A Weekend Jaunt

It was good to be out this weekend, the sun was shining, the wind was light.  When I have had a five month lay-off from driving the boat I am a bit apprehensive.  Will I still be able to manage it? Will I have retained my driving skills? But everything was OK, nothing had changed during the time moored up, I was just as useless at handling the boat as I had been when I was coming down the Nene last October.

There were a few boats going to the pub at Wadenhoe to celebrate a birthday.  I borrowed a boy to help me along the way.  Nowadays it may not be the done thing to send boys up chimneys but they are useful for going up lock ladders.  I was travelling along with the ‘Man Who Knows Everything About Everything and Never Does Anything Wrong’ so I was ready to have all my inadequacies as a boaty person pointed out.  They were: every time I came alongside: every time we went into a lock: every time we came out of the lock: every time we came within shouting distance my inadequacies were aired.  He dawdled along: the following pack caught up: words were exchanged between boats and a poor couple on a narrowboat who got caught up amongst this melee must have wondered what was going on.

At the last lock I left my crew member with The Man Who Knows Everything and went ahead to moor up.  It was a perfect display of how to moor a narrow boat.  I stepped onto the bank and tied up to a tree.  It was a good job the tree was there because I’d forgotten I’d need mooring pins and they were still submerged beneath a winters worth of accumulated junk.  The Man Who Knows Everything came in behind me and made a complete dogs breakfast of mooring up.  He was shouting at the lad to jump onto the bank when they were about half a mile away, he did eventually get near enough for the lad to jump off and then left him to strain every muscle pulling the boat in.  I don’t usually point out other boaters errors (there for the Grace of God etc. …) but in this case I made an exception to my rule.  I might as well have saved my breath to cool my porridge, as my Granny used to say, because he didn’t take any notice.  And guess who was the first one to shout rude remarks about women drivers when a boat coming in from the opposite direction turned, mis-judged the flow of the river and ended up in the bushes? Not me.

The following day we travelled back together, both single-handed, we worked the locks quietly and efficiently and I wasn’t treated to a list of my faults.  I think a few hours on the river must have mellowed him.

I realised the flow on the river was still strong when I came to turn onto my mooring space. I drifted much further downstream than I intended before I was able to turn the bow.  At one point I thought I might bump my neighbours boat.  It wouldn’t have been a disaster because his boat is pretty solid, now if I’d bumped his shed………………….