As the American cartoonist Berk Breathed said, “I like boats. They’re healthier than Valium. Cost more, though.” Boats and the idle lifestyle though, don’t, at first sight, seem to go together. Think of Ellen Macarthur, weeks on end with less than an hours sleep a night, bashing around the southern ocean with never so much as a G&T on the poop deck while watching the sun go down. Even dinghy racing, viewed from the shore, seems little better. It seems, rather, to involve lots of shouting and jumping around for very little reward. There is however, a boaty option for the idler, and that is the narrowboat. England is crosshatched with canals, several hundred miles of them. You can get all the way from Bath to Leeds, from Llangollen to London, and you can only do it very slowly. 4mph is the speed limit on British canals, but most boats don’t go faster than this anyway. It takes days to travel between cities. Take into account sporadic locks, and the excellence of canal-side pubs, and you aint going to get anywhere fast.
Other than an early holiday with my Mum and Dad, my main experience of canal boating has been with my friend Jim. Jim lived on his own narrowboat for many years . A narrowboat is the classic british canal boat, long, thin, and usually made of steel (Canal boaters get annoyed if you call it a barge). Jim worked as a supervisor on the railways, so periodically he had to relocate. I’d get a call asking if I was doing anything for the next week or so- ‘I’ve got to take the boat from London to Warwick’. So, a free holiday for me, and a crew for him.
Steering a narrowboat is ace. You can pick up the basics in an hour or two, but after a few days you acquire a certain élan. It’s like driving the aquatic equivalent of an articulated truck. If you have a proper narrowboat with a ‘trad’ stern (A little platform at the back you stand on) you can see over the roof the full length of the boat. You have a tiller to steer and a throttle at waist height for speed and forward/reverse. Piece of cake. Jim could even construct roll-ups whilst steering. Narrowboats are constructed so solidly that the odd ding while getting the hang of driving won’t hurt them. This brings me to the other main type of boat sharing the canals, the fibreglass cruiser (referred to as ‘cockle shells’ or ‘fantastic plastic’) Cruiser owners are very nervous about 20 ton steel hulled narrowboats, and with good reason. One time coming into a lock on the Thames alongside a half-million pound gin-palace steered by some bloke with a cigar, I considered putting the tiller hard across just to see the expression on his face when they fished him out of the river.
The best thing about inland cruising however, is the sheer soporific effect it has on you- plenty of fresh air, pretty countryside, the fact that you can drink while you do it, a bit of minor exertion at the odd lock which serves to put the edge on your appetite for dinner. Even the throb of the slow revving diesel engine becomes relaxing, sort of a background uterine soundtrack. Then at night you are rocked gently to sleep in what is essentially a 60ft long cradle. As most of the canal system is built in valleys and low ground, there is usually no radio or mobile phone signal- peace and quiet rules.
Of course you get the odd grim day. Canals were built to serve industry, so sooner or later that’s where you have to go- past the backs of industrial estates in the cold drizzle, under bridges where you get things dropped on the boat by the local youth, and in cities the cut is full of rubbish waiting to get wrapped round your propeller. Then there are the fishermen. Without wishing to dispute the benefits of fishing canal bank anglers have always stuck Jim and me as the dourest specimens on God’s earth. The procedure goes thus; 1) See angler ahead 2) reduce revs to the slowest they will go while still keeping the propeller revolving in the water 3) bid a cheery ‘Hello’ or ‘Caught much?’ as you crawl past 4) Get sworn at for ‘disturbing the fish’. If you ever point out, as Jim once did, that they maybe adopt a more sharing attitude, because, the canal was built for boats and not some misanthrope with a 30ft fishing rod, they tend to get a bit ratty.
But mostly it’s great. You can hire boats for anything from a day to a couple of weeks- the longest 70 foot ones can sleep up to 12 people in comfort, and the more mates you take the cheaper it gets. Being on the canal is like becoming a Buddhist; you end up loving everyone. Even the fishermen.
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