Newsletter Archive | Living on a Canal Boat

2013 06 09 Newsletter – Cruising Notes For Narrowboat Owners

Living on a Narrowboat News 9th June 2013

What a wonderful week. I truly hope it’s been a glimpse into our future.

Sally and I have been travelling, ever so slowly from our home mooring on the beautiful Calcutt Boats owned Meadows marina to the head of the Ashby canal at Snarestone in Leicestershire. It’s not a long or arduous journey and cruises go; just 52 miles and seven locks. But, even though I enjoy every day I work at Calcutt, it’s been far more pleasant exploring rural England at a very gentle pace.

I know boaters who like to travel as far and wide as they can when they cruise. I know others who like to spend their retirement on a static mooring. Sally and I see ourselves somewhere in the middle. About a year ago I was introduced to the concept of snail’s pace continuous cruising. The idea is to stay as long as possible on a mooring but within the guidelines set by the Trust. The continuous cruising rules dictate that you should move to a new area as part of a progressive journey every fourteen days (which means that you can’t shuffle backwards and forwards between two points).

I know of one couple who travel continously but only cruise for three hours (about ten miles) every week. They then have seven days to thoroughly explore their new “home” before moving on to the next spot. I can’t imagine a better retirement.

Given that the average narrowboat engine uses less than 1.5 litres of diesel an hour, cruising at such a sedate pace would cost less than £5 a week for propulsion fuel. The canal and river network would take over four years to explore completely. I don’t know about you, but my memory isn’t what it used to be. Exploring the network every four years would be like exploring it every time for the first time.

I think that Sally and I are a couple of years off being able to afford to support ourselves comfortably in retirement. This cruise has been a little bit of a test to make sure that Sally is completely comfortable with the limitations of living off grid. I don’t think she is yet. She’s been suffering from acute vacuum cleaner withdrawal symptoms for the last week. For the last hour she’s been on her hands and knees muttering about “bloody dog hairs” and the “dirty filthy stove”. If we’re to avoid her having a dirt induced nervous breakdown we’re either going to have to invest in a suitcase generator or a more substantial inverter. Either that or install a central heating system and shave both dogs.

I’ve been on holiday for the last week so I haven’t had the time to write content for the newsletter as well sa writing the daily cruise updates. The seven blog entries are listed below in order. There’s some useful content in the posts about the ins and outs of managing a boat on the move so I hope you find the posts interesting reading. I also hope that my account of the cruise will stiffen your resolve to follow your dream and finally move into your own floating home.

Day One: Calcutt To Braunston
Day Two: Braunston To Brinklow Marina
Day Three: Brinklow Marina To Burton Hastings
Day Four: Burton Hastings To Stoke Golding
Day Five: Stoke Golding To Sutton Cheyney Wharf
Day Six: A Lazy Day At Sutton Cheyney Wharf
Day Seven: Sutton Wharf To Congerstone

Happy Birthday Dear Forum

The forum is now a year old. I set up the new section of the site on 3rd June 2012. Since then there have been 2,210 posts made on 388 different topics. I couldn’t be more pleased. I was in two minds whether to invest the time, money and energy into the installation and maintenance of the forum. I didn’t know whether any narrowboat enthusiasts would want to use yet another boating forum when there were one or two already in use.

I needn’t have worried. With the very genourous contributions from a growing number of very knowledgable boaters the forum has become a very well used resource for both new and established boaters. We have also been joined by one or two escapees from the other forums who have come here because they consider the response they get here to be far friendlier than they get elsewhere. All I can say is that all constructive contributions to the forum are very welcome indeed.

I’ve also received some very interesting emails from forum users. I received one from Roger Filler last week suggesting that a section where boat owners could add cruising notes would be a useful addition to the forum. Roger kicked it off by emailing me his cruising notes for the river Severn. I think his idea is excellent. There are more and more site users buying boats. The information they pick up as they cruise the network will be very useful to both new and existing boat owners if they add it to the new section.

I’ll be setting up the new cruising notes section when I return from my two week break. In the meantime, if you’ve done any cruising and have recorded any notes, please let me know. I’ll let you know where and when you can add them to the site.

There’s a list of the more popular forum topics below. If you can’t find the answer to anything you want to know about narrowboats in the existing topics, all you have to do is start your own topic. Remember, the only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.

Comprehensive Site Article Listing

There are dozens of helpful and interesting articles on the site, but have you found them all? I thought you might appreciate a list of the more popular articles that you can glance through and click on the ones that take your fancy. Here it is.

Useful Links

Living on a Narrowboat: The REAL Cost of a Life Afloat – Narrowboat costs explained in detail. My own maintenance and living cost on narrowboat James for a full year. Use this information to work out your own costs.
Find out what parts of the canal are closed and for how long. Essential cruising information for you.
Do you need to find a home for your boat? Here’s a comprehensive list of the narrowboat friendly marinas in the UK
Do you want to see where these marinas are on a map? Here it is.
Here’s a map of all the canals on the system to help you plan your route.
Newsletter Archive – Browse through a wealth of useful content in the newsletters over the last year.

2013 06 02 Newsletter – Pre Cruise Checklist

Living on a Narrowboat News 2nd June 2013

I’m moving house today. I’m not moving out of my home, I’m taking it with me. The ability to undo a couple of ropes and move your home to another location with a better view is one of the many wonderful aspects of living on a narrowboat. We actually have very pleasant neighbours at Calcutt but, if we didn’t get on with them, we would be able to move our home to another location where the neighbours were better.

We’re not moving permanently. We’re off on holiday for two weeks. A cruising holiday on James is something that I’ve been wanting to do for years. Unfortunately when I moved on board, James wasn’t in an acceptable condition to take anywhere.

The wooden top was in a very poor state of repair, as were the front and rear doors. The hatches over the rear doors and the port and starboard side doors were in an awful state. At some stage the original hatches had been replace by deckboard. The hatches had warped and the hatch runners had decayed to the point where I could poke my finger through them. The hatches offered no security at all. Anyone who wanted to gain entry to the boat could simply lift them off and climb in.

The onboard electrics were extremely basic. I had a starter battery and just one 110amp leisure battery. The single battery wasn’t enough to run the 12v appliances on board and couldn’t be charged because the engine’s alternator was faulty. I couldn’t use 230v appliances at all because the boat didn’t have an inverter.

The engine itself was in serious need of some TLC. The first time I took James out for on a day trip to Braunston I broke down with Sally and her two adult children on board. I walked back from Braunston to Calcutt with Sally’s daughter Maricar to fetch my car so that we could collect Sally, her son Michael and the dogs. I was very embarrased.

The cause of the breakdown was minor. The fuel filter was blocked. However, because the engine had been installed very close to the bulkhead between the bedroom and the engine room and the fuel filter was on the front of the engine, it was almost impossible to take off and clean.

The next time I plucked up enough courage to take the boat out the engine kept dropping out of gear. I managed to limp back to the mooring where one of out engineers had a look at it for me. It appeared to be another minor problem. The oil in the PRM gearbox was very low on oil. A PRM gearbox isn’t damaged if there is little or no oil in it. The gearbox simply stops working so doesn’t engage the drive.

With a fully topped up gearbox I took the boat out again. I had the same problem. This time I discovered that one of the gearbox hoses had perished so all of the oil recently added to the gearbox was in the bilge.

All of these problems have been resolved now. RCR have given the engine a thorough service (and told me that the engine should outlive me), I’ve increased the leisure battery bank from 1 x 110amp to 4 x 135amp, I’ve added a 1.6KW pure sine inverter to allow the use of 230v appliances when I’m “off grid”, I’ve added 300w solar panels to keep the batteries topped up without running the engine even if I’m stationary fo r a few days and the major improvement. And to make sure that I have enough power to draw from while I’m stationary, I’ve increased the original leisure battery bank from 1 x 110amp to 4 x 135amp.

We’re now ready to thoroughly enjoy the two weeks ahead. We’ve spent time and energy making sure that we’re properly prepared… unlike two holiday hirers at the beginning of the week.

John and Jan hadn’t been on a narrowboat before. They had booked a Tuesday – Saturday break to try it out. Unfortunately they picked the wrong Tuesday to experience narrowboating for the first time. The weather was awful.

After a wonderful bank holiday weekend, the brilliant sunshine was masked by angry clouds. The rain was relentless. During the morning my “waterproof” Calcutt padded jacket had absorbed more water than a paddling pool so I had switched to my own Guy Cotten bombproof trawlerman’s oilskin smock top. There’s no chance of rain getting in. As it’s not breathable there’s also no chance of perspiration getting out, so it’s no good for wearing during strenuous physical activity but it’s marvellous for standing around talking. It’s perfect for instructing holiday hirers in the pouring rain.

Jan and John didn’t have effective waterproof clothing. In fact, they didn’t have waterproof clothing at all. Jan stayed inside the boat while I showed John around the gas lockers, the wet locker and the engine bay and told him how to operate the boat.

An instruction usually lasts about an hour. The first part details the safe operation of the hire boat and is followed by a hand’s on demonstration of how to steer the boat and how a lock works as we take the boat through one or more locks in the Calcutt flight.

John steered and stayed with the boat while I showed Jan (“Oh dear. I didn’t expect the locks to be such hard work”) how to get the hire boat safely through the lock. By the time I was ready to hand the boat over to them, they were both shivering so violently that they could hardly speak.

I suggested that they take the boat just past Napton Junction where there’s a lovely spot to moor. I advised both of them to have a hot shower and settle in for the evening. They told me that they couldn’t. They didn’t have any food with them apart from two packets of crisps. They needed to cruise to a pub where they could get something to eat. They planned to eat out every day so didn’t think they needed to bring any provisions. As they were heading towards the Ashby canal, the first pub en route was the Boat House at Braunston over two hours away.

I’m writing this section of the newsletter early Saturday morning. Jan and John are due back later this morning. I hope they’ve had a good time, but somehow I doubt it. Out of their fours days on a narrowboat, they spent the first three trying to cruise in pouring rain while, chilled to the bone, they searched for somewhere selling hot food.

A little forward planning would have made all the difference. A good set of waterproofs each and a stock of food would have allowed them to enjoy rather than endure a canal break. Relying on available pubs for food is a disaster waiting to happen. Boaters can’t guarantee that they can reach a pub during the hours that it serves food, or that it will actually be serving food when they get there. I suggested to Jan and John that they walked a mile from their mooring at Napton Junction to the King’s Head at Napton to get something to eat. They said that they would rather press on in the rain. I’m pleased that they didn’t take my advice because I found out later that the King’s head had been closed that night. I don’t know why.

