On The Canal

For me, the trip up the Kennet with the Home Built Boat Rally came to an end at Newbury, where there is a fabulous range of facilities to wit:
A shower in the nearby leisure centre (£1.70);
A public slipway.
I think this is the first proper picture of the boat I had borrowed to do the trip, a Salter double skiff. A fibreglass brute but the right boat for the occasion. Paul Hadley and I could get her up to a decent clip and she could hold all our gear with no problems.
Three of us pulled out at Newbury and took a cab back to Pangbourne to collect the cars and trailers. The driver was a tremendous guy from Zimbabwe. We told him proudly how we had rowed/paddled/yulohed ALL THE WAY down the Thames and up the Kennet, and he told us how he used to avoid hippos in the Zambesi river.
The rest of the flotilla continued, pulling out at various points. Tim got to Bath. Adrian and Pete made it all the way to Bristol - kudos to them. There are more pictures here, here, here and here.
It was a great trip in great company. Thanks everyone.

Yay for the Spork!

As I have mentioned before, camp cookery should involve no more than:
1) Open tin and slop contents into pan;
2) Heat and eat.
A pre-raid sweep through Tesco for camping stuff discovered a much greater range of canned instant meals since my last expedition. 'The Works' was a great find, but the top culinary experience was Beans with Chorizo Sausage yum yum. Also Thai Chicken Curry, but that needs rice as well so doesn't really count.
The big surprise in the camping aisle was a spork. The spork is probably the most reviled cutlery innovation since the fork itself ("God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks - his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them when eating," thundered a senior cleric back in medieval times).
The classic spork has a spoon with short stubby tines on, so it is fairly useless both as a spoon and a fork. Tesco's new one is a redesign by a Swedish designer called Joachim Nordwall, which puts the spoon and fork at opposite ends of the handle, and adds a serrated edge to the fork. For tinned ready meals, it is ideal. The spoon holds a proper quantity of beans, and the long tines of the fork can spear the sausages, and you can hold the canteen in one hand and eat with the other. Brilliant.
Just don't leave it hanging over the edge of the canteen when on the stove though - notice the bubbly edge?

Gadget Anxiety

Electronics and water don't mix, so gadget anxiety is high on boat trips of more than a couple of days. Luckily, I was well prepared.
My phone is a Sony Xperia Go, which is not only a fine phone with a decent camera but waterproof.
It was kept charged with a couple of excellent pieces of kit. First is the Freeloader Classic solar charger, which has a battery that you charge up from the mains before you leave and then top up by leaving it out all day with the 'wings' deployed, soaking up rays.
The battery is big enough to totally recharge a smartphone, and the solar panels can recharge the battery in a couple of days. The sun doesn't even need to be out, though it helps. I suspect that a non-stop-chatting, always-texting, continuously-Facebook-updating, games-playing teenager would not be kept going indefinitely by solar power alone, but it easily coped with my needs.
So I didn't really need the Mophie Juice Pack Duo, a battery big enough to recharge a tablet and a smartphone in one hit. This is a very smart bit of kit and would have been invaluable had I not left my iPad in the car....

The River Kennet

Going up the Kennet Navigation from Reading to Newbury was interesting. I had assumed that it would be canal-like with virtually no current, but the early 18th century engineers had clearly been told to keep spending to the absolute minimum. The natural and rather steep river bed was used wherever possible, with artificial cuts being dug only to take boats up to the locks. 

It can be quite a slog, especially in a notorious stretch through Reading called the Brewery Gut, where the canal company could not divert the stream because of a brewery. The drop is particularly sharp and the course winding. The prospect of a 70ft narrowboat labouring slowly upstream meeting a 70ft narrowboat hurtling out of control downstream is too horrible to contemplate so the stretch is controlled by traffic lights. You have 12 minutes to clear the stretch.

I have to say that us rowers seemed to manage with far less grumbling than the paddlers.

