Lmst

I'll be joining several other boats by month end. The first of them arrived today and tied up behind my boat. Another is closing in from … somewhere north of us.

Today's boat arrived with D on board, who introduced himself to me. He has an aging whippet who likes cheese. Cheese was had.

To get acquainted, the 3 of us walked and 2 of us talked on our way to a local shop. This town has 1 shop, and it wasn't a half-bad place to buy food.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #dog #grocery

On this midsummer night, we find ourselves at a year’s turning point — caught between the stillness and the unsettling. Join us tonight as we explore the solstice, the shifting seasons, the rhythm of carnival swings, and the restless nature of the mind, uncovering the connections between them all.

#podcast #solstice #canal #CanalLife #mentalhealth #wellbeing

https://www.noswpod.com/unsettled/

A photograph of the 'Erica''s bow as she is moored alongside a bank thick with summer vegetation.

Tens of thousands of UK boats are in good shape, but occasionally, people do abandon a boat.

Last fiscal year (2023/2024), Canal & River Trust removed 106 boats, mostly white fibreglass ones—built 40 to 50 years ago—which cost it £6,000 to £10,000 each to do.

The 36,000 steel narrowboats are seldom the problem: steel recycles. It's the white "yoghurt pot" boats: no facilities to dispose of fibreglass.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn41zg7p1ddo

#CanalLife #canal #CRT #UK #boating #boat #PleasureBoat #narrowboat

It's a good thing canal lock gates are carefully balanced, because this lets one person push them open and closed. (It can take considerable effort if a boat has unbalanced the gate by crashing into it.)

To open a gate, when water levels on both sides are equal, push the beam. It's long, so it acts as a lever that reduces the effort. The beam of a lock gate is sometimes steel, but most often oak, as pictured. This beam is particularly bulky.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #lock

A man's hand and a windlass laid atop the end of a square-cut oak beam beside a steel grab handle.

This photo focuses on the end of the beam. The beam is part of a massive oak lock gate (not shown).

A lock beam is a lever that lets boaters open a wooden lock gate that can range from a very small 750 kilos to a typical large size of 1500 kilos (about ¾ to 1½ tons). This beam is probably 50×50 centimetres or 20×20 inches—and has a flat end. Its full length isn't shown in the photo but might be 7 meters or 22 feet. The very end of the beam is bound by a reinforcing, flat steel bar, to keep it from splintering.

There's a solid steel grab handle anchored in the top surface of the beam, for boaters to grab and pull, to start the gate moving. The end of the beam is painted white, though the paint has worn away on top, as has the wood, from years of use and from getting tapped by windlasses. (Boaters usually have those in one hand as they reach for the grab handle with both hands.)

The windlass in the photo is a type of spanner or wrench, one piece of steel, with a square hole on one end that fits the lock mechanism. (Mechanism not shown.) For easier winding, each side of the windlass' L-shaped handle is about 30 centimeters or 1 foot, and about 2 centimeters or ¾ inch round in diameter.

In the background is a dirt towpath and some unmowed grass. Below the beam is red-brown brick paving with some ridges set in to offer some traction to boaters as they strain to push the beam.

This week there's been a half dozen gorgeous flying insects visiting the boat as I pass by.

They have silken black wings. At first I thought: maybe some sort of moth? Then I decided: maybe a dragon fly or damselfly that has pointy black wings?

They never stop, they just fly over, so no pics. And anyway, while operating a narrowboat is not a great time to try for a photo.

#CanalLife #canal #UK #insect #dragonfly #damselfly #boating #boat #narrowboat

I apologise. I've relaxed now. Since I moved the boat ahead 2 spots, NOBODY has crashed into me. I picked an unfortunate place to stop, before. My bad.

Sometimes boating is like bumper cars at the fair—the boats themselves are built to take it. My peace of mind suffers when many tonnes of steel hit my 17 tonnes (18¾ tons) of steel.