Remember the five P’s. Proper Planning Prevents P*** Poor Performance. Effective planning doesn’t just apply to holiday hirers. Boat owners need to plan their trips too. As I said earlier, I’m out for two weeks starting today. I’ve planned the trip for a while to ensure that everything goes as smoothly as possible

Pre Cruise Planning

My planning has taken a long time for my first real cruise on James because of the condition of the boat when I moved on board. James was OK for a day trip – once the engine had been serviced, the fuel filter cleaned and the perished gearbox cables replaced – but the boat wasn’t suitable for even a short multi day cruise.

The electricity generation and storage was very poor. There was a too small alternator to charge just one 110amp leisure battery. James had a 230v ring main but it could only be powered by plugging in the shore line. I’ve now upgraded the alternator, increased the size of the battery bank and added 3 x 100w solar panels complete with an MPPT controller. In order to use the electricity stored in the new larger battery bank for running my 230v appliances, I’ve fitted a 1.6KW Sterling pure sine inverter. And to minimise the amount of power I use, and to provide far more effective illumination, I’ve replaced all twenty of the boat’s standard light bulbs with LEDs.

I’ve over plated the boat’s original wooden top with steel. Part of the work included adding a reinforced anchor point for the centre line, the most important rope on the boat and an essential aid to single handed navigation. I’ve added a cover for the cratch to provide additional storage space. I honestly don’t know what we would do without it.

All of the above has been preparation to bring the boat up to a standard where it can be used for comfortable cruising. After that I had to anticipate my needs for this particular trip.

One of the many wonderful aspects of taking your liveaboard narrowboat on holiday with you is that you don’t need to do any packing. I’m not leaving my home to go on holiday for two weeks. I’m taking my home with me. All I need to do is turn the engine on, unplug the shore line, untie the bow and stern mooring lines, and we’re off!

There’s no stress packing suitcases and wondering what clothes we need to take. I remember from previous holidays in UK that we used to take nearly every stitch we owned anyway. We had to take a range of clothing to allow for the English summer; cloud, sun, rain, hail and on one memorable break to north Devon at Easter, snow.

So we don’t have to worry about what to wear. We don’t have to worry about negotiating busy airports, busy roads approaching the airports, tiny seats on claustrophobic planes, unpleasant neighbours overflowing their tiny seats, remembering to take passports (and remembering, months in advance, to ensure that those passports are up to date), organizing holiday spending money, furiously saving holiday spending money, organising hotels or apartments and planning and paying for airport car parking. And then, when finally arriving at the holiday destination, exhausted from planning a break to recover from the exhaustion of a “normal” stressful life, being too tired to enjoy the break for several days.

This break is very different. There’s no stress involved at all. Providing I keep my “house” in good order, I don’t have to do much to prepare for a few weeks away. But I do have to consider the logistics of the trip.

Unlike Jan and John, the under prepared holiday hirers, we won’t be relying on canal side pubs to provide us with hot food every day. We’ll be eating on board. Eating on board will be far cheaper (and the quality of food is likely to be higher) but we need to know where we can restock.

Although we aren’t going to stick rigidly to a time table, we expect to take three days to get to the section of the Ashby canal we want to explore. The only decent supermarkets on the canal are at Market Bosworth. We could stop off in Rugby at some of the large supermarkets there but I want to spend as little time as possible in Rugby. I don’t like the town at all. We’ll pass through there as quickly as possible so that we can get back to the peace and quiet of the open countryside.

We’ve bought enough fresh food to keep us going until about Wednesday, and some tinned and dried food in case we want to stay longer.

I ran through my pre cruise check list on Sunday morning before we left.

2 x windlesses
2 x lump hammers
3 x mooring stakes
2 x mooring chains
British Waterways key (for the locking plates on the water points)
Anchor, chain and rope (I don’t need an anchor for this trip, but there’s one on board)
A sharp knife, bolt croppers and mole grips for removing obstacles from the propeller
Pole and plank on board and in good condition
Coal, kindling and firelighters in case the weather turns chilly. I don’t really want to have to light the fire in June but the early mornings can be a bit chilly and I don’t have a central heating system on James which can be used to provide a quick burst of heat as and when I need it.
A spare 13kg gas cylinder
Spare engine and gearbox oil
Spare grease for the greaser
Fuel topped up (so I can top it up again when we get back and work out how much fuel my engine user each hour)
Bow line, stern line and two centre ropes – all present and in good condition
Batteries topped up and holding a charge
A map of our cruising route. A good map (I favour Pearson’s) is essential for finding water points, winding holes – turning areas – estimated journey times and quiet mooring spots away from housing, roads and railways.
A good set of waterproofs, especially for the helmsman
A sense of adventure and anticipation

I discovered that I didn’t have everything I needed, including a means of charging the starter battery. The thought of not being able to start the boat when moored in the middle of nowhere induced a certain amount of panic. I’ve run out of time to tell you about it now. We have a five hour cruise to where I want to moor tonight. We’re currently a mile outside of Braunston on the Rugby side. Once we moor up this evening I’m going to write a post about the first day of the cruise. I’ll explain all about my problem there. Until then, I’m going to enjoy the sunshine and the countryside drifts by at a leisurely 4mph.

Comprehensive Site Article Listing

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2013 05 26 Newsletter – From Nervous Anticipation To Confident Cruising

Living on a Narrowboat News 26th May 2013

Let me tell you a story. It’s a horror story. The main characters are my bank, my laptop, an unknown individual of debatable parentage and I.

About a month ago I told you that I had my identity stolen. My new laptop was hacked, I was locked out of my email account, this site, the site that hosts this site, T Mobile, and my bank. The hacker changed the contact address and phone number on my bank account. As a result I had to close my bank account and open another. This process took three weeks due to one cock up or another. During this three week period my employer couldn’t pay me and I had no means of paying my regular monthly standing orders or direct debits.

As part of the bank’s verification process, the hacker had to establish that he was me. He did this by uploading a copy of my own passport to the the bank. The laptop was brand new. By a process of elimination I guessed that the hack could have only come from within the new laptop. I did some research and discovered stories of laptops which had malicious code added to them before they reached the stores which sold them. The store which sold me mine was PC World.

I took the laptop back to them. They assured me that their machine couldn’t have been infected but offered to do a factory reset for me if I would pay them £50. I didn’t feel as though I had the choice. I use a laptop for four or five hours every day, my old laptop has slowed down so much that I can almost make a cup of coffee between typing words and seeing them appear on the screen and the inconvenience was driving me mad.

Once I had the repaired laptop back on the boat, I started the laborious process of downloading all of the applications I use on a regular basis; Microsoft Office, Open Office (because Microsoft appear unable to develop a document editing application which can convert a document to a PDF with links which actually work), Adobe Photoshop, Picasa, and half a dozen other large downloads.

Of course being on a boat and connecting to the web via a dongle, the downloads took an age, and they also resulted in me running out of data. Three offer the best roving internet connectivity in the UK, but they also offer the poorest and most frustrating experience when it comes to topping up.

If you go over your monthly allowance and if you insist on carrying on using your dongle, they charge you 10p per megabyte. Adobe Photoshop at 600mb would have cost me £60 to download. I didn’t discover this until I had been able to log into my account which involved retrieving a password which they don’t tell you when you set the dongle up. In order to determine the password you need to tell them the sim serial number. The sim is in the dongle which, in my case, is on the boat roof.

In the end, to keep myself online until my next month’s allowance kicked in, I had to buy a PAYG sim and use that as an interim measure.

Finally back online, and with a huge backlog of work on the site, my first job was to secure my identity and access to all of the sites I use. I upgraded my antivirus software and I also bought an application which generated complex passwords, encrypted them and password protected the passwords in secure vault online.

Finally my life was back to normal and I was safe… or so I thought.

I checked my bank account on Sunday. I check it most days because I reconcile it with an accounts package, mainly so that I can record my boat expenses for Living on a Narrowboat: The Real Cost of a Life Afloat. I noticed that £500 had been withdrawn in Bristol. Sally and I live on the boat in Warwickshire, 100 miles from Bristol. Neither of us have been there for years.

I called Mastercard’s lost or stolen credit card hotline immediately. I told them that neither of us had lost our cards but that there had been an unauthorised withdrawal from the account. Both Sally’s card and my card were stopped immediately. I told them that I wanted the account frozen as well as putting the block on the cards.

The next day, Monday, I called Mastercard as soon as their phone lines opened at 9.00am. As part of the never ending automated service before I could talk to a living person, I was given the opportunity to hear my current account balance. The balance was now a further £500 lower than it should have been.

When I was finally put through to him, the customer services guy told me that another £500 had been withdrawn from the same Bristol cashpoint machine that morning, twelve hours after I had telephone their emergency hotline to put a block on the account.

The operator told me that when I telephoned the day before I had asked for a block to be put on my card and Sally’s card, but not on the third card holder. He read me the name on the card. I was stunned. The identity of the third card holder was a mystery to me. I certainly hadn’t arranged for them to have a card.

After a little digging Mr. Customer Services told me that they had received a telephone call the week before. The caller had correctly answered all of my security questions, including an eight digit security number only known to Sally and I which isn’t written anywhere. The caller requested an additional card for the account to be sent to the account address – which the hacker had changed to an address in Bristol.

One of Mastercard’s security measures is to send an email to the account holder (me) in the event of the contact details being changed. The hacker anticipated this, hacked my Gmail account and set up a filter to delete all emails from Mastercard before they arrived in my inbox. Consequently I wasn’t aware that a change had been made.

Mr. Customer Services informed me that they will have to investigate the case before considering refunding the fraudulent withdrawals. In the meantime, yet again I have no bank account (and no money to put in one anyway), yet again I’m forced to use a laptop only slightly more advanced than the abacus and yet again I’ve had to send away my new laptop to try to get the malicious code removed.

I haven’t taken the laptop to PC World this time. I have no faith in them. I’ve taken it to a computer expert who will be able to resolve the issue. However, I’m sure that he’s going to charge me about £1,000.000 an hour for his services so it’s questionable whether I would be better off having the laptop fixed or just throwing it off a very high building and buying another… not that I now have any spare cash to buy it with.