The pictures show another 18th century cost-saving measure, a turf-sided lock. 

These are very rare now, having been replaced by proper brick and stone walls everywhere else. The sloping sides may have been cheaper to build but waste astonishing amounts of water. In a totally artificial canal this is a big problem but on the Kennet water was plentiful.

The first time we were faced with the torrent of water coming through the paddles in the top gates everyone's faces froze in panic. By the end of the trip most people used the stops in locks to tidy up in the boat, send a few texts and generally relax.

Another Mirage Drive Boat

There were two boats powered by Hobie Mirage turtle-flapper drives on the HBBR Raid this year, but unfortunately Paul Smithson could only bring his boat as far as Mapledurham before turning back to the wonderful world of work.

A few years ago boatbuilder-turned-furniture-designer Paul made an interesting waggling rudder to power his boat, but this had the disadvantage that you couldn't steer the boat at the same time.
Now he has returned to the 'human-powered outboard' idea by hanging a Mirage drive out the back. The drive is mounted where the rudder would normally be and linked by ropes to pedals in the cockpit. No big hole in the hull, then.

Steering is by a push-pull rod. It works very well.
The workmanship is amazing, and all in wood though it looks exactly as though he had made metal castings. 

The hull is John Welsford's Walkabout design, with an extra strake to increase the freeboard and no decks.

HBBR Raid down the Thames and up the Kennet

As the Beale Park Thames Boat Show drew to a close on the Sunday, the Home Built Boat Rally fleet left for its annual raid. This year the objective was to go down the Thames to Reading and turn right up the River Kennet, which leads via the Kennet and Avon Canal to Bath, Bristol and beyond.
The first stop was Mapledurham, a fabulously beautiful house, church and mill. Tim O'Connor demonstrated the latest development on his Hobie Mirage-driven canoe Zelva - a fitted tent.
The tent is supported by wooden hoops that fold down over the bow and stern. They blend into the lines of the boat nicely when down, and when up give lots of headroom although the shape might be a bit odd.

I wandered down to the mill and was astonished to see electricity being generated by a reverse-Archimedes screw, a very impressive bit of kit. The old mill wheel (or a replica thereof) showed how technology has moved on.
In the morning we arose to find Zelva hauled out of the water and Tim looking worriedly at a long crack between two strakes just below the waterline. He had been woken at 3 am by a worryingly damp feeling. The dampness continued to rise so he reluctantly got up to investigate.
The crack seemed to have been caused by the trailer, which had been modified slightly bringing a roller up too far against the hull.
But the Home Built Boat Rally has the expertise and the tools! Application of marine sealant and duct tape made Zelva watertight in minutes and we continued down river.

Skiff, Stirling and Sidecar

Beale Park now has a Racing and Riverboat Museum which I didn't get to see because I had to get away early on the Sunday to go downstream with the HBBR, which will be the subject of the next few posts. However, the Museum had a tent at the show and showed this gorgeous double skiff made by Wally Downing of Ashleighs Boatbuilders in nearby Pangbourne in 1906.
It was made for boat operators Hobbs of Henley and the Hobbs family still owns it, remarkably. It is mahogany on oak frames.
A new feature at the show was a bunch of Stirling engine fans. Stirling engines are the power plant of the future and always will be. They are theoretically highly efficient, totally silent and completely reliable, but they are fantastically complex and have never taken off. The Swedish navy had some Stirling-powered submarines but that is about it.
The Stirling engines propelled boats round the lake in eerie silence, but the engines themselves were clearly works in progress, not designed to be lovely and old-fashioned like the steamers at the show.
By the way, by a nice coincidence the performances of a Stirling engine is indicated by its Beale number.

I omitted to post a picture of the sidecar/cordless canoe actually attached to its motorcycle yesterday, so here it is.
Which gives me an excuse to show you a photo of the wonderful boat-tailed car on the Henwood and Dean stand, as usual.