...so, we had no anchor.
Luckily - and it was all luck - there was no flow on the River so, even had the engine packed in, we'd have found some way of parking up. Unlike the time when my engine packed in a couple of years later - but that story's yet to make it to these pages as it hadn't happened yet.
We get to 5.30 and suddenly, there are no lock-keepers, which means you've got to do it manually. Open the doors. Fine if they've left the power on; you just punch a couple of buttons and 'open sesame', you're free to go through. But, as it turns out, most locks don't keep their power on afater 5.30, which means you've got to open those vast steel doors by hand. With a winch. Which takes a long time.
I think it was on our sixth lock wnen the cub-scouts appeared. We'd parked up, when a load of woggles appeared, led by Arkala/Brown Owl/Someone Who Should Know Better. Arkala's delighted, because his troupe have never seen a houseboat before and could they have a look inside. It's at this point that Jim plays a blinder and says that, yes, they can inspect the boat, if they operate the lock for us. And so, after a quick tour of a 57ft by 11ft steel box, Jim and I got to cruise lazily through while half a dozen ten year-olds worked up a sweath on the winches.
Much, much later, it was about 10.30 at night, darkness was falling fast and we didn't know about the spotlight on the front of the boat; we were flying blind and, to all intents and purposes, invisible to other craft. We were watching the map and had just made it under a bridge, when I realised that we'd overshot our mark. To be fair, I'd only seen the moorings from land and it all looks a bit different from the water. In the dark. Without an anchor. So, we span the boat and chugged back to where I thought it might have been. And Lo! 'twas the moorings!
Trouble was, my moorings are in the middle of the River; two big stakes, romantically known as 'piles'. So here's the problem: we can't just park on the piles, because Jim can't then get to land to go home. But I can't handle the thing on my own. Luckily, there were some dinghies floating around and (I still don't know how we did it without decimating at least three fibre-glass boats) we got to the piles, towing a dinghy. By now, it was nearly midnight.
But we were full of rejoicing - we'd sailed/boated/careered for eight and a half hours and got to where we needed to be! We were heroes! But Jim had to go home.
I rowed him over to his car and, it was only as his tail-lights rounded a corner that I realised that real journey was about to begin. I was living on my own. On a boat. In the middle of the River. What the hell was I thinking???
It had all seemed like such a good idea at the time, but now the reality-side was starting to kick in. Starting with the lights. I didn't have any. Well, not entirely true: I did have lights, but no amount of flicking the wall-switches would turn them on. Luckily, I'd spotted some candles in a drawer and lit them. OK. First problem solved. Problem The Second: it was cold. It was late May, but still very wintry. I dod have central-heating, but no idea how to turn it on. So, I sat on my sofa and covered myself in a duvet and some towels.
The one piece of forethought I had had, was to get out a DVD to take my mind off the fact that I was now no longer a part of my family, that I couldn't see my son whenever I wanted and that I was living in a boat. Luckily, I'd charged my laptop, because the TV and the mains plugs didn't seem to work, either. So, I sat down to watch the film that I'd chosen very deliberately to keep my spirits up. A Disney. You can't go wrong with a Disney, right?
Wrong.
'Night at the Museum' for those who haven't seen it, is about a father who has been booted out of the family home and is a failure in his young son's eyes. No amount of animated dinosaurs, cowboys and Indians or Hawaiian Idols could take away the fact that this was just how I felt. Luckily the batteries on my laptop ran out before I got to the end; I was in a bad enough state already; I didn't need some schmaltzy ending to cap it all off.
Red eyed, tired and more than a little frightened, I settled down for my first night aboard my floating home. It was to be the first in a series of very sleepless, traumatic nocturnal adventures.
To be continued...
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