Grinding,grinding,grinding.

0 Locks / 0 miles

My aches and pains from yesterday had almost gone by this morning so it was back to the grinder. In fairness to other residents, considering it is Sunday I didn’t start until about 10am. I have now completely cleaned the starboard side and am about ¼ of the way along the port side. After lunch I decide I had had enough of the grinder for one day so got a tin of blacking from the boatyard shop and started blacking the starboard side. Well this blacking is soooo thick, the only way I can describe applying it is to say its like painting with treacle that’s been in the fridge. Needless to say that the 4 inch brush I had bought for the job was not really up to it and came to grief just as I was nearly finishing. As I cannot get a replacement without taking a bus trip back to Hemel Hempstead and wasting half a day I have managed to repair it using cable ties. Hopefully it will hold together long enough because it won’t be of any use after this even though the manufacturer states brushes can be cleaned in white spirit or turps. I don’t know how many gallons it would take because a bath in about 200mls of white spirit did nothing so I have left the brush soaking in it so it doesn’t harden up over night.

High and dry

0 Locks / 0 miles

Just as well we set an alarm clock last night. Neither of us slept very well for one reason or another and Murphy’s Law prevailed because we had no sooner dozed off when the alarm went off. Dead on 8am the boat yard team arrived and started to remove the boat in the dry dock and within 10 minutes we were being pulled in by rope. They don’t drive the boats in or out as it stirs up too much sludge making it difficult to seal the dock gateway.

After closing the gate behind us and lining the boat up, securing ropes fore and aft, 3 submersible pumps were started to drain the dock. This took about 30 minutes and “Gypsy Rover” gently settled on the 3 wooden bearers without a bump. As soon as there was no fear of any movement a gangplank was placed from the dock wall to the boat. I then set about putting on my wet weather gear in preparation to start the water blasting A.S.A.P. I had no sooner got down onto the dry dock floor when I found a small Perch (see picture) flapping around in the shallow water. So a helping hand was needed for this little fellow to get back to the canal in one piece rather than being minced up going through one of the pumps.
We hired the water blaster which can be used hot or cold but it was recommended that we do the job at 70⁰ C to remove any oil or grease as well as the sludge. The whole job took 4 hours with a brief coffee break.
Lunch was the next order of the day while I waited for the boat to dry.
After lunch the hull was dry enough on the starboard side to set to with an electric grinder fitted with the meanest, coarse wire brush available. The rest of the afternoon was spent wielding this heavy piece of electrical equipment around grinding off anything the water blaster had failed to shift. To date I can report that 25% of the hull has now been finished awaiting blacking and I am exhausted (I was going to write something else here but I’ve been censored) so it won’t be long before I’m in bed to restore some energy for tomorrow.

Just had a power cut after some heavy rain so I am uploading this in the dark, I can't wait for the power to come back on. I hope the dry dock doesn't fill up over night and ruin all my hard work!

Blustery

6 Locks and 3½ miles

Thursday morning was quite windy and we had heard on the news of 5 lorries (trucks) being blown over on motorways. It was on my way down to the marina that I witnessed a very strong wind gust destroy a collapsible canopy on a GRP cruiser moored outside the marina. This area is very exposed compared to where we have been moored above lock 67. There was a phone number in the window of the boat which I rang only to get an answer phone. I duly left my details and what had happened to his boat but as of yet not received any thanks or acknowledgement. The owner has been back to the boat to secure the remains of his canopy but I have heard nothing. A thank you would be a nice gesture.
Friday morning started out calm as we prepared to move off from Apsley. Our first chore was grocery shopping at Sainsbury’s. While there Homebase rang to say they had found our missing vanity and would we like to collect it which we did.
It was lunch time before we finally cast off and the wind had started to become quite strong. During the course of the trip we encountered some very strong wind gusts which blew us all over the canal and made locking difficult where the locks were exposed to the elements. Along the way we saw 2 huge trees that had succumbed to yesterdays winds and workmen had been busy with chainsaw’s clearing pathways etc. Plenty of firewood for the taking although not for us as we do not have a multi fuel fire. However we had to battle on as we wanted to be moored up at Winkwell dry dock before dusk.
Dot gave the washing machine a work out during the trip to take advantage of plentiful power so all our chores are up to date. This means next week can be totally devoted to the working on the boat.
Upon arrival at Winkwell we found the dry dock was full of water with its present occupant ready to be pulled out tomorrow morning. So it’s early to bed tonight ready for an early start tomorrow morning.
WANTED. Labourers, painters or brush hands. Lunch and dinner provided.