I could take the laptop back to PC World and demand a new machine. However, I would have to prove that there was something wrong with it but I don’t know how to do that if the fault is a very well hidden key logger. Once upon a time I would have relished the opportunity to make a very big fuss inside the store. These days though I’m not so keen on going for a ride with the boys in blue. I want a quiet life. That’s why I live on a narrowboat.

Update 22nd May 2013: Fantastic news! I received a letter from Mastercard today. They said “We have already refunded your account with the unauthorised transactions”. It’s wonderful news. The refund has allowed me to have some scheduled work done on James that needs to done before I go on holiday on 1st June. I can relax a little now.

Update 23rd May 2013: When I spoke to Mastercard on Monday after they reassured me that the account was safe to use and that there was no way that anyone could access it to make changes including, frustratingly, myself, I agreed that they could reinstate both Sally’s card and my own. Reinstating the cards, I was assured, would be done at the click of a button.

Imagine my surprise then when Sally called me from the checkout queue at Tesco in Southam where she was waiting with a full trolly’s worth of bagged food to tell me that the card had been declined. She was understandably very unhappy. I called Mastercard and as I waited in the automated queue checked my account balance. The second surprise of the day was that the £1,000 that Mastercard had promised to put into my account wasn’t there.

When I queried this with the operator, I was told that they hadn’t put the money back in my account and simply sent me the wrong letter! They then admitted to a second mistake. They hadn’t reinstated Sally’s card after they promised they would. They corrected one of the errors by reinstating the card but told me that I would have to wait until they had concluded the investigation before there was any chance of getting my money back.

Update 24th May 2013: Mastercard called this afternoon. They have listened to the recording of the phone call I made when I reported the first unauthorised transaction and when I repeatedly asked the operator to ensure that the account was frozen. They agree that there was no doubt that the account suspension request was made so they have transferred the second unauthorised withdrawal back into my account.

Mastercard are going to investigate further before they decide whether to refund me for the first unauthorised withdrawal. Even though they sent me a letter advising me that the money was already back in the account, I think that I’ll be very lucky to get the money back. I’ve lost the money as a result of a sophisticated hack. I couldn’t have done any more to protect myself.

As a result of the hack, I’ve lost £500 from my bank account, I’ve spent dozens of hours reinstalling software, setting up new passwords, securing this site and taking and delivering my hacked laptop to and from PC World. As a result of the second attack, I’ve taken the laptop to a private software expert who has taken the hard drive out, given it a very thorough going over and then reinstalled the operating system. I’m reasonably (but not totally) confident that he’s cured the problem. However, he’s charged me £200 for the pleasure.

The work isn’t over yet. Sally will be picking up the laptop this evening when she finishes work. When I get my grubby little hands on it, I need to spend a further four our five hours installing my applications for a third time.

I’m so pleased that I live in an age where we have so much technology to make our lives easier.

A Case Study – Our Nige Takes Forty Winks

Nigel Buttery (Our Nige on the forum) is in his mid fifties, a registered care assistant and was, until very recently, an unhappy home owner. Like many visitors to this site, Nige wanted a boat of his own to live on. Unlike most, he’s seized the bull by the horns, sold his house, found a mooring where he can live on board and spent an exciting week taking his boat to its new home.

Our Nige has also taken the opportunity available to all site visitors to blog about his narrowboat experience. He’s written some very entertaining posts. Here’s his case study. There’s a chronological list of his blog entries at the bottom of the post.

Crick Show

It’s the end of May bank holiday and a long weekend when many narrowboat enthusiasts head for Crick and the biggest of the inland waterways boat shows. Crick is renowned for it’s poor weather so the continuous sunshine yesterday and day has been a very welcome bonus.

I’ll be there tomorrow (Monday 27th May) to help bring the Calcutt Boats stand back to the marina and to do a little shopping. Sally and I have been compiling our boating shopping list for the last couple of months. We’ll be looking at truncheon Fenders, front and rear button fenders, a BW style life jacket or two, some ceiling lights, a suitcase generator, rubber matting for the rear deck, and chrome mushroom vents and tiller. We can’t afford everything on the list but, with the discounts available on the last day of the show, we’ll be able to buy more than we could anywhere else. I’ll let you know how successful we were in next Sunday’s newsletter.

Next Sunday Sally and I are going on holiday. We’re taking James out for the first proper cruise since I moved on board three years ago. It’s taken me this long to be able to afford the repairs, additions and modifications to allow us to cruise confidently and comfortably. I’ll be updating the site each day as we cruise, very slowly, up to the end of the Ashby canal. We’re both very excited.

Comprehensive Site Article Listing

Useful Links

2013 05 19 Newsletter – Keeping Dry On The Cut

Living on a Narrowboat News 19th May 2013

I try not to upset people when I write the weekly newsletters. After all, living on a narrowboat is supposed to be a stress free alternative to living in a bricks and mortar home. I don’t always succeed though. I upset at least one couple with the account of my cruise back from Braunston to Calcutt two weeks ago. I met a brand new wide beam hotel boat heading towards Braunston which required some interesting maneuvering to pass it on a section of canal with boats moored along one side.

As a result of the account, a post was made on the forum complaining about my attitude towards wide beam boat owners in general and the owners of the Wessex Rose in particular. I’ve responded to the post but, just for clarification, please let me say that I have nothing against wide beams or their owners. However, wide beams do cause the same kind of holdups on the narrow canals that caravans and RV’s do on narrow country roads. They need to cruise with care at narrow passing places, of which there are many, at bends and at bridge holes. Because of this, they tend to create a tailback of slightly frustrated narrowboat owners.

So, if you are a narrowboat owner and I’ve offended you, I apologise. I try to ensure that the site is as friendly as possible for all visitors, and not just for narrowboat owners and enthusiasts. While we’re on the subject of wide beams, meet Rob…

There’s A New Blogger On The Site

Two months ago I added a new section to the forum to allow boat owners and those in the process of buying a boat to write about their experiences. The new blog sections is slowly gaining momentum. There are now half a dozen bloggers posting in this section. There are some fascinating posts in the new section now. There’s the full range of experience from long term liveaboard and continuous cruiser Peter Earley (Pearley on the forum) to the latest blogger, aspiring boat owner Rob.

Rob and his wife Manda are in the process of selling up and moving to a life on the water. Rob likes the idea of a wide beam because of the additional space it offers. Manda is quite happy with a narrowboat. Rob has added his first post to the blog section to introduce himself and to ask for advice from those who have advice to give. Can you help him out?

Keeping Dry On The Cut

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I love my job. When I wake up in the morning, I don’t really know what I’m going to do. I can be working on the grounds trying to keep all 110 acres both tidy and attractive for our 250+ moorers, instructing holiday hirers on the correct operation of their temporary floating homes, delivering engines to or collecting engines from boatyards up and down the country, releasing sheep trapped in brambles or boggy ground, emptying bins and clearing blockages in our sewage system (I don’t enjoy that very much) and, one of my favourite jobs, moving boats around the marina.

Our slipway is always very busy. Nearly every day we pull a boat out of the water for blacking or repairs. The boats need to be brought from their moorings before the work is done and returned once the work has been completed. Every year we black out own fleet of hire boats which involves taking them from the wharf, down through Calcutt Middle and Bottom locks and into Locks marina to the slipway and then back up the locks to the wharf once the work has been done. I’m actually paid for taking boats on short cruises and I love it.

There are ten online moorings at Calcutt; five below the Calcutt flight and five above it. On Tuesday I had to take a boat from the wharf to one of the online moorings above the lock flight and next to the reservoir. It’s usually moored with the bow pointing down stream so it had to be returned to the mooring as it was found.

In calm conditions it’s possible to come out of the top lock, use the winding hole to turn the boat 180 degrees and reverse it 100m to its mooring. Tuesday was quite windy so the alternative to reversing the narrowboat in a strong cross wind was to take it half a mile to Napton junction where I could turn around and then cruise back to the mooring pointing in the right direction. Not only was Tuesday windy, it was also very wet.

By the time I reached Napton junction I was soaked and just a little bit fed up until I looked at my experience from a different angle.

It’s spring and the canal was beautiful. There was new life everywhere. The hawthorn lining one side of the bank were in full and beautiful bloom, bowing over the few remaining daffodils. I passed a mallard with five chicks followed a little further on by a pair of swans with week old signets. The rain glistened on the vivid green foliage framing my view of acres of water and hundreds of birds on Napton reservoir. What’s more, I was cruising and I was being paid to do it.

I really enjoyed the short cruise back to the mooring. The rain enhanced rather than spoiled my experience. If I had been wearing decent waterproofs I could have happily cruised all day.

Not many boaters cruise in the rain. I think it’s usually because of the unpleasant sensation of standing immobile in wet and increasingly cold and uncomfortable clothing. I’ve spent many years as a keen hill walker and at a different stage of my life as a keen angler. I’ve had more than my fair share of uncomfortable days in wet clothing. I’ve tried a huge variety of waterproofs from low tech oilskins to the latest breathable fabrics.

Oilskins are completely waterproof. You can stand all day in the heaviest rain without getting wet… until you generate some body heat. When I wore my oilskins as I remained stationary for hours at a time on board a boat when I was fishing offshore, the oilskins worked perfectly. However, if I was fishing from the shore constantly moving as I retreated before the incoming tide, the oilskins were very unpleasant to wear. I was frequently soaked by the sweat retained by the none breathable waterproofs.

In later years I often loaded up a 75 litre rucksack and disappeared into the Scottish Highlands for a week at a time to enjoy some much needed solitude. I had a little more money to spend on waterproof clothing than I did in my youth so I invested in the best waterproof and breathable clothing that I could find. I was never completely happy with any of it.

Scotland is often a very wet place to walk and even the best breathable waterproofs struggled to keep the rain out. Oilskins weren’t an option because walking all day long carrying a 40 – 50lb pack would have resulted in torrents of sweat running down the insides of waterproofs.

Now my passion is boating and it’s the style of boating that involves standing very still on the back of a boat for hours on end. The situation is ideal for oilskins so I’ve just invested in the best oilskins I could find. I’ve bought heavy duty oilskins favoured by trawlermen. They are a Guy Cotten X Trapper jacket and a pair of heavy duty bib & brace trousers. I can now enjoy cruising the canals of rainy England in comfort. The downside is that they won’t be practical for lock work. Sally will have to do that. I haven’t told her yet.

Reducing Unnecessary Expenditure – Do You Really Need A Car?

