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Miss Inexperience plumbs the depths: part 1

When Miss Inexperience and MsB left their mooring in central London they did so with two new pumps in their possession. What they had failed to account for was the small problem that neither of them had any idea what to do with them beyond the theoretical knowledge that they should have a pipe attached to either side and some wires to transport the magic from the batteries (where it’s stored) to the pumps (where it’s consumed).

Shortly after arriving in Cassiobury Park, Miss I decides that it’s high time she tackles the increasingly thorny issue of the yo-yoing hot water supply, not to mention the monotonous clogging of the shower pumps filter with hair (yes, the job of cleaning that out is just as fun as it sounds).

the drainage digression

Miss Inexperience decides to tackle what she thinks will be the easier task first and replace the shower pump. Tentatively she removes the pump from its box and gives it a good coat of looking at. Beyond telling her that replacing it should be a fairly simple task (two hoses, one in one out, two wires ditto, it even has an arrow on the bottom telling you which way round to put it) it doesn’t tell her much. Along with the pump there is a selection of plastic attachments, 4 “penny washers” and a manual, she decides to read the manual. No, it really is as simple as it looks:

  1. disconnect existing pump (a screwdriver will be required)
  2. find appropriate fittings from the selection supplied, ones that fit the pipe you have will work best, push them into the loose ends of the pipe and jubilee clip in place (where did you put that screwdriver?). Did you remember to put the jubilee clips on the pipes first? No? Remove the pipe fittings and start again
  3. fasten the pump to the floor/wall (if fastening to the wall make sure that the pump is uppermost) with screws (you did buy screws right?) and washers (do you remember where you put them when you excitedly opened the box?). Did you remember to check that the pump was the right way round? You want it to extract the water not aerate it, it’s a shower tray not a fish tank. No? Turn it round then…
  4. push the snap fittings home either side of the pump and secure them by sliding the plastic locks across. Yes they’re stiff, persevere, you don’t want them coming out and dropping dirty water all over your bathroom floor do you?
  5. ok, what did you do with the two wires you disconnected from the old pump? Is one of them red and the other black? No? You do remember which of them was connected to the live right? Ok, reconnect them.
  6. test the pump. If it works, waterproof your connections (assuming you’ve used “choc block”), if not, check you’ve turned the power back on/haven’t blown a fuse.

Simple right?

As if Miss Inexperience could ever get that lucky. The hose linking her shower pump to her shower tray was beyond repair and the shower tray had apparently been self draining for goodness knows how long.

She buys a new length of hose before removing the pump (which has, by this point, given up the ghost entirely). She concludes it probably died of an overdose of abandoned hair although that doesn’t explain the newly discovered self draining aspect of the shower tray. Tentatively (with the delicate aid of a Gorilla Bar) she lifts the floorboard next to the shower tray. As with so many things in her short boat owning career, she abruptly finds herself wishing she hadn’t. On the other hand it does help her identify the source of the problem.

Miss Inexperience quietly props the floorboard up in the kitchen and wanders next door to find out if APs wet and dry vacuum is to hand. She then spends the next hour or so vacuuming what is euphemistically known as grey water out of her bilges and chucking it into the canal where it was meant to end up in the first place. Still, it seems no major harm has been done. As the waters recede, one slow vacuum full at a time, she discovers the source of the leek. Not that it really needed much in the way of searching for. Slowly, probably over the course of years, the jubilee clip holding the decrepit pipe to the drain on the shower tray has rusted away leaving the pipe not quite secure and allowing the small amount of water that had been seeping out to become a petite lake under the bathroom. This, Miss Inexperience realises, shouldn’t be possible. The boat has a run through bilge which theoretically allows rain water to drain from the bows into to the stern bilge where it can be pumped out. It would seem that something, somewhere has gone a tad awry as what she has discovered under the floor is a small lake. Miss Inexperience pokes the drain holes, discovers they’re full of leaf litter and hesitantly lifts the next board along. More water … drat.

Having spent most of the day vacuuming out the bilges and clearing the drain holes so that the water actually runs through the boat rather than just into it Miss Inexperience is quite glad to finally get back to the job she’d started doing – replacing the shower pump.

Step 1: disconnect old hose, “it came off in me hand gov”
Step 2: wiggle new hose into place without breaking the slightly rusty shower tray fitting and jubilee clip it on as firmly as possible without crushing said slightly rusty fitting.
Step 3: replace floorboard and run away.

As is so often the way with this kind of job, once she’s done the unexpected tasks the actual process of putting in the new pump takes about ten minutes. She flips the switch, the pump gulps air, she turns it off again and goes to make dinner.

Miss Inexperience leaves London

Miss Inexperience is a restless soul, so when the time comes to leave London, she does so with the same lack of planning and at pretty much the same speed as she arrived. Bored now of the hurly-burly. Bored of the same faces, the same places every day; she decides, one June evening in 2010, that it’s time to move on. And this time she’s brooking no argument.

