Narrowboat Journal

Monday 16th to Saturday 21st February 2009

Did a brave thing and took the bus by myself to Leicester. Thinking this was easy and settling into my seat with a ‘free’ newspaper I was brought up short when the jolly bus broke down.

Hysterical laughter from the driver accompanied by the announcement that the bus’s batteries were dead broke my concentration so I went forward to see what I could do.

Before I’d realised that this was none of my business I was well into enquiring if we could jump start the engine battery from the domestic batteries. Half way through my question I remembered that this wasn’t a boat and the electrics could be quite different. When all I got was a quizzical look from the bus driver and raised hands I backed off, returned to my seat and sat out the half hour for the rescue bus.

Talk about disorientated, I have been on a boat too long and quite forgotten what happens out there in the big wide world.

Tuesday was a better day. Up early for a water run into Harbro, we set about turning the boat round. But this wasn’t easy because slabs of ice refused to budge and half way through the manoeuvre we were caught by three hire boats making a dash from Union Wharf.

On the pontoons we lived like kings with running water, electricity, walkways free of mud and melting snow and company for dinner (Claire and Ter).

Wednesday saw us return to Foxton dodging trees, floating plastic toys and other junk that was thrown onto the ice last week. Why do we have such a fascination with ice, why do we have to throw beer cans, bottles, polybags and food wrappers in the navigation? Are these the same walkers that protest at having to pay part of their council tax towards the upkeep of canals?

Stop me, I feel a rant coming on.

Not wanting to miss a coal boat we checked to see if Hadar was close enough. Parked up 10 locks above us was just great so we wandered up to book a few bags of smokeless and scrounge a cuppa. Nattered, like you do, and got to see Marmite the cat do tricks with till receipts. No, not produce receipts for coal sales, but run catch and return screwed up till receipts like dogs do. Talk about funny, if you ever get a chance to see it then I recommend a demonstration or at least watch the video, it’s hilarious. The first one there with a camcorder gets £250 from You’ve Been Framed.

Thursday saw us load up with fuel. I slipped on the mud before the camera came out so we sat out for morning coffee chewing the fat with Keith and Jo while I dried out.

It was a good opportunity to talk about anything that came into our minds with Keith raising the best topics along the lines of introducing young people to a touch of reality. While weighty subjects like financial prudence were discussed the subject of chucking rubbish into canals flashed through my mind.

A lovely couple, Keith and Jo, and our time was too short to get to know them properly so we are really looking forward to crossing paths with them again before too long.
But all good things must eventually come to an end and we parted ways at the new swing bridge, us going north them going east.

A sunny day in most of the country by all accounts and very welcome too. I spotted a lonely kingfisher zipping under the branches at Debdale and a rather rare heron, spooked by us, near Wistow. I don’t know where the herons go in winter but we’ve not seen one for months.

Several yards into Saddington tunnel I realised our tunnel light was off. Made it with nav’ lights only, though I was fully prepared to grab a torch if anyone had come the other way. Fortunately the walls are far enough apart not to have to bother looking where I was going.
V was downstairs at the time and I didn’t want to worry her about steering blind, it’s only a short tunnel and you’re out before you know it.

Wistow is an interesting stretch of canal. It might be even more interesting soon because the bank is about to breech. I’ve told a blue shirt fella but he wasn’t terribly concerned, he said it was something to do with English Nature not wanting BW to spoil the countryside with steel piling. They should worry, a few million gallons of water will spoil the countryside a lot more than 20 feet of steel piling. Remember you heard about it here first.

Friday - Kilby Bridge
Been spoilt again - trips to shops c/o Jo off Sarah-Kate. A computer shop and one of those Age Concern places gave us toys to play with and projects to do. Jo noticed a box of brass objects last time she was in Blaby and this time through we sorted it for boaty bits like three legged pot stands for the stove. I can see Mike and I will be busy with a hacksaw and file over the weekend.

Saturday wasn’t so good, V’s crook again. She went to bed early last night, off her grub, a dry nose and her coat isn’t shiny any more.

Out of milk means I’ve got to catch the bus again. Remembering what happened last time, I took a bag of tools and some jump leads but I arrived without incident in Wigston. Twenty minutes later I was back on the bus with a bag of food from Sainsburys for her and a bag of goodies from the Pound Shop for me.

As it was I used the old people’s bus pass so it didn’t cost me anything and having noticed the bus number on the way into town I was able to catch the same one back so no harm done, a little bit of shopping on my own didn’t faze me.

V’s looking a little better by lunch time so I wasn’t overly concerned. If it had looked like several weeks then I might have got worried. We’re not talking about men here, off food and sleeping late could have been very serious.