I gave my car away last week. It’s gone to my ex wife so that she can put the proceeds of the sale towards university fees for our children. I am now without a car of my own since I passed my driving test in 1977 which, incidentally, was when my boat was built. In the last 36 years on the road I’ve always had a car. In recent years I had a Toyota Previa for five years (for the children) followed by a Nissan Pathfinder for another five years (for showing off) before my last car a Seat Altea 2.0 TDI FR (for no particular reason).

I loved the car. After a decade of big cars, the Seat was a pleasant and nippy change. It was comfortable to drive, was fast, good to look at and totally unnecessary.

In the last 12 months the car has cost me £1,900. I owned the car so the costs where for tax, insurance, repairs and maintenance and fuel. I suspect that if I had kept the car for another year, the annual cost would have been far higher. The brake pads needed replacing, all four tyres where on their way out and the car, only six years old, wasn’t keen on starting in the mornings.

Before I decided to get rid of my car, I had to think seriously whether I needed one. Sally has a car. It’s a very reliable Honda Civic. Sally works shifts so our days off don’t always coincide. When we’re off together, we go out together so we can use her car. When she’s working and I’m off, like today, I won’t have access to a car but I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.

I don’t particularly enjoy going to the shops. I love the feeling of peace and tranquility that living on a narrowboat affords me. I’m now more used to the company of pigeons that people and I much prefer life this way. I don’t actually need to go to the shops very often. With the technology available to me, I can ask the shops to come to me.

I do a great deal of shopping online. I’m a big fan of Amazon. I can buy just about anything I need from. Their system is excellent; products are easy to find, are accurately rated and with predictable or zero delivery fees. If I can’t find anything on Amazon, I can usually find it on eBay. My experience with eBay is almost as good as it is with Amazon.

I actually enjoy food shopping, but I don’t really need to visit the stores. When I do physically walk down the isles, I’m a prolific impulse buyer. I fall for the supermarket’s product placement tricks all the time. It’s far safer for me to do my grocery shopping online.

Whenever I make a decision about the boat or my lifestyle these days it’s always with my goal in mind. My goal is for Sally and I to cruise full time. I don’t think that we are many years away from achieving our goal. Will we want the hassle of dragging a car or two along with us on our travels when we go? I don’t think so.

A car is convenient but it’s not a necessity. I don’t know how many of the 2,000 plus genuine continuous cruisers own vehicles but I know that there are hundreds, maybe thousands who manage without. The genuine continuous cruisers are the few lucky narrowboat owners who don’t need to work or who are able to work from their boat wherever they are on the system. The genuine continuous cruisers enjoy a progressive and constant journey throughout the network. They have overcome the logistics of restocking on board food and medicinal supplies, laundry requirements and postal collections. If they need a car, which they don’t very often, they simply hire one. I intend to join the happy few. Getting rid of my car and reducing my outgoings is another step closer.

Please, Take A Seat

Site user Susan emailed me. She has a couple of leather captain’s chairs for sale. I don’t know anything about them other than that. If you would like a couple for your boat, or if you would like to pretend you’re on a boat while you’re sitting in your lounge, please get in touch with Susan directly.

New Forum Section

I’ve added the newsletter archive to the forum. You can find it here. Every week when I send out the newsletter, I’ll also post it on the forum. You’ll have all of the newsletters listed by date in one handy section, and you’ll be able to comment on the content in a place where others can respond. You can also use this section to ask for topics to be included in the newsletter. If there’s a subject you don’t think I’ve covered in enough detail, or at all, elsewhere on the site, please use this section to suggest its addition.

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2013 05 12 Newsletter – An Interview With The Trust’s Head Of Boating

Living on a Narrowboat News 12th May 2013

I’m always amazed how quickly you make new friends on the cut. After years of living and working in London where even my immediate neighbours were strangers, the easy going and approachable nature of most liveaboard narrowboat owners is truly refreshing.

I spent a very pleasant couple of hours on Monday evening with new narrowboat owners Keith and Gui (pronounced Gee as in geese) on their new Calcutt built Clipper. I first met Keith and Gui last October when they hired one of our boats for a week’s cruise on the Ashby canal. Like many of our hirers, they enjoyed the trip so much that they told me they were going to look into buying a boat of their own and adopting the nomadic lifestyle of continuous cruisers. Unlike most, their suggestion was more than idle talk.

Keith retired from his well paid but far too stressful job in anthropology three years ago. He’s been living with his partner Gui, an ex jet setting travel agent, at her home in Portugal after leaving his native New Zealand. He loved the relaxed lifestyle in the Portuguese village on the coast about half an hour’s drive from Lisbon. He loved the lifestyle, but not nearly as much as he’s always loved the idea of cruising the canals and rivers of England and Wales.

They’ve been on their new boat for less than a week and they’re enjoying every minute of it. They drove to Calcutt from Gui’s home so they were able to bring a few “essentials” with them. I love port so I was in heaven when I sampled the three different types they brought with them, along with a delicious cheese made from goat, sheep and cows’ milk.

I don’t think there’s a better way of passing an hour or two than sitting on a boat’s deck on a warm spring evening, drinking fine wine, eating exquisite food and enjoying stimulating conversation. It’s what living on a narrowboat is all about.

The Wessex Rose Hotel Boat Update

Last Sunday I wrote about the just launched Wessex Rose hotel boat. At 70′ long, 12′ wide and 50 tonnes it’s a rather cumbersome boat to move through the network. Even though the Grand Union is a “wide” canal – it has locks which can accommodate two narrowboats at a time, or one widebeam – there are very few wide beam boats using it.

Although cruising on a wide beam boat is possible on the canal network, it isn’t always pleasant. The canals are usually very shallow away from the main channel which is kept silt free by the continual passage of narrowboats. A wide beam boat will often straddle the deeper channel, especially at bridge holes and narrow passing places, and necessitates ploughing through the muddy canal bottom.

I met the hotel boat as I cruised back from Braunston at a narrow spot with boats moored against the towpath. The Wessex Rose is to narrowboat owners what a nervous caravan tower on a winding country roads is to car drivers. There was a queue of frustrated narrowboat owners moving at a snail’s pace behind the barely moving monstrosity.

The hotel boat’s owners were highly stressed. Not only did they have to contend with dragging their new boat through the silty bottom, but they also had to absorb the tirade of comments from the boats behind them, the moored boats they passed and the narrowboats travelling in the opposite direction.

I met them at Flecknoe where they only had to deal with boats moored against the towpath. I suspect they would have had far more problems with both navigation and criticism from nearby boaters when they reached Braunston. The approach to the junction from all three directions has boats moored on both canal banks. There’s just enough room for two narrowboats to pass each other. There isn’t enough room for a narrowboat and a broad beam boat to pass. They owners looked stressed when I passed them. They would be approaching a nervous breakdown by the time they had negotiated Braunston.

The Wessex Rose is heading down to the K & A where they intend to take high paying passengers on relaxing short breaks along the rivers Kennet and Avon and the Kennet & Avon canal. There are some very narrow stretches on the K & A and plenty of moored boats. I hope that the passengers travelling on the hotel boat aren’t subject to the same stress as the owners.

An Interview With The Trust’s Head Of Boating.

On Friday I spoke to Sally Ash, the Canal & River Trust’s Head of Boating. I regularly receive emails and respond to forum posts about residential moorings and how to find them. I think I know the answers to site visitors’ questions but I thought it was about time I asked for confirmation. Sally was the perfect person to talk to.

When applying for a license for a narrowboat, owners are asked to either confirm that they have a home mooring or abide by the guidelines for continuous cruising. A home mooring can cost in excess of £2,000 a year, rising to two or three times that figure in and around London. Many boaters are either unwilling or unable to pay for a home mooring, or simply can’t find one which will enable them to legally live on board full time.

The license guidelines state that a boat owner cannot stay in one place for longer than 14 days, or less as indicated on some visitor moorings. Some boaters, in a mistaken attempt to comply with the mooring guidelines, move their boats backwards and forwards between two points in order to stay in the same geographical location so that they are close to work or to schools. Continuous cruisers are required to move every fourteen days as part of a linear progressive journey although, to date, the distance that a boat needs to move as part of the journey isn’t specified because of the difficulty the Trust has defining locations on the cut. The Trust are in the process are in the process of defining clear geographic areas on maps which will be made available to boaters and which will enable the authorities to qualify distance moved.

Some continuous cruisers simply don’t move at all. They are referred to by the Trust as None Compliant Continuous Cruisers or NCCC. They stay in one spot on the towpath, often as part of a community of other NCCC boaters. Out of the 35,000 narrowboats on the canal and river network, 13.4% or 4,700 are registered as not having a home mooring and are therefore obliged to cruise continuously. Sally believes that as many as 50% are NCCC boaters.

Finding a suitable legal mooring for a liveaboard narrowboat is a considerable hurdle to overcome for many would be boat owners. There are relatively few residential moorings available either online (along the side of the canal or offline (in a marina). Most of the Trust owned canal-side moorings are defined as leisure moorings and are not supposed to be used for residential use. However, the Trust are quite relaxed about boat owners living on leisure moorings full time. They are aware of the shortage of official residential moorings and also feel that the canal is a more attractive and more secure environment than lines of empty boats.

While the Trust are happy to allow boaters to stay full time on their leisure moorings, they aren’t happy at all when boat owners over stay their welcome on visitor moorings. The Trust currently employs enforcement team of 50 officers who patrol the towpath to monitor boat movement. The areas of greatest concern at the moment are the Grand Union south of Milton Keynes , the south Oxford and the western end of the K & A. The problem is so acute in these areas that navigation is difficult and vacant visitor moorings are few and far between.

In order to deal with long term NCCCs, the Trust are about to launch a pilot scheme in the London area. The scheme will grant a license to existing none compliant cruisers which will allow them to legally “bridge hop” (move backwards and forwards between two or more points). This scheme will only apply to currently known long term NCCCs. Any new boats using the network which flout the rules will be identified and ultimately served with enforcement notices.

So why is there such a shortage of residential moorings when there are so many vacant moorings, particularly in marinas? Sally says it’s all down to the local authorities. A leisure mooring doesn’t need planning consent. A residential mooring requires a change of land use. Many marinas are on green belt land so the local authorities are unwilling to give consent.

Local authorities are becoming slightly more flexible with linear moorings, The Trust are working with them to identify suitable residential moorings along the canal, especially in congested areas such as the Grand Union south of Milton Keynes.