Photo shows Gypsy Rover alongside Narrowboats Archimedes and Ari while refueling outside Apsley Marina.

No prizes for guessing where the first photo was taken by Brent last Friday.

Derby & Joan

0 Locks / 0 miles

Unfortunately Brent was dis-appointed on Monday as his trip to visit the ‘Cutty Sark’ was thwarted because it is all closed up for restoration and not scheduled to re-open before mid 2008. However his visit to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich more than made up for it. The two photos show the laser light with the direction of the meridian line.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time

The second shows the latitude of Wellington New Zealand. (Our hometown)
He also enjoyed traveling on the Docklands light Railway because he sat where a driver would normally sit and had a perfect view all around. Perhaps I should explain to those not in the know that the DLR is an automatic computer controlled system. Each train has a guard to open and shut the doors who also sets the controls to go and the computers do the rest. It’s quite uncanny having a driverless train.

That night we had dinner in the Paper Mill pub where there is a lot of photo’s of the area circa 1900 – 1930 including a very good aerial photo showing the mill, canal and railway. When you compare this to what now stands on the old mill site you can see just how big the mill complex was.

Tuesday morning was a 5am start as we had to get Brent on the 6.08am train from Apsley to Watford Junction where he caught the rail air link on National Express to Heathrow. First leg of his flight home to New Zealand via, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Perth and Auckland before arriving home in Wellington on Sunday.

After all the walking around London in the last week Dot is now looking forward to putting her feet up for a couple of days to recuperate.

Last week Dot and Brent reported seeing a couple of narrowboats on a stretch of water close to the canal but couldn’t see how they got where they were. So Tuesday afternoon was fine enough for Dot and I to take a walk and solve this mystery. We walked up the tow path to bridge 153 where we crossed the canal and down the side of the old lock keepers cottage. This bought us out into a street which was an industrial area where some of the buildings would have been part of John Dickenson’s mill. There were old steam pipes (the mill had been steam operated) between some of the buildings and there was a water course running alongside the buildings with overhanging canopies. My guess is that this was originally a barge loading dock which has since silted up. At the end of the road we turned left where we found a bridge over the waterway running behind the buildings. This waterway was coming from the canal further north but the bridge was far too low for navigation. After walking down a parallel road from where we had just come from we found an alleyway which headed us back towards the waterway. At the end of this we found the 2 narrowboats Dot had seen earlier. The water way was lined with steel and concrete and appeared to be reasonably deep making me think that it was built for a purpose. We followed the waterway in a Southerly direction and found ourselves behind Sainsbury’s supermarket which is alongside lock 66. Alongside the lock is an off chute of the canal which I had mistakenly taken to be the river Gade as it is not very deep and flows quite fast unlike the canal. However from what we have seen I would guess that this off chute was originally access to one of Dickenson’s wharves and the 2 narrowboats had gone in to their mooring via this entranceway. I would hate to try and get them out now as the entranceway is badly silted and full of supermarket trolleys of which we could see 5.

Preparation for dry dock.

2 Locks / 1 mile

In preparation for going into Winkwell dry dock next Saturday we dropped down through lock 67 to the Apsley Marina for water and a pump out and returned to our original mooring first thing this morning.
This afternoon Brent and Dot went to Halfords and bought a new Kenwood CD/radio/MP3 player which was half price (love those bargains). Brent then got the job of fitting it.

The photo is of an unusual duck? Dot and Brent sighted in St James Park on Friday. Anyone have any ideas on what it is?

As Brent leaves us on Tuesday to fly home to New Zealand and back to work he is going into LondonGreenwich
with Dot for one final visit tomorrow with a trip on the Docklands Light Railway to visit and the sailing ship “Cutty Sark”. He is also hoping to meet up with his sister Tracey for lunch. I will remain on board in case the agency rings me with some work, if not there are still jobs to be done on the boat.There has been more movement on the canal today than we have seen for some time.

