Morris Dancing

Morris Dancing seems to be very popular. We have seen it in many different villages. Here is a little composite video of dancing in Pershore, Tewkesbury and in Stroud. I like the simple movements, tunes and the basic instruments.

http://youtu.be/xsjO3CZTBiM

Gary eats crow, where Nancy gets it right.

http://youtu.be/srjwtRIT6ys

Narrowboating - Critical Review

So, how was it? 

The set up. After reading "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome on the advice of Cameron Graham, he and I started discussing the idea of a vacation in a Thames rowboat, on the Thames. We eventually settled on the idea on a narrowboat on the Avon & Severn river and canal system (old backs and cranky wives being the impetus to make life easier).

The four of us had never travelled together before, and in fact we didn't even all know each other very well. Nancy and I were experienced boaters, but Cameron and Anne were lubbers. It was a classic recipe for disaster.

We selected the route we were to do based on the notion that we only wanted to be moving about 5 hours a day and we wanted a couple breaks in the transit for days off. We regarded locks as exercise, so lots of locks didn't faze us. The Avon Ring, starting in Stoke Prior consisted of 128 locks, two canal systems (Stratford -upon-Avon and Worcester & Birmingham canals) and two rivers (Avon and Severn) over about 109 miles. 

Our boat, the 62' Thin Lizzy, had two beds, two heads, one shower, a sitting area with a TV and stereo and a fully equiped small galley (stove, oven, broiler (for toast English style) sink, and fridge). Everything worked and the boat was spotless. Black Prince, the narrowboat company, provided two sets of bedding for each bed, enough towels for clean ones each after a week, and loads of tea towels. There was only one roll of toilet paper onboard. Lizzy cost £2000 for the two weeks. She was good value.

The boat was designed so that the two bed areas could be turned into two staterooms by latching open the cupboard and head doors effectively dividing the boat up into three private sections. Forward was the living dining area, then a stateroom, then a second stateroom. The forward stateroom could get on and off through the front door and the after stateroom could get on and off through the rear door. This design feature went a long way to keeping peace and good government onboard. (See our video walkthough posted earlier.)

Running the boat was easy. We took turns driving. During periods of intensive locking activity, three people would walk while the fourth drove. Walking between the locks, and opening the sluices and gates is moderately challenging and a perfect license to eat constantly. On the canals it was busy enough that no one was bored. On the rivers there was a well deserved break that allowed some reading. Our biggest day was 33 locks (Tardebigge flight), our fewest was two (Tewkesbury to Worcester).

We ate every breakfast onboard, most lunches onboard, and some suppers onboard. Three times we bought small disposable BBQs and used them on the side of the river (lamb chops, chicken, and steaks) they worked pretty well as long as they weren't overloaded.

Our most vexing problem was water consumption. Despite teaching my travel companions Naval water discipline (Pusser showers) and employing the cottage country technique of "if it's yellow, let it mellow" we still went through water very quickly. We had to look for a water source every second day. Having two real toilets onboard really upped the consumption of water. The boat need more than the claimed 200 gallon tank. Everything else was fine (cooking gas, diesel, and black water tank).

We stopped at every village and small town. We tried to visit every pub and abbey, cathedral, etc. Our oldets pub was 700 years (the ale was still good), and our oldest church was 1200 years (not sure about their ale).

My personal favourite place was Worcester. It seemed to have everything. It was big enough to keep us interested for a two night stop. We could have stayed longer. My least favourite stop was, sadly, Stratford. It was too touristy and I felt like a mark the whole time we were there.

While we were stopped both couples generally went our own way. That gave us some breathing room and prevented too much "togetherness".

The weather was hot and sunny for the entire two weeks. On the last night it clouded over, and it was pouring rain when we drove the last couple miles to return the boat. If it had rained that hard for the two previous weeks, it would have been a very long trip. We were lucky (and luck counts).