Just an observation, the nice bit about this time of year is there are no flies or spiders. I haven’t seen one for ages and it’s so nice not having to worry about sleeping with my mouth open.

On the other hand it’s the time of year when green mould appears round windows and although it means I’ve got to think about washing the boat again it also heralds the warmer weather and that means barbeques - hooray.

Caring for V meant staying indoors while the sun shone. We were going to cruise down to Blaby but her funny turn has meant a postponement. N.b Harnser fresh out of Debdale Wharf, cruised past us today all shiny in her new coat of paint, very nice too, well done. That’s something we will have to plan one day and seeing where others get their boats spruced up always gets noted in my book.

Monday 9th to Sunday 15th February 2009

Stuck in ice is what we are this week, Balmaha is going nowhere. Sometimes the night is so cold that the ice grips the boat and falls off with an alarming crash when we get out of bed. Surrounded by ice and held upright has its advantages when showering, there’s no danger of falling over when V moves about in the boat.

It never seems to thaw in the day but every night the ice grows a little more and at 2” it’s too thick to break with the boat pole.

The fields are still white, as are the canal towpaths and even footpaths to town where the sun hasn’t reached them.

Although we moved out of the boat basin over a week ago we are close enough to Market Harborough to fetch most things we need, unlike those poor blighters on the Leicester Summit who are stuck miles from anywhere and fast running out of necessities (Del and Al on Derwent 6).

Water rationing started Friday, no showers (hooray) and the washing machine is enjoying a welcome rest.
Wood stocks are exhausted though we didn’t do too badly with two weeks of logs from our last scavenging.
We’re surviving on coal at £6.20 a bag (last year’s fuel) and if we don’t get away from here then we’ll be burning the furniture.

Actually we’re not quite that desperate, thanks to the local night-life we had a wood delivery last night, albeit out of arms reach on the ice.

The forecast for the weekend brings hope of a thaw, sun by day and cloud by night which might get us mobile by the beginning of next week.

In the meantime ancestor chasing has become obsessive, compulsive and addictive. My searches concentrate mainly on Dover, Whitstable, Sittingbourne and Canterbury in the garden of England - Kent.
Judging by the number of relatives down there that spawned in the 1700s it’s a good job our family moved away when we did or I might have married a relative.

When off the computer there’s always something useful to do like filling the stern greaser, hunting an engine water leak, tightening alternator mounting bolts that rattle terribly, and a list as long as your arm for indoor jobs, most of which need warmer weather and dry woodwork.

Met a guy out for a walk between Foxton and Harbro who commented on our boat name. He said Balmaha meant Darling in his native Indian tongue, I thought it was lovely and thanked him for telling me that. How romantic just before Valentine’s Day.

The Six Nations Rugby keeps us quiet on the weekends and provides a welcome distraction from studying passing nature, mostly birds and dogs. One unusual bird (Mike says it’s a Fieldfare) flies in during the morning, swallows a couple of rose hips and flies off again until the next day. Dunnocks are very common this year whilst sparrows seem very rare, at least I think this is a sparrow waiting for his chance at the bird feeder.

Saturday night was warm (+3 degrees) and it was a pleasure walking through the boat this morning to riddle the fire with a room temperature of 11 degrees C, luxury, Spring is definitely on its way.
Even managed to break a few bits of ice off the glacier around us by whizzing the prop and whacking the ice with the harpoon.

All we need is a hire boat to break out of the basin and we’ll be on our way. Next stop Foxton and the water tap.

Monday 2nd to Sunday 8th February 2009

Alright, alright, alright, we were a bit behind the rest of the country when it came to proper snow.

But it finally arrived and we were glad we’d taken Tuesday’s fine weather window to move down to Union Wharf at Market Harborough to fill the water tank.

5 inches on top of Sunday’s sprinkling placed Balmaha in a winter wonderland and temperatures hovering around zero kept everything in place until we moved back out to the edge of town on Friday.

Down at the wharf, nothing stirred. 25 hire boats fast asleep under a carpet of snow and not a hirer to be seen which is a shame because it’s such fun cruising in the freezing cold.

Apart from walks to town to use library computers (yes, ancestry chasing) and the odd bit of shopping we had nothing better to do so filled the water tank again and left town.

We got the occasional strange look as we broke ice along the Arm but most people were glad to see a boat on the move and comments were thrown back and forth about the lack of gritting lorries.

The gardens we passed looked beautiful in a weird black and white contrasty sort of way and the photos don’t do them justice.

The ice had been slushy and was just on the turn again which made it fold like a blanket as we pushed into it. At first glance it looked like a huge sheet of polythene and my hand hovered over the Morse control, ready to stop the prop.