The Trust acknowledge that they have a difficult task ahead of them. For many years NCCCs have been left to their own devices. There are many communities of static continuous cruisers. There are between 500 and 1,000 NCCC cases open at any one time. The Trust will, in extreme circumstances, remove these boats from the water. However, as the boat owners live on board full time, the courts are often reluctant to sanction boat removal and the boat owners subsequent loss of their homes.

The message is clear, if you live on your boat but don’t cruise and don’t have a registered home mooring, you are breaking the rules as the Trust are concerned, but they are prepared to talk to you to discuss a solution. But if you’ve only recently declared on your license that you’re going to cruise continuously, you need to make sure that’s exactly what you do.

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2013 05 05 Newsletter – Narrowboat Fuel Tank Range And An Encounter With Snakes

Living on a Narrowboat News 5th May 2013

I took James out for another cruise last week. I was out for longer but didn’t travel as far, not did I have nearly as much fun. I took James along to our workshops to have some more work on the engine.

River Canal Rescue serviced my engine a couple of weeks ago. It’s an old but ever so reliable Mercedes OM 636. It’s done just 4,000 hours. I understand that it’s considered young and that I can reasonably expect 20,000 hours from it. In fact, the engine should outlast me. However, it needs some TLC.

I can’t ever see myself stripping it down to its component parts and putting it back together again, but I do need to be able to clean and change the fuel filter. I couldn’t get near the fuel filter up until now. It’s positioned at the front of the engine, low down, and very close to the bulkhead between the engine room and the bedroom. Both the RCR engineer and one of our own engineers have struggled to get it off to clean it. RCR recommended that I install a more conveniently placed pre-filter and that I have the fuel lines rerouted. At the moment they run underneath the engine which means that they too are inaccessible and are subject to damage from the ballast bars which lay on top of them.

In order to change the fuel lines, engineer Jim had to drain the fuel tank. It was a slow process because there was a lot of diesel to drain. Before I went out on last week’s cruise to Braunston, I checked the fuel level. I didn’t know how much the tank held, noticed that there was a bit of a gap between the surface of the fuel and the top of the tank so I added another 25 litres. I needn’t have bothered. Jim removed about 32o litres from the tank. It’s a huge amount of fuel.

I don’t yet know how much fuel my engine uses but I know that the consumption will be between 1.0 and 1.5 litres per hour when I’m cruising. Using the conservative figure of 1.5 litres per hour, the diesel will last me for 213 hours. At a speed of 3mph there’s enough in the tank to take me and my floating home 639 miles.

I could cruise for seven hours a day for a full month up to Lancaster and back, travelling 446 miles, opening and closing 208 locks and passing through ten tunnels. I could do all of this without stopping for fuel. And then, if I still had any energy left, I could head south from Calcutt to Bristol. I would cruise for another fortnight at seven hours a day to travel the 184 miles and 162 locks before I had to look for diesel.

My tank holds a lot of fuel. I can’t wait to use it all!

Jim was called away on an emergency job so he couldn’t finish the work on Tuesday when I took James in so we had to stay overnight in one of our covered double docks. We didn’t have the views that we’re used to and enjoy so much. A polythene tunnel is a very poor alternative to grassy banks and an island covered by trees in their early spring splendour, but I still loved the few seconds of confusion when I woke up knowing that my house was somewhere different but not quite sure where.

A Picnic With Snakes

I spent most of Friday working on James. Steven Cox, our buyer, is very good with electrics. He’s been promising to fit my inverter for a while now. He agreed to do the work on Friday. The engine room was a bit of a mess after the fuel lines were rerouted earlier in the week so I took James up from the marina through two locks to the wharf where we keep the Big Brute. It’s a wet vacuum cleaner the size of a small house which we use for vacuuming the hire fleet engine bays. A couple of hours with the Brute, a tin of degreaser and a stiff hand brush had the engine and its surroundings looking better than it has for years.

Back on the mooring, Steve spent a couple of hours connecting the inverter and adding a changeover switch and a new shore line to comply with Boat Safety Scheme regulation. That’s nearly all of the electrical work done for now. I’m still running on just two 135amp domestic batteries plus a 110amp starter. I have two more 135amp batteries in the engine room. I’m waiting for the leads to be delivered before I can add them to the battery bank.

It was mid afternoon before the various jobs were finished. I really don’t know where the time goes. I’m always up at 5am, but then the day flashes by. Maybe I should get up earlier.

Friday was warm and sunny so Sally and I decided to have a picnic on the grass next to the woods. Last winter I removed a fence from the edge of the woods. The extensive grassed area adjacent to Meadows marina now merges with the mixed woodland and provides a beautiful and tranquil spot to spend a few hours relaxing.

While we eat our picnic of chile spiced sausages on buttered baps and fiery chicken wings with salad, Charlie and Daisy played along the tree line. Charlie is always finding creatures to annoy. One of his great pleasures last year was night-time hedgehog rolling. We often see them in the warmer months after dark on the marina embankment. As soon as they see Charlie, they roll into a ball. As soon as they roll into a ball, Charlie tips them down the marina bank. Charlie loves the game. I don’t think the hedgehogs are so keen.

We’re used to Charlie discovering spiders, worms, crane flies, frogs and, of course, hedgehogs. We noticed that he’d found something but didn’t really pay him much attention. After five minutes of jumping up and down and pouncing on a pile of leaves though I went to see what the fuss was about. I couldn’t see anything so I left Charlie to his game.

After a few more minutes of pouncing at leaves closer and closer to where we sat, I had another look. There was no mistaking what he had found this time though, a large and very unhappy looking grass snake. Charlie wanted to play. The grass snake didn’t and was quite vocal about it.

I now had Charlie jumping up and down in excitement, Daisy running around in pointless circles and Sally looking for the nearest tree to climb. Sally doesn’t like snakes with very good reason. She was born in the Philippines where there are a considerable number of snakes far more unpleasant than our completely harmless grass snakes and barely venomous adders. They have 179 species of snake, fourteen of which are venomous. They have a Krait which can kill you in under two seconds and a very aggressive, highly venomous Philippine cobra which only needs to spit at you to kill you.

Sally doesn’t like snakes.

After the poor terrified grass snake escaped into the undergrowth, I calmed the dogs down, helped Sally down out of the tree and reassured her that our snakes, like just about everything else in the UK, are far less harmful than anywhere else in the world, I suggested a walk in the woods. The look she gave me was far more dangerous than any of the snakes in the Philippines. I’ll have to work on that one.

Out On The Cut Again

There’s no holding us back now. Sally and I are out again today. I’m determined to do justice to the diesel tank’s hanger-like dimensions. Mind you, I’ve just worked out that if I only travel the five hours to Braunston and back once a week, and I make the trip every week until the tank runs dry, I won’t need to top up with diesel until 28th February 2014!

It’s such a joy to be out at this time of the year. There are some beautiful places to moor just a stone’s throw away from Calcutt; just about anywhere on the six mile stretch between Calcutt and Braunston will do, above the Napton flight on the south Oxford or on the GU before the Stockton flight. We love the cruise to Braunston because, with limited time available, we can enjoy a couple of hours of lock free cruising after we’ve passed through the thee locks of the Calcutt flight.

At the moment we’re moored near Napton Junction. It’s not as peaceful as it was last week. I should have expected far more boats about as it’s a bank holiday weekend but there are a lot of people cruising this weekend.

I still haven’t sorted out the problem I had last week with my dongle aerial. I’ve bought the fairleads which, when fitted, will keep the centre rope from snagging both the aerial and the vent over my water heater. Yesterday though I had to keep an eye on the rope to make sure that it didn’t sweep everything off the roof when we were tied up in the lock. As an added security meas.ure I removed the dongle from its fitting and put it in my pocket.

We moored up and, because I’m obsessed with keeping in touch with you, dear reader, my first job was to reconnect my broadband dongle. I couldn’t find it, but I did find a very large hole in the pocket I had carefully placed it. Sally and I ran the mile back to the Calcutt flight asking passing boats and walkers if they had seen a black dongle. The only response was confused and slightly hostile stares.

Back at Calcutt Middle lock we found it laying on the grass by the upstream paddle. I was very lucky.I think I’ll keep the dongle inside the boat in the future.

We ate well last night. Sally’s special spare ribs, beef noodles and sticky rice. All washed down with a couple of glasses of Wolf Blass and a pair of swans with their brand new signets to keep us company. After dinner I sat down to do a bit of work on the site, delighted that I didn’t need to worry about my laptop battery dying as, thanks to the new inverter, I had mains power… for about an hour. The inverter died. I scratched my head for a while before I realised that I had left a 500w heater plugged in when I switched over to the inverter. The heater didn’t take long to drain 2 x 135amp batteries. As it was about 8.30pm and as we had been joined on our tranquil mooring by two other boats, I couldn’t fire up the engine to charge the batteries again. I gave up for the evening, got up this morning at 5.00am as usual and took the dogs for a long walk along the canal until 7.00am when I could start charging the batteries.

We set off for Braunston at 10.00am. It was an enjoyable but slow cruise. Every man and his dog were out on the cut. Every blind bend and bridge hole was a game of Russian roulette. We managed to get by with just one slight bump and no damage done. Braunston was very busy. Actually I should say, Braunston is very busy. I’m still there. We’ve done a bit of shopping at Midland Chandlers, had a coffee at the Boat House. Now we’re back at the boat. Sally and her friend, Sheila, are basking in the spring sunshine on the front deck while Sheila gives Sally a manicure. We’ll go for a walk later on before an early tea and a sedate cruise back to the marina.

I can’t wait for the beginning of June and our two weeks away from the mooring.

The UK’s Largest Inland Waterways Hotel Boat

We had a rather large visitor at Calcutt yesterday, the just launched hotel boat Wessex Rose. It’s a monster of a boat at 70′ long, 12′ wide and weighing in at a rather hefty 50 tonnes. The Wessex Rose was launched yesterday at Stockton. They pulled in to fill up with diesel. They were with us for quite a while. The tank took 1,000 litres. It’s a monster of a boat which tends to get in the way of other boats. Sadly, they discovered the hard way just how difficult it is for other boats to pass around it. One boat caught their bow a glancing blow as the Wessex Rose maneuvered onto the wharf. Only a couple of hours after launch, they had a foot long scrape through the sign writing on the bow.

