few weeks of the year.

There is also much news on the status of the marina and a great deal of movement of boats coming and going, so more news when I return from my travels in a weeks time.

Al :)