All in all, the narrowboat phase rocked. Cam got the World Cup soccer games, Nancy and Anne got naps, and I got lots of helm time (and beer and Scotch lessons). We all got along well, had lots of time, and room, to ourselves. Cam and Anne were good shipmates. Nancy needs a little more work, but she's coming along nicely. It was a great time. We'd do it again in a heartbeat. 

Put a narrowboat on your bucket list.

Narrowboat Handling

Narrowboats, as a result of their function, can be somewhat difficult to handle. They are long and narrow (duh) with parallel sides, low powered engines flat, shallow bottoms and small rudders. The small rudders make the boat handling particularily challenging.

On most boats the rudder sticks down below the boat, and when the boat is moving (ahead or astern) there is water flowing freely past the rudder. The rudder directs the flow of water moving the stern of the boat in the opposite direction.

On a narrowboat the rudder does not extend below the bottom of the boat because they are meant to be run in very shallow water. The rudder only extends out the back of the boat. 

It doesn't extend very far aft however, because of the danger of catching the rudder on the cill (English spelling) of the lock.

That makes maneouvering a narrowboat more difficult than a typical sailboat. The water coming around the hull of the narrowboat hits the rudder and the flow is controlled by the rudder, however the water is already changing direction (unlike the water that a sailboat is moving over). A narrow boat steers best when the screw is pushing active water over the rudder, and the rudder forces the active water out to one side or the other (rudder geeks will notice the balanced style of the rudder). With the engine stopped, even while making headway, the steering is very weak. 

When going astern the problem is compounded because the rudder is effectively in the bow wave of the boat, and out of the active water from the screw, so to adjust course a big shot of forward with the helm over is needed. 

The steering is further challenged by the absolutely flat bottom of these narrow barges. The hull can be run very close to the bottom with all the difficulties that presents (pressure, smelling the bank, etc.). They also have little lateral stability, so wind very quickly can blow the bow around. They are kind of like a smooth, flat bottomed canoe with one paddler at the stern.

Nevertheless, barging around the canals is not stressfull. Everything (even the bumps) happen slowly and the boats are built like battleships. There is a long barge pole handy on the roof and a line led to the middle of the roof of the boat that allows one person to jump ashore and control the boat. The English have been doing this a long time. They've got it sorted out.

The Challenges of the River

Narrowboating on a river is not the same as narrowboating in a canal. 

The obvious difference is that the river is bigger and open ended. That means that, unlike a canal, the water is going somewhere. Each lock is associated with a weir and there is generally more current. On the canal the locks simply lifted or dropped you to the level of the next canal, on the river the locks get you around some obstacle (a waterfall, or short set of rapids, in one case a power generating station).

Because the locks are built to get you around the obstacle, they generally are off to one side at funny angles to the general flow of the river. They also kind of sneak up on you. Although we have river maps, charts and a guide book, we (I) am still sometimes surprised when the lock suddenly pops up. I think many of the warning signs are grown over or gone. One of the lock keepers told me that private landowners don't like having the signs on their property.

So, what does that mean? Why am I making excuses? Because my narrowboat handling skills have been tested and three times I have come up a little short. 

The first time was at Evesham Lock. The weir was on the left as I approached the lock. There were moorings above the weir, but I thought if I moored there I wouldn't be able to get the boat off the platform because of the pressure of the water running through it. I continued on thinking there would be a more protected place, but there wasn't. I came suddenly on the lock, which sat at about 90 degrees to the channel, and couldn't stop the boat in time to negotiate the corner. I slowly went past the lock towards a small power generating plant under a building that straddled the river. Using lots of astern power, and helm, I managed to turn and get a line onto the sewage pumpout dock. It took us a little bit of narrowboat wrangling to get Lizzy (62' of steel) back around the dock onto the other side where the lock was. 