The boat is heading south where it will cruise with up to six paying passengers on the Kennett & Avon. I imagine that it’s a very comfortable boat to cruise on in luxury (each of the three passenger cabins has an en suite bathroom) but I wouldn’t like to try to pass it on some of the narrower stretches of the K & A). You can read about the Wessex Rose here.

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2013 04 28 Newsletter – Narrowboat Blogs

Living on a Narrowboat News 28th April 2013

I’ve been reading Our Nige’s blog, Steppin’ Out, with great interest and a certain amount of nostalgia. He picked up his new floating home last Sunday and over the last week has been learning all about the boat as he cruised towards Mercia marina. He reminded me of my first cruise down the south Oxford and onto the Thames.

I had only been working at Calcutt Boats, was still living on dry land, and didn’t know much about narrowboats at all. I was given the job of transporting one of our new clippers, a Calcutt Boats built 50′ cruiser stern narrowboat, to the IWA National Festival at Beale Park on the Thames. To say that I was under prepared for the cruise was an understatement.

I took my then twelve year old son, Brook, with me to help with the locks, lift and swing bridges and coffee making duties. I loved every minute of the adventure, and what an adventure it was!

We set off early in the morning on the first day, passed through Calcutt Top Lock from where the clipper had been moored on the wharf, stopped briefly to eject the stowaway site cat that had sneaked on board at some stage and very nervously cruised along a tranquil waterway before coming to our first narrow lock on the south Oxford at Napton.

This was the second time in my life that I had operated a lock (The first had been at Calcutt half an hour earlier). I enthusiastically raised the paddle to let the water out of the lock. Too enthusiastically as it happened as I hadn’t secured the clipper to the bollard correctly and, before I noticed anything wrong, the boat had drifted away from the bank and down the canal taking a very confused twelve year old with it. A couple on a boat moored close to the lock brought both boat and son back to me with a smile and a laugh.

It was a very wet August. By mid morning I was so wet and cold that I could hardly think. Of course, I hadn’t brought any waterproofs with me. I had to stop the boat for two hours so that I could light the fire and warm up. As feeling returned to my extremities I looked out of the window as I dressed for the next leg of the journey… to find that one of the mooring stakes had pulled free from the soft earth and I was broadside across the canal. Another lesson learned.

Over the next four days the adventure continued; we were pinned to the bank by the wind in Banbury, had to extract ourselves from a reed bed when I tried to get out of the path of a working boat and butty, had to stop for four hours while the police pulled a body out of the canal, and had the joy of trying to negotiate a lift bridge that was too heavy for Brook to raise on his own.

We moored in some idyllic spots away from the noise and the stress of the “civilised” world. It was my first experience of the peace and quiet of rural canal moorings and I loved it. And then I joined the Thames.

What a shock! After 49 miles of gently winding canal I nosed out onto the scary and oh-so-wide Thames at Isis lock junction. Although I had become reasonably proficient over the preceding three days on the canal, the river was a different kettle of fish. I immediately headed for the very large and very clear signs warning me to keep clear of the weir and was instantly pinned against the safety barrier put there to prevent idiots like me from being swept over it.

I was pulled free, helped into a lock large enough to take a dozen boats and prevented from going any further down the Thames until my “trade plate” license was checked. Eventually I was allowed through the lock. The remaining 30 miles downstream to Beale Park was exhilarating With the current helping me, I cruised at more than twice the speed I had on the canal and I had so much more space to play on than I had on the Oxford. We eventually found a bank side mooring on the Thames for our last night. We tried and failed four or five times because of the shallow water next to the bank.

The cruise only lasted four days but we covered eighty miles, forty canal locks, ten river locks and eighteen swing or lift bridges. The first three days were ten or eleven hour cruises; the last day was a rather tiring thirteen hour stretch. The last hour and a half of the final full day was spent looking for a suitable mooring on the gently shelving Thames riverbank. It was a great adventure. I loved every minute of it. I can’t wait for regular cruises in the future.

A Day Trip To Braunston

After I wrote the above introduction I realised that, although I can’t afford the time off work to enjoy a multi day cruise at the moment, there’s nothing stopping us from going out for the day now and then. My home mooring Calcutt Boat’s stunning Meadows marina is the perfect starting point for many different routes.

If I turn left out of our marina, I’m on the Grand Union heading west to Leamington Spa and Warwick and then on to Birmingham. If I turn right, go through the Calcutt flight and cruise half a mile to Napton Junction, I can turn left to Braunston or right to head south on the Oxford canal towards Oxford and the Thames.

I decided to take James out for a day and a night to see how the engine fared after its recent overhaul. Here’s my trip.

New Forum Section

Your Own (Free) Narrowboat Blog

Talking of new additions to the site, about a month ago I offered any site user their own blog section on the site so that they can create a lasting memory of their own boating experience. One or two have already taken me up on the offer. I would like to introduce you to one of them, Our Nige as he is on the forum.

Nige’s dream was to own and live on a narrowboat. Even though he wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing, he bought his boat and he’s now on day seven or eight of his maiden voyage back to his home mooring at Mercia marina. If you’re thinking about buying a narrowboat, even if you’re only going to use it for recreational cruising, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the detail in his blog posts, and his determination to try every different drop of local beer at the end of a day’s cruise.

Here’s the first of Nige’s blog posts. You can follow the blog’s progress through the forum here.

If you’re in the process of seriously moving to a life afloat and you would like your own blog please read this post and then get in touch with me. I can have you up and running in about ten minutes.

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2013 04 21 Newsletter – The Trust Target Illegal Moorers

Living on a Narrowboat News 21st April 2013

I’ve suffered quite badly with wind over the last week. Fortunately for Sally and the dogs not the type of wind that involves a furtive spray up and down the boat with an air freshener. Real wind, the sort of wind that encourages full time boater to stay on mooring rather than cruise.

It’s been a very windy week. On Wednesday night we had gusts of 40mph. Both Sally and I had trouble sleeping. The starboard rear fender hangs close to our bed. In addition to the howling wind, we had the pleasure of the rhythmic squeak of rubber fender on wooden jetty as the boat bobbed on the marina waves.

The following day I had to move several boats around the marina. Calcutt Boats’ Meadows marina is windy at the best of times, but boating on Thursday was a real challenge. Taking boats off their moorings and moving them to the relative calm behind the workshops wasn’t too much of a problem, but returning them to their berths was a real test of nerve.

It’s essential when steering a narrowboat to use the wind rather than fight against it. Because of its flat bottom, a narrowboat doesn’t hold a line, it skates across the surface at the whim of anything more than a gentle breeze. To maintain any kind of control it’s necessary to steer into the wind to slow the boat down rather than with the wind and reduce your ability to stop effectively.

Because the moorings that I needed to get on had the stiff breeze blowing from the port side, I had allow for the wind and steer the boat, with a considerable amount of throttle, towards the rear of the boat on the adjacent mooring and hope that the wind didn’t drop at the wrong moment. Fortunately the wind blew the bow around until, just at the right moment, it was pointing directly into the boat’s own berth. No bumps, no scrapes, and no need to change my underwear.

Identity Theft – The Gift That Keeps On Giving

As you know, a couple of weeks ago I had my laptop hacked and, among many other problems, my bank account compromised. The account was closed immediately, funds transferred to a new account and a new debit card was sent to me in the post. Unfortunately for me, the bank doesn’t appear to have enough fields in whatever application they use to record addresses. When my new card hadn’t arrived after a week I phoned their call centre to discover that the bank had sent my card to an incomplete address. I corrected the address for them, or rather, told them which parts of the address they already had would need displaying on the envelope to stand a chance of reaching me. They promised to send me another card.

The new card arrived yesterday. It didn’t work. I called the bank to ask why. They told me that the first card had been returned to them marked “Address Unknown”. Consequently, they blocked my account “in case the card was interfered with in the post”. They now have to issue a third card, hopefully to the right address, which won’t reach me before the end of next week. Oh the joys of modern banking!

A New Image For The Site – Tell Me What You Think

At enormous personal expense and after months of design, redesign and revisions, I have a new logo for the site. Actually, the whole process took less than a week and cost very little but I’m very pleased with the result. I gave the designer a blank canvas to work with. I told her that I wanted the logo to look professional but informal, both striking and relaxing and to reflect the rural aspect of narrowboat life. Do you think she’s cracked it? Do you like the logo? Please take under a minute to let me know. Before you go to the survey, please look at the logo at the top of the page. Is it too large, too small or just right?

The Trust Target Illegal Moorers

I received an email from site subscriber Roland last week. Like many site visitors he’s considering buying and living on a narrowboat. He’s reached the stage where he’s actively looking for a boat to buy but there’s one thing holding him back; the availability of residential moorings.He sent me an update on the mooring situation in his part of the world. Here’s his email…

“I cycled up the grand union today from the village I live in to Leighton Buzzard. On the way back I saw an old chap painting his boat and stopped to talk with him. What he said was very interesting. I can’t recall where you are based (Midlands ?), but the world of narrowboating in the south is changing and, it appears, becoming a bit of a nightmare unless you can find yourself a proper residential / long term mooring… and that is becoming a very expensive option.

He said that the amount of people on narrowboats now mooring up on the towpath is causing problems.He knows of at least 3 people who work in the city and earn mega bucks but are living on a narrowboat as it’s cheaper than in the city, but whom have little real interest in canal way of life. He went on to say that, because of this growing influx of people mooring up on the towpaths, the people with money enough to have their boats in southern based marinas, costing them a pretty penny, have caused a stink with the CRT as they dislike the idea of them paying big fees when people are mooring up at random along the towpaths.

To combat this the Trust now have inspectors on bikes.They no longer do the old two week check; they are out every 4 days in teams cycling the towpaths and keeping tabs on who’s where and moving people on. You then have to move several miles and you are not allowed back for a couple of months to that spot and you have to move every two weeks. If you don’t move, they will fine you £25 per day and then if you still fail to move they can seize your boat and auction it off.

All a tad scary and I guess the need to ensure you have proper residential moorings is now even more important than ever. The problem with that is that there just aren’t enough proper moorings and when they do become available, there is this auction system here (which I mentioned previously) where people bid for a place and the price gets silly. The last one I witnessed ended up more than my flat rental for the year! I’d love to live on a narrowboat, and to get involved in the way of life completely. I’m the kind of person who would get involved properly and help out with the canal and land etc, but I’d have to be balmy to pay more for a mooring alone, than my rent on quiet little two bed one up one down in a sleepy village.

