Celebrations!

On this day ten years ago, I was celebrating the fact that I, newly retired from teaching, wasn't at the Training Day that my ex-colleagues were having to endure. Callous, wasn't I? But I was celebrating even more that we had just taken possession of NB Kantara. The next day, when I'd got my breath back, I blogged about it.

 

Now we REALLY start!

We could actually have hoped for a colder day yesterday, the day Kantara was handed over to us.  We allowed two hours for a one and a quarter hour journey, and it took three hours, a large chunk of which was spent sitting in a jam on the road from hell - the M1 - in very hot weather.  So we arrived late at Crick, to meet Bob, the last owner of Kantara, a lovely man who had lived with his wife full-time in the boat until poor health had forced them to sell.  He clearly loves Kantara, and his greatest wish now for her was that someone else would love her as much, and be as happy in her as he had been.  We think that describes us well.

Bob spent a good deal of time with us, explaining all sorts of details, and making sure that we had all the information we needed to get the best out of Kantara.  After he left, having given us his contact details and assured us that we were to feel free to get in touch with him if we needed any help, we drove to Yelvertoft Marina, left the car there, and walked back to ABNB in Crick to collect Kantara and sail her back to the mooring we had booked at Yelvertoft. It was a good feeling, knowing that she was now actually ours.

Then began the process of unloading the car, and getting things into the boat, listing the things we had overlooked and would need to pick up from home the next time we return. Time flew, and we realised we had not eaten since we munched a sandwich on the M1, so we had to stop to prepare and eat a meal, drink a bottle of wine Bob had so kindly left for us (along with some port and a bottle of a fiery spirit we had never seen before), before falling into bed, exhausted.

We awoke late this morning, to a dreary and windy day, but still warm, and the day was spent shopping for food, tidying our things properly into the many cupboards in the boat, and sorting out a few technical problems, most of which were due to our ignorance, and were solved by reading the manuals. One needed Bob's help, and he was onto it like a shot.  We are so grateful to him for his promise of support on such occasions.

And here we are, 10:20 on Saturday evening, sitting in the moorers' lounge in the marina - the best place to connect to the wi-fi - a lot closer to being ready to cruise a bit. We are in no special hurry. We want to be as comfortable as possible when we start to cruise, and not be irritated by some detail we have overlooked. The biggest challenge at the moment is getting our 3G router and antenna set up properly, so that both of us can get the best possible Internet connection for our laptop computers. I tried this evening before we ate, but I think I was just too tired, and I had to give up. But there's time to do that - I don't go back to school on Monday! 

Here's Kantara in her new setting...

And today, Grace and I celebrate that day; the beginning of a new way of life for us. The next few years are chronicled in the books I wrote later - Life with our feet under water, and Moving home with our feet under water. Hints and tips for life with YOUR feet under water followed, after we had gathered a mass of lessons learned from experience, and loads of advice from more experienced boaters. Those books, all Amazon best sellers, can be found HERE or via the links in the column to the right of this page. Please go and take a look.

What have we liked best on board Kantara? Well, the cruising, obviously. And my favourite trips? In no particular order...

• The Leicester Ring (our first cruise on Kantara)
• Liverpool, Salthouse Dock
• IWA Festival of Water at Pelsall on the Wyrley and Essington Canal
• Stratford-upon-Avon
• River Trent
• Oxford
•  Ashby Canal
• Down through London, and up the Lee and Stort navigations

For various reasons, we've done less cruising over the past four years, and that's regrettable. But Kantara was a lovely home during Covid lock-downs, and we plan to be back on the move next year after I've had my surgery. Covid allowing. And be assured, we'll be celebrating then, too.

I raise a toast to Kantara on our joint ten-year anniversary. Cheers! Here's to the next ten!

And now it gets better! (cruise retrospective)

We'd been pretty disappointed with the Lee from the start. Perhaps unreasonably so, but we'd been told by several how pretty it is, such a pleasant change from London. But it wasn't. Until the end of yesterday's cruising, when it had begun to feel more rural and beautiful. And we started today passing between lakes. Lakes below canal level, unlike yesterday's vast reservoir which hid behind towering banks on both sides of us. Birds filled the trees and bushes, singing as if it were spring. Perhaps it is!

Today's locks were all manual, but frankly I could have done with motorized assistance at some of them. The gates were almost immovable. And there was no safe way to cross the gates, no way to get from one side of the lock to the other save from a footbridge at the downstream end. This made locking rather tedious.

Picture the bad-case scenario. Which was not uncommon. I empty the lock and open one gate for Grace to drive in at the bottom. I close the gate, but the one opposite drifts open. So I cross the nearby footbridge to close it. I go to the top gates, open the paddles and fill the lock. I open one gate and Grace drives out. I close the gate, but the one opposite drifts open. At this point, Grace could back the boat up to the lock exit and close the gate for me. But this is often not as simple as it sounds, and then it's easier and quicker for me to do it. But the footbridge is at the other end of the lock. Sigh.

And it the other one swings open again? It happens sometimes, And sometimes, when "closed" gates swing open again, you just have to leave them.

One boat, apparently made out of three!

Old wooden barge

There were notices at locks, warning boaters of canoes and racing boats. You know the ones - one, two, four or six people pulling hard on oars, and going backwards very fast? Sometimes with a coxswain looking forwards for them from the back of the boat. But often not. What's that all about? Why don't they have wing-mirrors? I watched with some amusement as a solo rower drove at high speed into an overhanging tangle of tree branches. No damage done, I think, but what a plonker!

This isn't him. I didn't have the heart to photo him in his embarrassing plight.

I helped a young man, Dutch or Deutsch, down through one of these challenging locks. His boat was quite remarkable. Small, narrowboat style but with an outboard motor. The tiller, however, was short, made for a boat without a cabin. He had to sit to steer. But the cabin was in his forward line of sight. His solution to this was to open the door at each end of the cabin and look down through the cabin. His progress was understandably slow.

Fielde's Weir Lock is the last on the Lee before the Stort Junction. We filled with water below the lock, then ascended it, and turned right into the River Stort.

My first shot at video... (pardon the pun)

...well, in quite a while anyway. I've used the car's dashcam, fixed to the inside of the front window of the cratch. There are some reflections which I'll avoid next time. This one's really here as a test run. It's less than five minutes long, and is played at double time - so it's a maximum boat speed of 6 miles an hour!

This is simply the first ten minutes of our current cruise Click here.

Back tomorrow!

A routine blood test on Thursday was our main reason for being here for the whole of last week, having collected Jess from the airport on Saturday. Then there was the mystery leak in a bathroom. And then taking up the vinyl in that bathroom, and finding the floor sodden. And it's Mother's Day today, of course, so we'll soon, all six of us, be sitting down for a family meal. The weather's wonderful (unless you don't like the cold), and we'll be returning to Kantara tomorrow.

Floods permitting, we're planning to visit the Lee and Stort navigations. We'll take five weeks or so over it, I expect. (For those of you not familiar with the map, it's down the green bit, and up the red bit!)

We're getting a dashcam for the car, but we'll be using that on the boat sometimes, too, to make films of our trips. That'll be largely experimental, not a regular habit, but I'll probably post a few time-lapse sequences on the blog from time to time. NB Kryfold Sky does these regularly, and I'm inspired. His YouTube channel is well worth a look.

Well, the sun's gone in, and it's looking like rain. On a positive note, it's dinner-time!