The beginning of the adventure
This is the beginning of our next adventure. On Saturday the 2nd of July 2022, my wife Erin and I got the keys to our newly-purchased narrowboat ‘Carla’. This ~15-ton steel box will be our home for the next few months, until the British winter starts looming, forcing us to flee to warmer (and drier!) pastures.
We’ve been trying to decide what the next thing for us to do is, having both decided that we wanted a change of pace from Berlin. After a short week-long narrowboat holiday back in April, it seems our fate was sealed - we were returning to the UK and going to become continuous cruisers along England’s extensive and beautiful canal network. I will detail specifics about the boat at a later date. Suffice to say for now, we’ve got a boat and we’re on it!
The first day of cruising - weeds and stuff
We picked the boat up from Virginia Currer Marine, the broker from which we purchased the boat. This is situated on the Slough arm of the Grand Union Canal - just outside the M25 encircling Greater London. Unbeknownst to us, the Slough arm is notoriously weedy. It also has quite a current. These two facts led to the first hour or two of the days cruising to be tough - especially for a pair of inexperienced narrowboaters. I had to pop into the weed hatch two or three times during our cruise down the roughly 2-mile strength of canal, until it merged onto the main part of the canal at Cowley Peachey junction. This was something I’d never had to do before, and something I’d very much like to avoid having to do too often in the future.
The weedy but
short Slough arm
The weeds wrap around the propeller shaft so tightly, but thankfully they are relatively weak and easy to tear off in huge chunks. And you’ll know when your prop is well and truly fouled. If it’s not the strange juttering due to the now-uneven load on the prop, it’ll be the fact that your boat’s slowed down to basically a near stop no matter how much gas you give it. Or that you’ve lost all ability to turn, the boat veering off to whatever direction the weeds have deemed correct. Often, a short (2-3 seconds), strong blast of reverse and then a similarly short blast of forward thrust is enough to untangle and shred the weeds up enough to regain forward movement and turning. It might not clear the prop entirely, but it’s often good enough that you can carry on until a better time to pop into the weed hatch presents itself.
A boat with a way cooler paint job than ours
The journey north after turning at Cowley Peachey Junction was much more pleasant, and felt a lot more familiar to us. It was fairly easy going, with only one lock until we found a good spot to moor for the night - just on the edge of Uxbridge at bridge 185. No pubs near us were serving food by the time we’d gotten settled, so a quick supermarket dinner was in order.
In the next post, I’ll cover our continued journey - mostly-broken locks, a wise and very experienced pump-out guy, big electric swing bridges….
Cheers, Martin
Our first mooring location aboard Carla, Uxbridge