He also mentioned that where people used to have ‘end of garden’ mooring rights, since the Trust took over, they are now making them pay 50% of the standard fees. In fact he works for a farmer who owns fields along the canal. The farmer offered him free mooring on his field side (even though there is no water, electricity or path) but the CRT said no and wanted to charge him £1000 for the right.

The old chap now plans to sell up, get a 55 ft steel boat to replace his current boat and move up north where he used to live. He said up there the authorities generally leave you alone and don’t bother as much as they do down here.I guess it’s because we are in the London commuter area in a way. prices go up and no doubt even though there are a lot of real people on the narrowboats down here there appear to be too many wealthy people “playing” at being boaters. What a shame!”

I speak to many boaters either through this site or when they pull into Calcutt for services. The Trust appear to be tightening up on their mooring policy throughout the network. I want the information I share with you to be 100% accurate though so next week I hope to speak to the Trust’s head of boating .

RCR Engine Servicing

You’ve probably heard about River Canal Rescue or RCR as they’re more often known. They’re the inland waterways’ equivalent of the AA/RAC. With my limited practical skills and with a narrowboat engine which is far from standard, membership is essential. I asked them to carry out a service on my Mercedes OM 636. I don’t know when it was last serviced properly but it’s been many years. My boat, James, came to Calcutt Boats in 1997 after being lovingly maintained and used for twenty years by the London based Illiffe family. After reaching Calcutt, James was rarely used or serviced.

I moved onto James in 2010 and treated the boat as a floating house. As finances allowed I slowly improved the boat . I want to do some proper cruising this year. I understand that my engine is a very good engine but it is thirty six years old and hasn’t been well looked after for the latter part of its long life. It needs some TLC.

One of RCR’s longest serving engineers, Kerry, arrived last Wednesday at 10.30am to carry out the service. From the moment I met him I was confident that he knew his stuff. He couldn’t have been more helpful, even though there was a considerable amount of quiet swearing when he tried to remove the very badly positioned fuel filter.

The expected hour long service actually took Kerry three and a half hours. He was very helpful throughout and explained some basic engine maintenance that I wasn’t even aware of. In addition to being a slightly unusual engine, my Mercedes is also raw water cooled. This means that the engine, rather than using its own water as a coolant, draws water from the canal or river. The water passes through a weed trap before continuing to the engine. I didn’t know the boat had a weed trap, let alone the need to clear it out on a daily basis when cruising!

Kerry also identified several areas where I need to have remedial work carried out. I had been experiencing problems with the engine dropping in and out of drive. I knew that this is a symptom of having low or no oil in the gearbox. I’d had the gearbox oil topped up a few weeks previously but I still had the same problem afterwards. I thought I was going to have to get the PRM gearbox refurbished at great expense. Kerry identified that one of the two gearbox cooler pipes had perished and that the gearbox oil was bubbling out through it when the engine was on. I needed one or both of the cooler pipes changing, and not the gearbox. What a relief.

He found an injector pipe with a minor leak and strongly suggested that the engine’s fuel lines were rerouted. They currently run under the engine and under the engine room ballast. It’s not a good place to route delicate copper fuel pipes. The rerouted fuel pipes would also allow a pre-filter to be fitted somewhere more accessible than the current position where it is almost impossible to change even for an experienced engineer.

Kerry’s summary of my engine was very reassuring. With just over 4,000 hours on the clock – an average of just 111 hours a year over the last 36 years – my Mercedes is still a baby. It’s good for 20,000 hours so there’s a lot of life left in it yet. At £145 for the service, which included an additional £15 for genuine parts, I think I received real value for money. For many of you, the opportunity to spend hours tinkering with your engine will please you no end. For me, with very little aptitude in that direction, RCR’s assistance was invaluable.

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2013 04 14 Newsletter – Mobile Broadband Allowance On Narrowboats

Living on a Narrowboat News 14th April 2013

Last week I reported that my laptop was hacked into and my identity stolen. I think I’m back on track now, but there was one further quite scary additional development. I had an email from Google to let me know that my site was producing phishing URLs directing users to a bogus PayPal site.

The company which hosts my site, Liquid Web, one of the largest hosting companies in the USA, has given my site a very thorough spring clean to ensure that any rogue code has been completely removed. Security to all areas of the site administration have now been changed and improved.

The phishing URLs didn’t affect site users as the URLs were buried deep in the site. I understand that the hacker would have used them as part of a phishing mail campaign where spam emails would have referred recipients to the phishing pages. Talking of security…

Narrowboat Security

I wrote about narrowboat security last week and referred to a thread on the forum. Forum user Cheeseybits asked about the reality of crime on the cut. He referred to The Water Road by Paul Gogarty. It’s an excellent book about his four month figure of eight journey from London to the far north and back. He mentions carrying a baseball bat for security as he travels alone and of his unpleasant brush with stone throwing yobs in Wigan and then a little later, a charming tale about yobs rolling burning cars into the cut and shooting BW workers with air rifles!

Cheeseybits, in the nicest possible way, accused me of looking at life on the cut through rose tinted glasses and wanted to know whether he’s going to be at risk on his watery wanderings.

I’ve posted my experiences and those of our holiday hirers on the forum. I’ve been doing hire fleet instructions for Calcutt Boats for the last three years so I’ve debriefed hundreds of holidaymakers on their return. Did they experience any problems when they were out and about? You’ll have to read the thread to find out.

If you are a boat owner, please add your comments to the thread. I want the anecdotes in context though. I want to know about the problems you’ve encountered, but I also want to know how often you’ve had unpleasant experiences in all the time that you’ve been out and about on the cut. Have you had issues every time you’ve ventured out, or has it been just once in a blue moon in a geographical area where you might have expected it. If you don’t want to post on the forum, please email me to let me know about your experiences.

Mobile Broadband

I use the internet every day. I spend three to four hours sending and answering emails and researching and writing content for the site. I used to use Three’s PAYG premium package which gave me 7GB of data for £25. My average monthly broadband spend was £40. It was expensive but, because of a poor credit rating brought about by the failure of my business and subsequent bankruptcy, I couldn’t get credit. My inability to obtain credit for absolutely anything meant that I couldn’t take out a monthly phone or broadband plan.

My credit rating has been steadily, if slowly, climbing over the last three years. Eighteen months ago I was able to take out a 24 month contract on a mobile phone and then three months ago switch from Three’s PAYG broadband to a pay monthly tariff. The new tariff gave me 15GB of data each month which was more than enough… until last Friday.

Three weeks ago I bought a new laptop to replace my old Lenovo which had developed a mind of its own and typed text anywhere on the screen it wanted. It was quite quickly driving me mad.

The new Samsung laptop shipped with Windows 8 (Windows Hate would be a more appropriate name – what a terrible operating system!) but no other software. I needed to reinstall all of the applications I use on a daily basis, Microsoft office, Adobe Photoshop Elements, my accounting software, iTunes and half a dozen web site management and editing applications. Then I had to download my backed up data from Google Drive as well as my photo’s and music.

Then two weeks ago my laptop was hacked into so I had to restore the laptop it its original factory settings and do everything again. Yesterday, for the first time, I exceeded my 15GB monthly allowance. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

If you run out of data with Three you can get onto the Three website to check your account but the rest of the internet is off limits. You can check your account to see how much data you’ve used but if you want to change any details, in my case payment details, you need to log into your account using a password. You don’t need a password at any stage when you first start to use your dongle. You just plug it in to your laptop, wait for the automatic driver installation, and away you go. Consequently, you aren’t aware of the need for a password at all.

Of course I couldn’t log in to my account to pay for more data without the password. I didn’t know it so I went through the Forgot Password routine. With any other system that I’ve used, this involves answering some fairly straight forward security questions. Not with Three.

I was asked for both the device and the SIM number. This information is on the SIM which is inside the dongle. My dongle is on the top of a pole on the roof. So on Friday night, in the dark and in lashing rain, I climbed onto the roof to fetch the dongle. Of course I had forgotten that last Sunday I spent seven hours lovingly polishing the boat roof with Carnauba wax. The combination of Carnauba wax on steel and heavy rain should be used on skating rinks. It’s almost impossible to stand on, as I discovered to both mine and Sally’s dismay when I fell over.

I didn’t quite fall off the roof, but it was close. I managed to grab hold of the edge of the port side hatch before I joined the fish in the marina. After retrieving the dongle, I climbed back into the boat to let Sally know what had happened. She wasn’t interested. The shock of me crashing down on the roof caused her to drop what was in her hand – the pressure cooker containing our dinner. She was busy scraping it off the floor.

I copied the details off the SIM but, before I could find out whether I could log in with them, I had to climb back onto the roof, more carefully this time, to replace the dongle. The device and SIM card number allowed me to log into my account, but I was still unable to top it up.

There was a “helpline” number I could ring, but that involved finding a signal for my phone. I never have one on the boat. So, I went back out in the rain and into my car for a drive around the marina until I could find a signal.

Of course there was the obligatory frustrating automated system to navigate but I was eventually able to make a payment using one of Sally’s debit cards (remember, I don’t currently have a bank account following my hacking attack).

Back on the boat, I joyously connected to the internet… to discover that I still couldn’t get any further than the Three web site.

I jumped back in my car, raced around to where I knew I could get a phone signal and went through the whole painful call centre process again. After ten frustrating minutes I was put through to a real person. He was on the other side of the world, but at least he was human.

He very helpfully told me, from the safety of his call centre 5,000 miles away, that the payment I had just made had been credited to my monthly account but that I couldn’t buy any more data at the normal rate until the next billing cycle began in nine days time. Until then, he told me, I couldn’t use the internet at all unless I purchased data at the emergency rate of 10p per megabyte.

£0.10/MB is a huge amount to pay. To put this rate into perspective, if Three used the same rate for my 15GB monthly allowance, they would charge me £1,500 instead of the £18 I currently pay. Their emergency rate is over eighty three times more expensive than their standard rate!

Even if I wanted to carry on using the internet at that rate, they wouldn’t let me. They allow an emergency use of 200MB (at a cost of £20) before they cut off the account completely until the next billing date.

I used the extortionately priced additional data by mid afternoon the following day – yesterday – so for the first time for as long as I can remember, I was completely cut off from the virtual world I’ve spent years creating.

I didn’t fully understand quite how much I rely on the internet.

I use the web for checking the weather, the news, what’s on television and to more or less instantly find out in depth information about any subject that interests me. I store my photo’s online, I constantly back up my laptop’s documents to my online storage, I use an online To Do list and calendar. I’ve moved much of my life online and, boy, do I miss it when I can’t get at it.

