As a vague foreword, I must point out that, while this may just read as a lightly amusing anecdote of sorts, everything on these posts actually happened and it still makes me sweat if I think about it too long...
So, I've got me moorings sorted and the boat's ready for me to pick up. So, I ring my mate, Jim.
"Jim - have you ever sailed a narrow boat?"
"Yeah..."
"Would you help me move mine to my moorings? It's a widebeam; like a narrow boat, but wider."
"Yeah..."
Brilliant. It's all go. Jim drives to me, leaves his car at the moorings and we take a taxi to where the boat is - about 20 minutes, by road. So far, so good. So, I lead Jim to my new floating home and he just sort of looks at it, which worries me a bit.
"You alright, Jim?"
"Yeah...It's just a bit bigger than the thing I sailed..."
"But it should be OK, right?"
"It might be an idea to ask someone..."
So, we go hunting around this marina, looking for someone to ask. It's lunchtime at this point and the only person we can find is a grizzled looking man in a straw hat: Ray. We ask Ray if he'll show is how to steer the thing, turn it on and point it in the right direction. Ray looks at us and then says he'll give us 15 minutes because his dinner's on.
It's better than nothing.
Ray gives us the precious 15 minutes. During that time, he shows us how to go forward, back. left (port) and right (starboard). he also tells us that we should drive on the right hand side of the river and then he has to go and have his dinner. As we pull away, I ask him which way my moorings are.
"Upstream!"
"Which way's that?"
Ray points upstream.
"And how long til we get there?" I shout as he gets smaller.
"About 8 hours!"
There is a moment of silence as me and Jim process this. 8 hours? But it only took 20 minutes by car! As we were to find, the Thames isn't a straight road and nor is the speed limit 70mph. The river twists and turns and meanders and the speed limit is 4mph. And there are locks.
I think it was about an hour in when we saw our first lock. Luckily, Jim knew what it was.
"OK, what do we do?" I asked, a bit panicky.
Jim may have known what it was, but he didn't know how to get through. We decided that the best course of action was to park up before the doors and 'fess up to the lock-keeper that we didn't have a clue what we were doing. This may have been the only good idea we had on the whole journey. In fact, it was so good that we did it at every lock we came to. The lock-keepers respected our honesty and saw us through, keeping us away from other boats where possible and helping out with the ropes. That is, until 5.30, when they all went home. But that hadn't happened yet.
About three hours in,we were getting relatively happy; we'd swap turns at the helm, make tea and knock up sandwiches as we went. It was sunny, people waved at us and it was suddenly quite a cheery way to spend an afternoon.
"You know I said I'd had narrow-boat experience..?" Jim said, while at the tiller.
"Yeah..." Something about the way he said it set the old alarm bells off.
"Well...I have..."
"Great - so what's the problem? Why are you telling me this?"
"Because it was when I was ten. I was at the tiller for a bout 35 minutes and then had my first epileptic fit."
I know I swore at this point. Here we were, miles from anywhere, on a boat and my First Officer had just revealed a disturbing link between the tiller and his neural pathways. In hindsight, I should've been sympathetic or something, but I wasn't. In honesty, I was starting to worry if we were going to get to where we were going.
Danger signs on the river are a funny thing if you've never seen them before. We drove through a set, looking around us for any hazards/shipwrecks/pirates, but couldn't see anything. Up ahead, there was a bridge with a lock and people waving at us. Something that we'd noticed is that a lot waving went on on the river: people passing in other boats wave, people on the bank wave - everybody waves. So, we just waved back at the people on the bridge and thought nothing of it.
Until they started shouting. And pointing.
We looked to where they were pointing.
"What's that?" said Jim.
I ran up to the front of the boat to have a look. It appeared to be a waterfall. A great big, drag-you-to-your-doom-style waterfall. I ran back.
"Jim! We've got to turn this thing around! It's waterfall."
It wasn't; it was the weir. But we were caught in the weir-stream and the tiller wouldn't budge. It took the both of us hanging onto it and the engine at full tilt to turn us around and inch away from the foamy steps of oblivion. To add to things, there were a load of other boats approaching the lock and, once we'd broken free of the stream, we went flying at them. Luckily, the experienced ones had spotted the problem and gave us plenty of room and we somehow veered around the two hire-boats in our way.
It was only as we were coming out of that lock, that another boater shouted after us: "Hey! Where's your anchor?"
Anchor?
To be continued....
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