The boat has been booked in to have her hull blacked in April since October last year. She is booked into Streethay services at their Willington base, which, coincidentally is in the marina we have just left. Unusually for a bank holiday weekend both Keith and I are off work, looking forward to a bit of cruising is the only thing that got me through my nights, so to say I’ve been desperate to get on the boat is a bit of an understatement.
Our shiny new mooring is 5 minutes away from us so we go down to give her a tidy through and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine the day before she is due in. The sun is warm and the canal is glorious. There are a few passing boats with cheery waves all round. It’s perfect. Dad and I negotiate the bathroom and kitchen plans and eventually I get my own way (this is subject to change mind!) Dad put up a spirited fight based in practicality but a walk-through diagonal bathroom with a huge shower and extra storage will soon be mine! I also wanted a belfast sink but adding the draining board in the planned unit will be a bit impractical. Dad suggested a granite or ceramic sink/drainer combo instead, who knew they existed? I’ve no idea what actually needs to be done to make this happen and think it’s quite a lot of work but I’ve complete faith that it will be beautiful once he has worked it all out and finished it. There is a bit of snagging to do in the bedrooms and Dad is keen for the apocalypse to be over so he can get on and finish that area. The bathroom and kitchen will be a big job though so we’ve decided to wait as I’m keen to use her and bob about for a bit in the nice weather. In the mean time, I can start looking for a granite sink and plan on extricating a kidney from one of the daughters to pay for it all. I think the invoice from Dad for his retirement project will be on its way at about the same time as we become continuous cruisers, so hopefully it’ll never catch up with us because I definitely can’t afford it!
Anyway, as we need to have the boat in the boatyard for 0730hrs we have an early start. Unlike the previous day, it’s freezing cold and snowing. Snowing! I was drinking wine in the sunshine yesterday evening! I am wearing a vest, t-shirt, outdoor fleece, woolly jumper, gloves and winter coat but still shiver on the stern, wondering how many pairs of tights I can get under my jeans. We enter the marina with the usual lack of finesse and as the bow moves under the bridge I start to turn right, towards the dry dock. I am pointing directly towards the entrance of the dock as it comes into view, but there is a widebeam boat already in there so make a snap decision to moor up next to the pump out (literally next to the dry dock, on the left in the picture above). The wind has other ideas and I am unable to actually get the boat close to the pump out so instead decide to swing around and moor opposite the dock on the wooden pier outside the chandlery. No problem, round we go and up we moor. I have a hot chocolate while Keith walks to get the car and he returns just as the widebeam moves out of the dock. The man waves us in and Keith pushes the bow off, thinking we can float the bow around and straight into the dock. Nope. Not a chance. I am too far forward to get my bow round so instead return to the pier and reverse to give myself more room to swing around. For those of you who know about marinas, they are very deep. They generally don’t have shallow bits. They do, however, have edges and the associated flora and fauna. I reverse off the pier with my bow gently swinging towards the dry dock on my left so I straighten up, swing the bow to the right so I can reverse into the body of water and continue moving backwards. Until I stop suddenly. Not going forward, not going backward. I am now parked with my bow on the end of the wooden pier and my bum next to the bank. Only I could ground a boat in a bloody marina.
There is now a gaggle of onlookers, including the people coming to work at the boatyard and quite a few watching from their moorings. Once again I am providing free entertainment as I get encouraging shouts and general bits of random advice. Keith is on the bow and shouts some instructions to me, along the lines of reverse. I tell him I’m stuck and he repeats himself. I visualise pushing him overboard with the boat pole and repelling him with it when he tries to climb back on, muttering to myself ‘successful people set achievable goals’ ‘successful people set achievable goals’…
Eventually, the boatyard takes pity on me and send a chap over to help us. He grabs the bow line and pulls telling me to move forwards but this doesn’t make any difference. He asks if he can come on and takes over on the stern. Well. My engine has never worked so hard. He revs her hard (really hard, as in I thought she may just go bang and never rev again) in reverse and then in forward gear. A few minutes and a lot of blue smoke later, we are free. He kindly explains that I’m too gentle with the throttle and that I need to give it some welly when stuck. Clearly not trusting me to put the boat into the dock he reverses out into the marina and then takes her into the dock. I have never moved so fast on a narrowboat! I am standing on the stern watching the dock coming towards us and thinking that there is no way this boat is going in that little space at this angle and we are instead going to hit the concrete edging really really hard. My bow is about 2 metres away from the concrete and heading towards it at a great rate of knots and I can take the strain no longer, so me and my chest pain sit down and look at our feet.
What feels like a split second later we are inside the dry dock at a standstill, having hit nothing on the way in. The chap jumps off, the team secure the boat and the dock starts draining. Luckily, the dock takes a while to drain so I have time to recover and compose myself before getting to see the underneath of our boat. Which is fascinating actually.
Standing on the stern and not actually rocking gently is very odd, I forget that the boat is constantly in motion but when she is dry docked she loses that sense of movement. She feels more like an inanimate object and less like our boat, as though she’s lost her personality and soul. Yes, I do know the meaning of anthropomorphism and yes I will continue to apply it to her unashamed! Once the dock is empty, we wrestle a mildly beleaguered Betty off and climb down the ladder. I am now standing next to my stern looking up at the boat. I can see random splodges and very worn anodes. I have no idea whether what I am seeing is good or bad but we have had a survey and the boatyard are going to check her over before they black the hull. The blacking is a type of bitumen and needs doing every couple of years to protect the hull. It is not cheap although there are more expensive options that simply blacking, but after researching them all, we decided to black her this time and consider other methods to protect our hull in the future. When we bought the boat last summer, we were told that she had been blacked the previous winter so technically we could have waited until this winter but I want to make sure that the hull is absolutely sound and look after her properly. This time next year, if all goes well, she will be a sexy deep purple with a lovely black hull and black covers to match. Now, I’m off to by a sink…