The second time was at Strensham lock. I wasn't expecting this lock at all. I thought we had been through the last lock before Tewksbury because we had gone under a swinging bridge which we had to move. Well, there were two locks, each with a swinging bridge, one not clearly marked. Same thing, me flying past the lock at 2 or 3 miles an hour with the diesel screaming in astern. We got it through that one too.

The final straw was the berthing in Tewksbury. Having learned (I thought) my lesson I eased her into Tewksbury noticing the the river was getting narrower and narrower. We were looking for a berth before the lock, so we wouldn't have to turn Thin Lizzy around and come back upstream to pass through the lock a couple days later. Well, bang, there was the lock, no berths so far, and the river narrowing up ahead. I stopped Lizzy quickly (twice burned) and tried to turn her around to get back to a mooring upstream. Alas, the wind had picked up a bit, and once again the current was playing havoc with my efforts. To top it all off, I had a crowd watching, then crunch, I hit a dock on the other side of the river from the lock. 

I straightened Lizzy out, still going the wrong way, being carried along by current and wind. The lock master was hollering at me (I was standing over the diesel and couldn't hear anything). The crowd was bunching up on the bank of the river. I felt like Shakespeare after a bad performance. Ahead there was a low bridge across the river where the current was accelerating and beyond it the river seemed to narrow even more. I was starting to sweat. In a last ditch effort I swung the recalcitrant hulk to starboard and put the bow up against a cement pier (unbreakable) and a fellow boater caught our line giving me a pivot point. The stern swung around in the wind and current, cleared the wall on the other side of the river by inches and we ended up a couple feet short of the bridge, now pointing in the right direction. I finally jockeyed the not-very-handy source of my woes up against the wall and tied her up. Total damage, one broken dock and one badly bruised ego. 

Fortunately this did provide the loyal crew with much fodder for (undeserved) jokes about my shiphandling ability, Naval training, thinking ahead etc. Throughout each of these deeply stressful situations they stood fast and responded to my curses like proper sailors. So far there is no sign of post narrowboat stress disorder. A happy crew is a good crew. 

Hopefully we can get the old girl out of here, through the last Avon lock, and onto the Severn without causing any more damage.

Narrowboat Tour

http://youtu.be/5Dh0j1SLMaA

Narrowboating - Early Days on the Canal

We picked up our narrowboat "Elizabeth" at Stoke Prior on the Worcestshire - Birmingham canal on Friday the 13th. Spoiler - nothing went wrong! Elizabeth is a typical charter narrow boat, 62 feet long and 6'6" wide. We affectionately cal her "Thin Lizzy". 

Nancy and Anne moving in.

She has two double beds, two heads, one shower, a galley, and a sitting area with a dining table and a small TV. There is room on the bow for a couple people to sit outside, and room on the stern for a helmsman and two others. There is full standing headroom throughout for me (196 cm tall). Thin Lizzy can rock along at almost 5 knots, but there aren't many places where you could actually go that fast and not hit the sides.

We laid in a few days stores from a supermarket near Stoke Prior by using the rental car that our crusing partners Anne and Cameron Graham had rented. The store will also deliver to the boat.

Things got interesting immediately after departing the boatyard in Stoke prior. We headed towards Birmingham and straight into the infamous Tardebigge flight of 36 locks in 4 miles. Our guide book called this a "right of passage" for boaters. For the first three locks an engineer from Black Prince Charters came with us to show us the boat and how to get through the locks. Since we were climbing the sequence is like this;

1. If there is any water in the lock let it out by raising the sluices (after making sure the other end is closed),

2. Open the lower lock doors (normally two, always opening into the lock),

3. Drive the boat in (sometimes involves a little bouncing off the walls),

4. Close the doors and sluices and walk to the other end of the lock,

5. Open the sluices, and wait for the water to come up to the height outside the lock,

6. Open the upper doors (opens out) and drive out.

7. Close the sluices and the doors.

Repeat 34 more times.

   Nancy squeezing in.