Further from town the ice resembled frosted glass, as in the bathroom porthole, and snowballs thrown by children had grown tufts of ‘hair’ after the last snow fall.

We hadn’t planned to go far, only as far as the winding point, and just as well because ice was building up on the bow, slowing the boat to barely a crawl.

Droves of walkers compacted the footpath’s snow and if I got caught chopping wood they asked the inevitable questions about how we keep warm.

One of the downsides of burning just wood in our stove is it won’t go through the night. That means one of us has to re-light it in the morning to thaw the frost on the portholes and the icicles hanging under roof hatches. Back in bed with a cup of tea I can tell when it’s safe to go to the bathroom by the pitter-patter sound of drips hitting newspaper on the floor.

We may be late with the snow but I wonder if anyone else has seen daffodils yet?

Met a poor fella on Friday wheel-barrowing his boater’s briefcase to the services point. Unable to move his boat because of gearbox problems he’s waiting for a dry, warm day to carry out repairs. If anyone knows of a second hand PRM120 gearbox I'll be glad to pass him the details.

Breakfast was special this morning (Sunday). Ter and Claire came for dinner last night and left us six duck’s eggs. So it was fried mushrooms, hash-browns, double bacon and double duck eggs on a bed of toast with fresh orange and filter coffee. I took the healthy option by leaving out the baked beans and declined the toast and marmalade. V took the even healthier option of one bowl of muesli – yeuk.

Monday 26th Jan to Sunday 1st Feb 2009

We decamped at Wistow a couple of days after the first boat went past loaded with logs. Thinking we were too late to join the timber scroungers I started pulling wood from the water below Kibworth Top Lock. This is usually an indication that tree cutting has happened further along the canal.
But I needn’t have worried because we found plenty of wood on the bank half a mile further on.
Sure, all the nice sizes had gone but I’m not fussy and a couple of beefy logs were loaded for splitting and recycling (in the stove).

The next mooring looked quiet enough so I set about making log pyramids on the roof. Like the old lady with the jar of oil the logs kept coming until we’d covered every inch of rubber mat and still there was more, so I took some to the next boat where I met Simon and passed an hour nattering, as you do. There’s nothing like splitting wood to gather a crowd and before long I’d made friends with walkers who told me stories about their aches and pains and canal life in the 1930s. Boats were less frequent in those days and without them the ice grew thick enough to skate on. I apologised for spoiling their fun. I also swept up the wood chips and hid them in the hedge so that I’d get invited back again.

That night the ice formed again but was gone by later in the day so we embarked and did the Debdale/Foxton run, picking up diesel, water, oil and filters on the way. A quick look at last month’s cruising figures gave me a 98:2 power to propulsion split so I declared this for my diesel and signed the papers with a clear conscience.

I detected a certain ‘air’ at Foxton, something to do with the way BW’s contractors can smash listed buildings to achieve commercial gains while boaters get hauled over the coals for bruising towpath grass.

We didn’t stop, apart from a night at Black Horse Bridge, and a very nice night it was because we were taken to the Three Swans at Harbro for a slap-up meal, thanks Ter and Claire. Yummy.

If it’s on the wet side this isn’t the place to stay. After heavy rain the towpath, which is wide, had grown puddles which were even wider and our back door mat struggled to cope with the mud. So we weighed anchor and headed further down the Arm, stopping where we couldn’t smell the bone factory and couldn’t hear the A6.

We moored on a tree lined boulevard with tall feathery reeds and not a soul about. At least that was until we’d fixed the bird feeder and settled down inside and then the whole world came out to walk its dogs.

Like Jo on Sarah-Kate and Jo on Hadar we’ve gone mad on trees, no not the oaks and beeches - family trees. I’m not sure if it’s about finding family anymore, it’s becoming more about the challenge of finding one obscure name in the 1800s without spending huge amounts of money.

It’s the computer that’s the problem, while V searches I make myself busy about the boat and when it’s my turn she walks to Great Bowden but sometimes you don’t want to walk or do jobs and we wish we had two ‘puters (and shore power).

The wild life around here is great, we have all the usual stuff scratching the dirt under the tree, a robin has taken up residence and feels its his duty to chase off the dunnocks, and the woodpeckers chatter all afternoon until it’s time for them to hand over to the owls.

And what a noise owls make, there must be a family of them living above our heads.

We’ve had a couple of days of glorious sunshine, enough to give us 3.5 amps from the solar panel, but today has turned grey and by 12.15pm it was snowing. We’re protected by a hedge from the north wind but they say the snow will come from the east, straight down the canal. Oh joy.

Here’s a picture before the snow.

And in the space below will go a picture after the blizzard…..

Monday morning - Not much of a blizzard was it !!!