What I have learnt so far this morning:
1) never walk out of boat in your slippers onto a towpath frequented by dog walkers! If you do watch where you put your feet!
2) Don’t assume flurries of white falling from the sky are snow. I made that assumption yesterday when white flecks fell on my bow garden and so I brought all the garden into the boat so as not to be caught by frost. Awaking today I found the whole boat speckled with blossom from the tree I have moored under.
3) Try not to moor under a tree covered in blossom. Terrible for the paintwork!
4) I am much warmer in bed with R around and having an evening fire to warm the boat. Last night, on my own for the first time, I didn’t worry about the stove and kept warm under jumpers. Without R to discipline me about bedtime I went to bed far too late by which time I was too cold to take any clothes off and didn’t warm up until the early hours when I wrapped myself in a fleecy blanket between me and the duvet. Worked a treat! But lesson learned.
We travelled yesterday to just outside Leamington Spa which involved half a dozen or so locks. R went ahead with the car and walked back along towpath to meet me, by which time I had negotiated a wide lock all on my ownsome, which gave me a great sense of achievement. It does take ages and you have to be patient but working a double lock single handedly is possible if you just take it steady and concentrate on what you are doing! The only difficulty would be if the paddles were extremely stiff to wind or the lock gates too heavy to move. In which case you just have to wait for the next boat. Having seen a fair few moving up and down the cut I felt sure I would have company sooner or later, but no, just when you need a fellow boater, they are nowhere to be seen! By the penultimate lock we met another boat coming up but that was the only lock in our favour.
Safely moored, we set off to the Midland Chandlers, now half an hour away by car, so we won’t be returning there for a while, although it did feel like my local corner shop, full of all my boating needs and very helpful assistants. We collected paint so I can titivate the boat and bought all the helpful suggestions (from the rescue maintenance man) of spares that we should carry aboard for emergencies. We added a super duper new windlass as unfortunately one ended up in the canal yesterday (that’s another lesson learned!) and a porta potti!
Why the need for two lous on a 43ft boat you may well ask? And where will we have space for the second one? Good question! It’s for emergency use only so at the moment, brand new and unused it can sit under the dinette. Once our outside area is covered it can lodge there. I have taken fright at the thought of the pumpout filling up and us being nowhere near a pumpout facility or worse, arriving and finding it already full and out of action. All stories we are being told by other boaters. I am even contemplating putting a table over the present lou and putting the porta potti on top. Fine for R but I might need a stool to reach the seat. Quite a canny solution though!
R left for home and I got to tidying all the boat cubbyholes. Amazing what we’ve collected after only four months. 6 bathtowels and four sets of duvet covers for starters. To landlubbers this probably sounds perfectly reasonable but when you have limited storage, two sets of bed linen is plenty and two spare towels. I also found a lot of fire making paraphernalia in all sorts of spaces – torn up cardboard, twigs, kindling wood and then excess sheets of plastic, which could come in useful, but how much do we really need! I managed to find a great space for R’s concertina once I had had a good clear out. As my mother used to tell me, everything needs a home where it can be put away, out of sight if necessary!
Our first overnight visitors arrive this afternoon. With R at home there’s space for my brother and his wife. I shall move to the dinette to try it out – only big enough for one I think. Be good to have their company. It is incredibly quiet which is lovely in small doses!
ps 1320hrs I may have been a bit preempt about the weather and the blossom!
NarrowboatTLC 