Entry one moment in time

as a photographer currently without a decent camera, I do see some picture opportunities simply pass me by without a chance to capture the moment.
its frustrating.

so I keep my trusty compact with me and occasionally I see a subject not too challenging for its meagre pixels.

sometimes if you squint enough, even the shit holes of london can look quite nice.

could be worse...

just when I think I'm having a miserable time on the canals, I am always reminded that in fact some people have it far worse.



still doesn't stop the really funny young people who knocked on my boat at 6.50am this morning, just because they thought it would be funny to wake us up. The man was just ready to leave for work so they got a suprise when he popped his head out of the doorway asking if he could help them. Stuck for anything interesting to say, they wished him happy new year.

They were lucky, if they had called by just 10 minutes later they would have had me waving kitchen knives at them and swearing like a steelworker as I was doing the pots and I'm very easily angrified in the mornings.

where's the punchline?

Living aboard a narrowboat on London canals just gets more an more exciting, the adventures never end.

Constantly cruising and trying to adhere to the rules as much as possible means we move. We move frequently. While the rest of the world (it seems) hides inside in a warm cosy place and rides out the winter only emerging in Spring, we continue the battle of finding somewhere new to moor each week or two.
Knowing we have to move means a few days before casting off I mentally prepare to move home again, mentally prepare my new route to work and mentally prepare for the boring journey ahead up a grim and grizzly london canal.

the travel power pulley has been replaced and a new belt applied. However when running up the engine the belt failed within 5 minutes, so there is still a problem somewhere with the belt fitment. Still no travel-power. still no automated home laundry. that's shit. I hate washing in a bucket.

However, onwards and upwards, since the engine is still capable of propulsion we are heading up towards the River Lea again for a final Assault on the River Stort. I want to see Sawbridgeworth and surrounding areas so that's where we are headed.

From Limehouse, the next stop is Springfield, just one lock and a couple of hours cruising.

Just one lock, Old Ford Bridge, lock 19, yes that's all there is, what could be more simple, it's electric so what can go wrong?

For a start, the lock could be jammed full of more shite than I ever thought possible. A couple of trees, a gate, a couple of doors, some planks of wood, a shopping bag on wheels, massive sheets of plastic, several different balls, 100 or more bottles, uncountable plastic bags, natural plant debris and a delightful swathe of diesel oil over the top of the lot giving off a lovely smell.
You can imagine this might challenge the lock operation a bit. It did. No sooner had I opened the bottom paddles than we had a red malfunction light flashing in the lock-keepers office.
I called BW (0800 4799947) to report the problem and the chap there advised me to "put the kettle on and have a cup of tea" not to be confused with "put your knickers on and make me a cup of tea" To BW's credit they came out quite fast for a cold, wet and windy sunday afternoon.

I sat by the fire warming my arse and clutching a beer* (Hobgoblin) ((*equally not to be confused with clutching my arse and warming a beer)), occasionally glancing out the window to see if anyone was on the lock. In-between glances. somehow the BW key-holding magician slipped under the radar, fixed the lock and buggered off. Maybe he buggered off because I wasn't standing there waiting with a cup of tea?

The lock doors opened and slowly emptied of shite, which was circulating in a cross current just outside. It was a delightful picture of unwanted household items swirling around in the green and brown sludgy paradise of the canal.
Getting in the lock was a case of, give the engine full welly, get some inertia up to tackle the howling side-wind and then knock it out of gear to glide over the swirling mass of rubbish, enter the lock a bit fast, chuck the centre-line and bow line round a bollard and hope Honey Ryder stopped before giving the bow a cill-shaped face lift.

Job done, we went through the lock in minutes.
Brilliant, isn't this canal boating fun?

Excitement over, yes really we do love electric automated locks where you can't control the paddles rate of opening...
Shortly after leaving the lock we realised the adventure wasn't over as we dipped our hands into the lucky dip barrel of fun. First pulling out a piece of wood that was blocking the upper lock doors to find a dead rat under it, then pulling round a corner into a fast flow on the river Lea with a strong head wind, we made progress at a rate of knot...

It's almost painful to watch the scenery go by in slow motion, watching a moorhen paddle past us was a bit like being on the motorway and being overtaken by a caravan... but in this case the caravan was being overtaken by a small bird with dubious fashion sense. ( a bit like me cycling through london in fact)

I can't believe how much fun it was, I could barely contain my joy at spending a whole day of my weekend moving a stupidly designed brick on water just a few miles in driving wind and rain, avoiding plastic bags and other products of human excess. There was nothing I could think of that would bring more joy to my life than doing that.