First cruise for 2007

8 Locks / 4 miles

Last night I thought I had better check to see how much diesel we had left and found we had less than a quarter of a tank (about 30 litres) so I emptied our emergency supply into the tank for good measure. It was then a case of where to go to refuel, Winkwell, if they had any, Watford or Tring. However an evening stroll down to the marina solved our problem as a working pair of narrowboats was just mooring up outside the marina. This was Candle Bridge Carrying Co who operates from London up to Apsley Mills selling the usual coal, gas and diesel.
An arrangement was made for us to move down through lock 67 first thing the following day and refuel before CBCC departed on their return trip to London.

The following morning turned out fine but very windy which made things a little tricky while trying to moor alongside CBCC to refuel but we succeeded without any mishaps. It has now become obvious that our fuel tank holds at least 30 - 40 litres more than the manufacturer states in our owner’s manual which is handy to know.
Rather than just turn around to go back to where we were moored previously, we took Brent on a short cruise down to below Kings Langley lock 69A and turned around behind the new Ovaltine apartment development so that he could go home saying he had traveled on a narrowboat and worked some locks.
He also got to see a bit more of the countryside.

Thanks Jeannie and Benn for your email, please send us your email address or post to your profile on blogger so that we can reply personally.

City of light (Paris).

Our lack of up dating the blog has not been due to inactivity, far from it, we have only just returned to “Gypsy Rover” to welcome in the New Year with 2 hours to spare.
We have in fact been to Paris, the City of Light, for 3 days. The city certainly lived up to its name with all the usual tourist attractions well lit and all the Xmas lights around the streets which I’m afraid put London’s lights to shame enough to say there was no contest.
As Brent has traveled all the way from New Zealand, his Xmas wish was a visit to Paris while he is in the UK. Not to be left out Tracey also joined us so that she and Brent could visit Euro Disneyland for which we conveniently had a free pass. We traveled via the Eurostar so that I could tick off another train trip off my wish list. The train journey to Paris was unbelievably smooth and quiet but unfortunately we did not get to see much in the way of scenery as we were shrouded in fog for most of the trip and the return journey was at night. Upon arrival at the Gare du Nord in Paris it was only a short walk to our hotel.
The hotel was listed as a 3 star rating but we felt that even a 2 star rating was an exaggeration as there was no tea or coffee facilities in the rooms only a dispensing machine in the foyer at a Euro per cup. The shower in our room was broken and you had to stand and hold the shower rose over your head which was a pain.
As we were on the 6th floor we had to use the hotel lift which can only be described as a shoe box which had a carrying capacity of 3 persons or 225kgs. Now Brent, Dot and myself could just squeeze into the contraption but our combined weight was over the maximum weight limit so what do you do in a situation like that? Perhaps French people are lighter than Kiwi’s. On 2 separate occasions the lift was out of action and we had to walk up the stairs, needless to say we were exhausted by the time we got to our rooms.
The day we arrived in Paris the weather was cold and dry (0ºc) and the last 2 days we had occasional showers. We walked for miles and visited all the usual places and took the open top bus tour when of course it rained. It was surprising how many tourists there were around Paris even though it is winter and queues for places like the Louvre and the Eiffel tower were still over an hours wait.
Unfortunately we did not travel on the canal St Martin which passes through Paris, but we did visit it and checked out the locks which were all securely locked with gates on all sides, the actual lock gates are steel and hydraulically operated by gate keepers.
Upon our arrival back in London we waited an hour for the train to Apsley and arriving back at Gypsy Rover just before 10pm on New Years Eve.
As midnight struck, large firework displays were being set off in towns all around us and it was hard to know which way to look to see the biggest and best displays in the sky. The noise was also so horrendous that the poor old ducks were swimming around in circles not knowing which way to go to get away from the noise.
Because we were away for 4 days the only appliance we left switched on was the fridge, the batteries held up very well and were just under 12volts upon our return. A quick half hour of engine running restored the batteries enough to switch on the Mikuni central heating for hot water in the morning.