On reflection, what I meant to say was: boating is an adventure, also on windy days.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #wind #weather #storm #gust #fun

Eight times in 3½ hours a boat crashed into me while I was tied up along the shore.

I have just moved the boat forward, leap-frogging two boats.

And in the process I myself hit 2 boats — inevitable, unfortunately, but I was unwilling to continue being crashed into by people for whom the wind is somehow a surprise.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #navigation #wind #hazard #storm #sunny

Six boats have crashed into me in the past 3 hours, scraping and bouncing all the way down the length of the boat. The wind is too strong for occasional- and hire-boaters but it doesn't stop them, so they get blown into me as they clear the trees.

I want to move but the strong wind also means I cannot move the boat. There are 2 boats immediately ahead of me and I could never clear them.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #navigation #wind #hazard #storm #sunny

Some days, all you need is sunshine on your face, calm waters by the canal, and the gentle hum of a boat passing by. 🌞🛶
Peace isn’t always loud — sometimes, it floats.
#MentalHealth #CanalLife #WatersideWisdom #SelfCare

Chatting with other boaters along the canal, one of them mentioned that the Environment Agency (EA) has closed a broken river lock at Barnwell for repairs.

😮 There's currently no way to get the boat to the east coast, to join 2 other boats. Together we were planning to cross The Wash (a bit of sea) to Boston, subject to tide, daylight, and pilot advice.

We'll see what it means for our July plans. Maybe EA's repairs will be quick?

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #lock #closure #EA

Blissworth tunnel is long, but at least I can see the pinpoint of light at the end of the tunnel right from the start—as soon as my eyes adapt to the dark. (Amazing engineering, when you think about how straight that tunnel is.)

Tomorrow it's a visit to Canal & River Trust's canal museum, then right back through the tunnel.

I have a work call in the afternoon and the mobile signal is better on the north side of the tunnel.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #tunnel #CRT #museum

Instead of "it's raining cats and dogs!" Brits say "It's pissing down!"

It turns out they also say that when a drained lock chamber is leaking onto their boat.

I shared a lock with a crane-boat operator, today, and his stern is getting SOAKED.

#CanalLife #canal #CRT #crane #boating #boat #narrowboat #lock #leak

A view of a crane boat and a narrowboat in a drained canal lock. One wall of the lock chamber is in the frame. And it has several leaks. The biggest is hosing water onto the stern deck of the Canal & River Trust contractor's crane boat.

At the far end of the lock chamber the gate is just starting to open, because two people on land, their heads barely visible, are pushing the gate arm. The cast-iron works at the top of the gate is up, which signals that the gate paddle is still in the open position. There's a gap inset into the chamber wall for the steel ladder boaters use to climb up and out, and its upper handles are visible above the chamber.

There is some damage to the chamber wall where boats have been thrown about and smashed into the brickwork while the chamber is being filled too recklessly. There's a thick length of chain on one side of the damaged wall, presumable to absorb the energy of boats as they're thrown about.

Last summer we got trapped on the Lancaster Canal when it breached. Last month that was fixed.

Two boats with us there boated from Lancaster onto the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, up to Manchester on the part of Bridgewater Canal that didn't breach. They couldn't go south on the Macclesfield Canal because it breached this spring. So they got ship-certified to go down the Manchester Ship Canal to Ellesmere, to the Shropshire Union Canal.

#CanalLife #canal #UK #breach #boating #boat #maintenance #CRT

The stern of two narrowboats, which are lashed together to form a raft, are boating down the Manchester Ship Canal toward Liverpool. On the stern, both boaters are wearing life jackets.

The canal is wide, with lush, green, soft banks. It's a sunny day.

At the swan doors today, the hissiest mute swan demanded food. No! Closed the swan doors.

Later, three ducks came along, each with large ducklings. Opened the swan doors again. Want birdseed?

A moorhen kept back, but also got some.