Oh wait a minute, yes I can.

the magic sponge

As with most modifications, they come about because of an urgent necessity through breakage.

Our travel power has been out of action for just over a week now, ok, it's 2 weeks but I was trying to think positive.

The first symptoms of something wrong happened, er, last year on our maiden voyage away from our marina at Easter. squeaking ( read squealing) bearings in a jockey pulley that stops the large travel power belt from flapping about.

We changed the travel power belt because it was looking a bit worn on the back and WD-40'd the bearings. Yes I know it's not a real fix but it does make the bearings go quiet for a little while. repeated WD-40 application was all it needed... yes, honestly it's got magical properties has WD-40... a bit like the magic sponge at football matches.

fast forward to christmas time 2007, having replaced the travel power belt again, it promptly failed after just 7 days of being fitted. we put it down to a faulty belt.

having adjusted the current belt several times and hummed a little tune while the jockey wheeled screeched away until it heated up we thought , perhaps one day we should replace the bearings.

SO, what happens when the WD-40's magic sponge effect wears off?
When bearings over-heat and explode, your jockey wheel seizes solid, bits fly off and embed themselves wherever it's soft enough, your belt gets fused to an almost red hot jockey wheel and you spend the next day on the phone ordering new parts.
Two new belts, at £14 each and a new "upgraded" jockey wheel that looks like the barrel from a gun, £74.

The new 12-shooter ( for that is how many holes it has bored through it to apparently keep the jockey wheel cool) is due to be fitted soon and normal 240v service should hopefully be resumed.

name that tune....

The tune we are humming is one of a Beta Marine BV1505 engine with travel power on the side.

Since the Man arrives home before me it's generally down to him to fire up the beast each evening to charge the batteries and heat the water.
Last night I arrived home and He tried to describe a new problem he had with the engine. First of all he says, "oh, the engine did a funny thing tonight"
I reply warily, "what kind of funny thing?"
"well" he says, "it was going along nicely then suddenly the note changed and it sounded like it was struggling"
"so what did you do?" say I

"oh, well, I turned off the travel power and nothing changed so I tried to give the engine more revs and still nothing changed"

I replied "have you checked the oil recently?"
(him)"no"
(me)"have you checked the diesel recently?"
(him)"no"
(me)"what about the travel power belt? because last time we had a funny noise that's what it was..."
(him)"no"

(me)"ok... well, we shall assume its one of those, and Im hoping its the latter"

-----------------

two new travel power belts are on order..... and Im hoping that's all it is

-----------------

extra note, the following evening I return home to be told the problem with the belt was that it has melted, yes melted and fused itself to a pulley, (cue funny french sherades describing the exact action and replicated forces which were needed to remove the fused on belt) which has seized bearings.
so, in addition to the new belts we now need to dismantle a pulley and send it off to be matched up with some new bearings.

strange as it may seem, this side of boating I quite like. How one small thing can totally fuck up quite a lot of other things. It keeps you on your toes!

The Victoria park posse

Life in London, moored on a busy towpath is never short of activity, gossip and curiosity. Not to mention unruly dogs and children.

This week, life in the nut house involved several events of note, hardly note-worthy on their own, but as a group, collectively they turn from curious to just plain odd.

So it all started on the Saturday morning when both myself and the Man set about a bit of bike fettling, the man was outside tightening up his bottom bracket (fnar) and I was inside struggling with a slippery cheap chain and tooling around. (fnar again)
The Banjo was on the roof barking at anything that moved and then arrived the first visitor of the day, a red haired lady from a neighbouring boat carrying a spanner. Having seen the Man outside with his tools she thought he was a good person to ask to borrow “one smaller than this” as she held out a 9mm spanner. He, being weak at the sight of a moderately attractive lady, offered her two!

So, fast forward an hour and we have our bikes put back together and are ready for a spin over to Greenwich market and Blackheath.
The Man goes to retrieve his tools.
The red haired lady ( we shall call Hillary) claimed that she couldn’t find them.
The Man comes back agitated and worried for the whereabouts of his 20 odd year old tools.
I sympathetically reply, “yes but they were a bit shit anyway, I’ve still got mine and they are better than yours…they will probably turn up in her cats bed or something”
This didn’t help.

So we arrive back a few hours later, still no sign of the tools, Hillary is very apologetic and adds that she is quite worried because her cat has disappeared. ( I shall call the cat Moggy-Joe)

A ha…. I smell a plot thickening.