Waiting over a week until my next data allowance cycle wasn’t an option so at 10am today I was in Leamington Spa waiting for the store to open. I purchased a PAYG SIM with 3GB data to get me through the next week until my monthly allowance resumes.

15GB is the biggest data package that Three offer, and Three is widely acknowledged as being the best provider for internet loving boat owners. 15GB is more than enough for a month’s general browsing but if you your laptop for watching TV or video or for regular large file uploads and downloads, you’ll soon use it up.

I hope that the tale of my misfortune will encourage you to think carefully about your mobile broadband options if you plan to spend long periods on your boat and you value a constant internet connection as much as I do. I haven’t enjoyed the problems I’ve had recently, but I’ve learned from them. As far as my internet connection’s concerned, I now have a backup in case of emergencies. Maybe you should too.

This story is really a long winded way of saying sorry for a content poor newsletter this week. I’ve spent so much time trying to sort out the problems I just haven’t had a spare moment to work on the site. I promise to try harder next week.

Read this forum thread for plenty more information about mobile broadband on narrowboats.

Online Moorings Available

I received an email ten days ago but forgot to mention it in last week’s newsletter. It’s from online mooring operator Peter Oakley…

“I’m a linear moorings operator on the Middlewich branch of the Shroppy at bridge 25. With the pump out toilets, i encourage the (long term) moorers with a pump out, to buy a Patay pump (normally off e-bay) and lay flat pipe. If they are lucky they can get it all for £50. As we are farmers we have a septic tank for our house waste. Which is a 100mtr cruise into the next field along. I ask the moorers to pump their waste into there as it is approximately 30 metres in from the cut. 4 pump outs and they’re saving £££££££. I have checked with the Environment Agency . As long as the owner of the vessel does it themselves it’s acceptable. If i were to do it for the boater I would need to apply for the relevant waste carrying licenses. I hope this helps a few boaters in trying to save a few quid here and there.”

Peter went on to say that he has two fully serviced long term moorings (metred water and electricity hook up) available from 2nd September this year. If you are interested in an online mooring in a beautiful part of the country, you need to contact him quickly. Long term online moorings are like hens’ teeth and Peter has just placed an advert in Towpath Talk. Please contact Peter directly.

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2013 04 07 Newsletter – Narrowboat Security

Living on a Narrowboat News 7th April 2013

I “celebrated” my 53rd birthday last Tuesday. How did I celebrate? A relaxing day on the boat? A fancy meal out? A fancy meal in? No. I worked during the day and then returned to the boat at the end of the day to discover that my online identity had been stolen.

I still don’t know how it happened, other than my laptop was hacked into, keystrokes logged, passwords recorded, all of the important web sites I’m registered with accessed, and passwords changed so I couldn’t get into them.

I had my main bank account contact details changed to an address and phone number in Bristol and an iPad ordered through my mobile phone account. My bank account has subsequently been frozen, soon to be shut down, so I now need to open a new account and go through the painful process of setting up a complete new list of payees. Because the new account won’t be live for another seven days, I am unable to pay bills, receive payments, or withdraw cash.

The account I use to receive payments for sales from the site was suspended. They still allowed money into the account, but I’m still not allowed to take any out. The bank was particularly concerned when they discovered that the hacker had stolen a copy of my passport from my hard drive to upload to their site to prove that they were me. When I phoned, they were in the process of restoring the account to fuull functionality which would have allowed the hacker to transfer some or all of the money out of the account.

I spent a fruitless hour reporting the crime to the police. They showed very little interest, even when I told them that I had the bogus address and mobile phone number that had been added to my bank account. They told me that they receive many hundreds of phone calls from people like me and that, unless they can spot a recurring trend in the reported hacking attempts, I’m unlikely to hear from them. The guy I spoke to even told me that assuming my identity isn’t actually a crime. They have to wait until the person assuming the identity attempts to defraud a company or individual before they can act.

One or two techies I’ve spoken to have heard that devices are being interfered with prior to them being purchased which may explain why the laptop’s pre installed anti virus software, Norton, didn’t pick this up.

I’ve now restored my new laptop to its factory settings to remove the offending code. All I need to do now is spend a couple of days reinstalling the software that took me a couple of days to install last week.

And then I have to wait for the best part of a week before I have a bank account again, and then set up all standing orders and direct debits, change my bank details with everyone I deal with online.

I used to be an angry young man. I’m much calmer these days, especially after moving onto James. However, I would love to spend just five minutes alone with the hacker so that I could explain, very clearly, just how displeased I am with him.

Narrowboat Security

On the subject of crime, my ex wife emailed me yesterday to let me know that her house, my old home, has been burgled for the second time in three months. The thieves escaped with the usual electronics; laptops, mobile phones, a X Box and a Play Station. They were in and out of the house in minutes and caused a considerable amount of physical and a huge amount of emotional damage.

Boats can be burgled too. I’m delighted to say that James hasn’t been burgled. In fact, to my knowledge, none of the boats here at Calcutt have been burgled. The marinas here are too risky for thieves. The main entrance is via a half mile private drive with closed electric gates outside of trading hours. The marinas are difficult for thieves to access from the canal too. We’re on the canal “offside”, the opposite side from the towpath, so anyone wanting to come onto the site from the canal either needs to do so by boat, or by walking over the lock gates.

If you’re going to take on a permanent mooring, from a security point of view, choose one which is on the canal offside. Thieves want easy access and exit. They tend to steer clear of moorings that they can’t sneak up on. There’s one marina in particular nearby where a quiet country lane runs close to the towpath. The thieves can park their vehicle next to towpath and quickly walk to the open gate to the marina next to the canal completely bypassing the marina’s electric gates. I don’t know how many of their boats are broken into, but I know they are.

Of course, the reason you’ve purchased a narrowboat is so that you can use it to cruise some or all of the network. You will be spending as much time as possible away from your home mooring so you need to be aware of security measures when you’re on the move.

Apply the same common sense that you would to the security of either your home or your car. If you’re away from your care, make sure it’s locked and that the locks on your doors and hatches are secure. Consider fitting a steel locking bar to the bulkhead either side of your front and rear doors and fit a decent security padlock.

Consider storing items from your roof inside your boat including poles. planks and boat hooks. Always remove your tiller bar when you are away from your boat. Shiny brass is irresistible to towpath toerags. Consider carrying a spare tiller bar on the boat. If you don’t think the additional expense is worthwhile, try steering your boat for a while without one. Remember, your tiller bar can be dropped in the water as well as stolen.

Keep your valuables out of site. Close your curtains and hide laptops, tablets and mobile phones.

Consider fitting a timer to a LED lamp inside your boat to give the impression there’s someone on the boat.

Here’s a thread from the forum with some very useful security information for you. Please read it. I know from bitter personal experience what it’s like to be burgled. Prevention is always better than cure. Make sure you take action before it’s too late.

Canalside Dining

Sally and I enjoy the occasional meal out, but we’re often very disappointed. We leave the restaurant feeling that we could have prepared better food for a hell of a lot less if we stayed on the boat. Friday night was an exception.

We took Charlie and Daisy for a walk along the Grand Union at Braunston on Friday afternoon. We stopped for a brief comfort break at the Admiral Nelson on the Braunston flight between locks three and four. We used the loo, bought drinks and crisps and browsed their menu as we sat on a bench outside with the dogs. We liked what we saw both on the menu and in the restaurant area of the bar so booked a table for the evening. It’s a good job we booked.

We returned to the pub just after six wearing a little less mud to find it heaving with both diners and Braunston boatyard workers. One poor girl was running between bar and tables to keep everyone happy and we had to wait longer than we would have liked before we were served. We had to wait a while before our food order was taken and then served but, oh boy, was it worth the wait.

The pub’s steak of choice is Scottish Black Gold 28 matured and unbelievably tasty. The ribeye was served with balsamic roasted vine tomatoes, fondant shallots, Moreton Pinckney portabella mushroom, chunky chips served in an individual dinky deep fat fryer and balsamic dressed watercress. It was so good neither Sally nor I spoke throughout the meal. At £20 a steak it wasn’t cheap but we’ll definitely eat there again.

NB Doublefracture Case Study

Mick and Marlene are committed to their life afloat. They burned their bridges and sold their house to fund the purchase of their liveaboard narrowboat Doublefracture. Weird name, lovely boat! Here’s their story.

I apologise for the shortage of new information this week. I don’t have a great deal of time to spare at the best of times but having to find an extra twenty hours to deal with my identity theft last week has left me just a little stressed. I’m going to relieve the stress in a minute by spending the day working on my lovely boat. It’s (finally) a beautiful spring day. I’m going to spend the next eight hours washing painting and polishing. I have two bottles of the best boat wax on the market. James if going to get a very serious buffing.

I know that Easter week is a holiday week for many people. If you were one of them, and didn’t have access to your email, you may have missed last week’s newsletter. Here it is.

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Living on a Narrowboat News 9th June 2013

Happy Birthday Dear Forum

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Living on a Narrowboat News 2nd June 2013

Pre Cruise Planning

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Living on a Narrowboat News 26th May 2013

A Case Study – Our Nige Takes Forty Winks

Crick Show

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Living on a Narrowboat News 19th May 2013

There’s A New Blogger On The Site

Keeping Dry On The Cut

Reducing Unnecessary Expenditure – Do You Really Need A Car?

Please, Take A Seat

New Forum Section

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Living on a Narrowboat News 12th May 2013

The Wessex Rose Hotel Boat Update

An Interview With The Trust’s Head Of Boating.

New Forum Section

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Living on a Narrowboat News 5th May 2013

A Picnic With Snakes

Out On The Cut Again

The UK’s Largest Inland Waterways Hotel Boat

New Forum Section

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Living on a Narrowboat News 28th April 2013

A Day Trip To Braunston

New Forum Section

Your Own (Free) Narrowboat Blog

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Living on a Narrowboat News 21st April 2013

Identity Theft – The Gift That Keeps On Giving

A New Image For The Site – Tell Me What You Think

The Trust Target Illegal Moorers

RCR Engine Servicing

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Living on a Narrowboat News 14th April 2013

Narrowboat Security

Mobile Broadband

Online Moorings Available

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Living on a Narrowboat News 7th April 2013

Narrowboat Security

Canalside Dining

NB Doublefracture Case Study

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