The movement of the ducklings is frantic, very quick. This video is slow motion so you can see them. The duck looks innocent, but has ferociously chased off the two other ducks and their ducklings.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #waterfowl #duck #swan #birds #wildlife

The towpath here gets little use, so the ground is very soft, not compacted. To tie up the boat, I was able to sink mooring pins into the ground with a few taps and then just by stepping on them.

When passing boats go by, the water displacement pulls at moored boats. This may pull the pins loose, out of the ground, and set the boat adrift in the canal.

If that happens, I hope I'm awake, and that it's not raining.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #moor #pin #tie

I feed ducks store-bought bird seed and grains. They'll wait by the boat for hours, making the soft, cooing sound of ducks asking to be fed.

In North America the rule is Don't Feed The Wildlife. In England feeding is OK since nothing's natural. What the English call nature is a built and managed environment.

Canals were built. They're constantly maintained to prevent them from reverting to dry land.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #duck #waterfowl #bird #wildlife #feeding #nature #environment #UK

Three ducks floating just off a narrowboat's gunnel, or gunwale. There are 5 more ducks, but as soon as a human appears near the swan doors, the aggressive ones chase the others away so they don't get any of "their" potential seeds and grains.

Bradley Workshop is where Canal & River Trust uses oak, steel, and plastic to make its "smaller" lock gates weighing up to 1½ tonnes (1⅔ tons). Lock gates hold back the water, so that canals can step up a hill using water-filled chambers.

Within each lock gate is a plastic paddle (photo)—a vertical, underwater door that boaters wind up to partly drain or fill a lock chamber with a boat in it.

https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/specialist-teams/engineering/building-lock-gates

#CanalLife #canal #boating #narrowboat #lock #gate #paddle #LockGate #CRT #UK

A cropped photo of a pair of oak lock gates in the Bradley Workshop. A pair of hands in the frame shows the massive scale of each oak door—about a foot thick (about 30 centimetres). The door closest to the camera has been shaped, one edge is rounded so the door can rotate once it is placed at one end of the lock chamber.

Added to the lower half of the oak gate is a plastic paddle, about a square yard (about 1 square meter) in size, set in a frame that holds the paddle against a square hole through the oak gate. Essentially, the paddle is a smaller, plastic, sliding door within a massive, rotating, oaken door. But the one door is called a paddle and the other door is called a gate, because historical English just is that way. The tour guide has just slid paddle up to the open position to show how it reveals the square hole through which water will flow to fill (or drain) the lock chamber. The paddle has some steel bracing and a steel bracket for the steel-toothed mechanism and gear (not shown) still to be installed. Boaters will use that mechanism to "wind" or crank the paddle up and down.

The photo is actually rotated to help the viewer imagine the paddle slide up and down when the gate is installed upright. But the gate is actually laying flat on saw horses, and of you look closely at the edges of the photo you'll see people's legs and bellies nonsensically rotated sideways; these are other visitors on the tour of CRT's Bradley Workshop with me.

@nelson

We tied up 10 minutes ago.

We would have arrived at our friend's boat two minutes earlier, but we first had to wait for a short narrowboat whose engine was overheating. They were trying to pull over, struggling to get near enough to the towpath to jump off with a rope.

(I can't imagine drivers of cars waiting patiently for two minutes while a blocking car gets pushed to the side of the road.)
🚗🚙🚗🛻🚛🚙🚙🚚

#slow #CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #engine #overheat

Instructions for finding a friend's boat: "Come past bridge 19, past a fibreglass boat that's there now, on the towpath side. Pass that. Then opposite, there's a white broad-beam boat, then a blue narrowboat, then us. You can tie up opposite us."

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #address

@gregc

Narrowboaters honk to claim the right of way through a narrow passage (in the absence of signage).

This is my point. Nobody knows any signs.

Instead, we yell messages at each other over the roar of the diesel engine, in the 5-second window as we pass.

Oh, I thought of another one:
• Your Tunnel Light Is On.

#CanalLife #canal #boating #boat #narrowboat #horn #honk #signal

#CanalLife

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