Michael Stimpson - Narrow Boats: Ownership, Care and Maintenance

NARROW BOATS

Ownership, Care and Maintenance

NARROW BOATS

Ownership, Care and Maintenance

MICHAEL STIMPSON

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2019 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2019

Michael Stimpson 2019

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of thistext may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 552 7

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Much of this work is based on my own forty years experience of owning a boat, but I have also drawn on surveys of other craft in my line of work. It is intended to be a dipping in book; a prospective narrow boat owner may well want to read it from start to finish but some information is repeated where the subject fits the chapter.

Cruising the inland waterways is a tranquil way to spend your leisure time. There are thousands of miles of canal and river to explore and enjoy, and wayside inns to visit at the end of your boating day.

The average use of a narrow boat is two to three weeks and six to eight weekends a year, but there are many owners who cruise more extensively. Some couples share a boat and take it in turns to use her.

Some boat owners get up early and boat all day whilst others will boat for a few hours and tie up to undertake work on their boat, talk to other boat owners or explore the local area that they find themselves in.

Many canal-based events take place around the system throughout the year, from rallies to smaller events. Many of these are organized by the Inland Waterways Association, others by local boat clubs who want to introduce the joys of the waterways to local folk in their area.

I would like to thank my friends Trevor Whitling and Hugh Mcknight for reading early drafts of this book and offering constructive comments, which have been incorporated in the final work, and to Sue Cawson for reading the whole text before I submitted it to the publishers.

Most of the photos in this book are from my own collection, but about three dozen have kindly been donated by friends, some taken specifically for this book. My thanks go to them for their help.

I hope the reader enjoys it.

Michael Stimpson, Rickmansworth

January 2019

INTRODUCTION

Buying a boat is not an investment. It is unlikely to increase in value over the years, it will either maintain or lose its value. This depends on the level of maintenance the craft has received during its life. A boat is a hole in the water into which one throws money!

One aspect of boating that has grown out of all proportion over the last fifty years is the bulk of craft being used on our massive inland waterways network. The design of these craft is based on the original narrow boats that were the mainstay of the goods-carrying fleets that used to move cargos round the country. While there are still a good number of ex-working narrow boats around, recent years have seen a vast expansion of modern craft to fill the need for leisure use and floating homes. Boatyards all over this country and abroad have been producing hulls and the numbers of these craft have grown at a steady rate.

A pair of narrow boats carrying coal on the Grand Union Canal. The rear boat (the butty) is travelling close up behind the motor boat and is connected with cross straps. Normal practice if the boats were loaded would be to have the butty on a long line.

If you want to buy a boat that can cruise the majority of the inland waterways network in the UK then it is likely to be a narrow boat. If you want to cover all the inland non-tidal system then the maximum size is 57ft 6in long by 6ft 10in beam (17.5m 2m).

The network we have today is somewhat smaller than we had 100 years ago, as many canals built to feed the Industrial Revolution have been closed and, in many cases, man or nature has wiped the line of the canal from the map. Some of these are now being rebuilt to provide even more waterway routes for us all to enjoy and much of the UK is still connected by inland waterways; for example, you can take a narrow boat from London to Manchester or from Gloucester to York with ease.

Before the decline of the network of canals in the 1960s the main use of the system was for the transport of goods. With the passing of this era the network started to fall into decline. The rivers of course were natural and thus kept flowing, but the canals started to fall into disuse and thus into disrepair. As explored later in this book, the system was revived by the hard work of volunteers, and the main use of the network today is leisure.

Why would such a collection of connected waterways become so popular? Perhaps each person using the system today would give a different answer but high on the list would be the peace and tranquillity out on the water.

There are three types of waterway:

Rivers, which are, of course, natural and were either used as they were or improved by man-made locks and weirs to aid navigation

Navigations, which are artificial waterways that divert and/or shorten the course of a river but which get their supply of water from the connected river

Canals, which are totally man-made and which, in the main, were built as a method of transporting goods during the Industrial Revolution.

Without the Industrial Revolution there would not have been the need for the large network of canals, yet without the canals the Industrial Revolution may not have happened this may sound like a paradox and indeed it is. One wonders if the Industrial Revolution would have happened the way it did, or at all, if a method of getting raw materials to the new factories and finished goods away, cheaply and in quantity, had not been found. The cost of goods to the end user went down dramatically and, as it was seen how beneficial a network of waterways would be, more and more canals were built in a rush known as Canal Mania, and many canals, some of which did not see the light of day, were promoted. The same thing, of course, happened with the railways a century later.

Other benefits of transport by water as opposed to pack horse or cart were the amount of goods that could be transported in one load and the lower risk of damage to finished products.

Early canals were contour canals that hugged the lie of the land, but later canals took a more direct route from A to B, using tunnels, embankments and aqueducts to maintain the level. These were harder to build but cut down the journey time. There are a number of locations where a canal route winds round a point on the route for hours because the canal was built on a level and thus took the longer way round by keeping to the contour of the land.

Like the later railways, the canal system was built to a number of different sizes, but unlike the railways, which eventually were standardized on 4ft 8in (1.4m), canals are still separated by the different sizes that were used to determine the size of the locks and thus the size and type of craft that could fit into them.