   Anne (our best driver) showing us how it's done.

There was no room between the locks to stop for the night, so the flight has to be done at one go. It was a long 4 miles. We did it in about 4 hours.

That evening we noticed a wet spot at the forward end of Thin Lizzy that kept getting bigger. Of course I immediately piped "Emergency Stations" (thanks to my proper Naval training) and the Rapid Response Team (consisting of the entire boat's crew) investigated. We discovered that we had a freshwater leak from the boat's domestic water supply (200 gallons) that was making the carpet damp. We decided over a very nice scotch (Glenglassaugh - non chill filtered, small batch) that we would not sink overnight, and we left it until morning (doing regular rounds of course). The following day we called Black Prince and they had an engineer on the boat right away, and he replaced the water pump and pressure accumulator in a few minutes and we were on our way. Great service!

Day two was lock-free cruising. For lunch we stopped at a canal side pub and enjoyed a mediocre meal and great beer. 

The highlights of day two were the tunnels. We went through two short tunnels as trainers (couldn't find the headlight switch until halfway through the first) and the came to the grand-daddy, the Wast Hill Tunnel, 2500 metres long. It is a very odd feeling running a 62 foot boat through over a kilometer of tunnel built in 1794, especially when meeting boats coming the other way. The tunnels are about 15 feet wide leaving about two foot of manouevering room when two boats pass. It seems very narrow.

   Lining up for the hole shot.

   Meeting other boats in the dark.

Stay tuned....

Anticipointment

All vacations are a combination of anticipation and disappointment. That's what makes impromptu parties, spur-of-the-moment camping trips and things like that so much fun. There is no time to build up any anticipation of what to expect, so disappointment is limited. Therefore, it seems prudent to limit planning to maximze fun.

Often when you spend months saving for, planning, and waiting for a vacation, it is inevitable that you build up a mental picture of how things will go. You dream of eyeball deep champagne powder. No one thinks of their planned Christmas ski vacay as having no snow. You imagine idyllic beaches with few people and warm water, no one thinks of their Hawaii trip as a hotel room in a tropical storm or crowded beaches with no room to lay down.

That is why I am a big advocate of the "Do as Little Planning as Possible" school of vacations. Sure, put down some hand waving sense of where to go and how to get there, then let things at the destination guide you. 

Birmingham was one of those non-plans. We flew here with few expectations. Several folks asked us "Why Birmingham?" We had no answer. I did read an article that said that B'ham was "the other big English city" and had lots to offer. Folks told us it was an industrial town, dirty and full of immigrants, not really a tourist place. We expected to be a little disappointed.

Surprise! We are finding Brum to be fascinating. People are friendly. There doesn't seem to be many tourists yet we hear a dozen different languages every day. There are a zillion restaurants (they must be cheaper than London eateries), and the shopping is fantastic. The city has closed dozens of streets in the city center and made a huge pedestrian friendly walking area that goes for miles. The "Balti Triangle" is the birthplace of Balti cuisine, a unique fusion of Indian and Pakistani food.

Brum, arguably, is where the industrial revolution started. It's connections of canals and rivers to the ports of England and the industry made it the center of the revolution. Those same canals, completely refurbished, are now the centre of a booming narrowboat scene with people living, working and vacationing on the canals in modern replicas of the narrow barges of pre railroad days. The walking and cycling paths along the canals run for miles and are wondeful places to meet people and watch the action on the canals.

The biggest library in Europe, maybe the world, with a whole different attitude on what libraries are about. (We've been napping in their easy chairs) Saw a great photo exhibit there today. 

Had a lunch of fried haloumi, salmon ceviche, and crab cakes with a couple local beers (every beer is a Brewpub beer in England). Fabulous!

Had a picnic supper in Peace Park watching local yobs (check Wikipedia) drink beer and sunbathe.  This is real England. Every street is a Coronation Street.

We're glad we didn't start in London. Brum rocks!