So the hunt is on for both Moggy-Joe and the shit-old-tools. I casually mentioned that perhaps the cat has nicked the tools.
This didn’t help

I have spent the past few weeks looking for a remote control for the stereo, it’s small and black, it was last seen at the end of 2007. After yet another evening of searching for this intrepid remote control I concluded that the cat must have this too.

It was late, dark and quite a pleasant evening, then the Coots started hollering. They have a coots-hangout opposite where we are moored and they can be noisy buggers. After deciphering the complex hoots, coots and bird banter I came to the understanding that one of them had accidentally stubbed its boney clawed toe on a spanner absentmindedly left behind by Moggy-Joe after a few jars of catnip following the local wildlife’s secret poker game. The cat took off with the tools and my remote control to avoid getting a kicking from the vicious coots.

The following morning Hillary has turned her boat upside down but still no sign of cat, spanners or remote control.

So, the day progresses like any usual Sunday, the men of the Victoria park posse go about chopping wood, we, the Honey Ryder crew had a small fire on the roof slow cooking our tagine, beer was drunk by all and I turned Mini-Baghdad back into a kitchen again. Complete with useable surfaces and everything. I also answered questions from the tow-path, from curious or just plain stupid passers by. I have everything from "does your dog bite", "can I stroke your dog", "do you live on that", "how much do you pay to put your boat here", "can I have a look around inside?"

Tired of being treated like a freak show I finally sat down to some serious leisure gel battery research when the Man returned ready to serve up the tagine, hotly followed by the neighbours asking to borrow the dinghy to investigate a sighting of Moggy-Joe on the opposite side of the canal near the lock.
It turns out to be a case of mistaken identity. The unidentified cat was looking in a bad way as it seems the coots had caught up with it, thinking it was the cheeky cat that cleared them out at poker the night before.

However the Tagine was lovely and well worth the 2 hours cooking time

Moggy-Joe, the tools and my stereo remote are still at large.

if plastic bags were women?

having moved yet again from my favourite spot in Limehouse Basin we cruised up the Regents canal ( not the limehouse cut as we would later regret)

Now, anyone who's has been around London may, or may not have experienced this lovely bit of canal. It has taken me nearly a week to find the words to describe it eloquently.

Basically it's a shit hole and reinforces everything I abhor about canals.

we cruised quickly through the first lock (which of course had to be turned around as they are never facing the your way- thats the law of the sod)
no sooner were we through that lock and the next lock quickly appeared, again the wrong way round but that's ok, we were expecting that.

So, the Man (who is gradually getting less and less grumpy these days as the thoughts of selling the boat get more and more imminent and the dream of sailing the world get closer) was in fact on particularly good form and we were working well as a team and everything was going tooooo well.

We exited the second lock, swung by a rubbish barge, it wasn't rubbish, it was quite good, very convenient as it is a great place to chuck the rubbish...
fnar, so, rounded the first corner and suddenly we are going nowhere.
The realisation quickly dawned on us that the pound was badly drained and we were on the bottom, literally ditch crawling.
It's a shite state of affairs when this happens because not only is there very little water, the concentration of plastic bags per litre of rancid canal water increases 100fold.

We decided to head to the side and beach ourselves so we could have a good look in the weed hatch.
what we found was a prop completely engulfed in plastic.
You can imagine by now Ive been standing on the side a few times with a limp wet rope, my hood pulled up around my ears to keep out the freezing wind and a charming view of a pair of legs pointing away from the weed hatch.
It's at times like this I kill the time by entertaining myself with fantasies.

....As the french swearing faded to the back of my consciousness my mind was swimming around a blue lagoon, with turquoise warm waters, surrounded by ladies clad only in shiny plastic bikinis, I imagined their cheeky smiling faces laughing and all shiny from playing in the water, then as one cast away her restrictive plastic swimwear, so did the others and the plastic bikinis took on a life of their own, floating across the surface of the crystal clear water they take form, fill out and become a whole new set of lovely ladies, swimming about and causing mischief.....

back in reality the prop was cleared and we pushed the boat away from the sandbank at the side and continued at a snails pace on towards the next lock. After less than 50meters we were virtually motionless again and so back to the side for further weed hatch foraging and limp wet rope holding...
It seemed pointless trying to drive the boat the final quarter mile to the next lock so I set about bow hauling while the next load of bikinis were being liberated from the prop and rudder. The rudder yielded an impressive haul too, although I never did see a woman with breasts quite so big before.


theres a small pile of plastic by the door and more in the dinghy.