MsB, who has been in London for 13 years, ums and ahs; she is used to the monotony of pay and considerably more attached to her surroundings than Miss Inexperience is. Although they have been talking about leaving London for a while, this has always been at some unspecified point in the future. On this particular evening however, Miss Inexperience turns round and says: “you keep saying we’re going to leave. When exactly?”

And that, as they say, was that. There is some planning that goes into this. They both have to hand in their notice, a task they perform at the same time as booking off the week they’ll need to get out beyond the area Miss Inexperience knows well, yet still stay close enough to be able to commute back.

So, with everything sort of organised they pack their stuff onto the boat and set off with barely a goodbye (to be fair they’re not planning on going far at this point). That first night is spent at Kensal Green, barely any distance from where they started, but the sense of freedom is tangible. There is adventure in the air.

They travel slowly, since, despite having been re-packed twice, and the grease gun having been unclogged. The stern gland is still leaking like a sieve and Miss I is obsessively pumping the bilges. They crawl the length of the Paddington Branch, turning west at Bulls Bridge onto a section of canal Miss Inexperience has never traversed before but that MsB used to live on a long time before.

Slowly, slowly they put Cowley Peachy, Uxbridge and the amusingly named Black Jack’s Lock behind them. They stop overnight at Rickmansworth near the mislabelled “Aquadrom”[1] before hitting Cassiobury Park, where they intend to spend a couple of weeks before dropping back down to Rickmansworth in order to empty some toilets. For the next few weeks Miss Inexperience and MsB will “continuous cruise” (or “continuous moor” as it’s sometimes known) in this area until their contracts have expired and they are free to continue their journey to a new life on the other side of the country.

A funny shaped park

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you can’t un-notice…

Miss Inexperience had actually been moored in Cassiobury Park for a while before she noticed quite what a funny shape it was. Of course, once she had noticed there wasn’t a lot she could do to un-notice…

Amusing, and it turned out apposite shape aside Miss Inexperience decides Cassiobury Park is an extremely nice place to moor. It feels like mooring in the middle of nowhere, but is near enough to Watford for there to be a ready supply of everything you might need – such as shops, a laundrette, takeaways and, usefully, a plumbers’ merchant (but more of that later). There is, in common with all such beautiful places, very little phone reception. It was a blissfully quiet couple of weeks.

Cassiobury Park is also where Miss Inexperience and MsB, who have between them lived in London for 16.5 years, saw their very first flasher.

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does anyone know this man?

He was a youngish man, early 30’s maybe, with some daft story about how he was on his stag do and his mates had stolen his clothes and wouldn’t give them back until he had had his photograph taken. He didn’t have a camera with him, and was definitely sober.

They laughed at him and sent him away with an elderly t-shirt so he wouldn’t frighten the wildlife on the way back to his car. He came back 10 minutes later, again naked except for his brown loafers and white ankle socks (pulled up). His story this time was basically the same except that he told them his friends were hiding behind the bridge and that they would be able to see the flash, Miss Inexperience has no idea if the pun was intended. On top of that she has fantastic night vision, is well aware that there is no one hiding behind the bridge and having been in the area for nearly two weeks knows full well there are no convenient pubs in the surrounding area that he could have come from. She is also, truth to tell, getting a little bored of this game now. In the interests of an easy life however, and to an extent out of morbid curiosity as to how far this will go, she continues to play along. She is not daft enough to get her camera out, she has, after all lived in central London for over three years and instead fishes her phone out of her pocket and photographs him with that – it takes a couple of goes to get a shot that he considers adequate, he would probably have asked her to try it again had she not informed him that she is bored now and he should go away.

Of course he doesn’t. What he actually does is creep along the side of the boat (a boat with no lights on bar the one in the bedroom where there isn’t anyone, no music on and two people paying very careful attention to any noise outside) and attempts to peer through the bedroom window at the two women inside (the two women who are standing fully clothed in the kitchen).

Miss Inexperience gently opens the door, quietly steps up onto the gas locker and informs the whole of Cassiobury Park in a voice trained by years of calling back lurchers, and tinged with anger at the invasion of her privacy, that the young man in question is a pervert and that he should leave now or he WILL REGRET IT.

He goes.

Miss Inexperience subsequently posts the better of the two photographs of the flasher on Twitter because what else do you do with such a thing? Granny Buttons enhances it for her, no one admits to knowing the man.

Everything else is optional

In July 2010 Miss Inexperience had not yet come into contact with Jon Ody, the originator of the title of this section, however she understood the principle. Most things on a boat are, in fact optional; it doesn’t matter greatly if the engine doesn’t work, or indeed if there’s no gas or the glass in the stove is broken (as long as you’re not trying to use those things), however, there is one thing that should work at all times. That thing is, of course, the bilge pump.

Miss Inexperience has, as has been previously mentioned, a very leaky stern gland, so it was really quite fitting that early one Sunday morning she got up to take the dogs out, flicked the bilge pump on as usual, and discovered that it wasn’t working. It is a Sunday morning. She doesn’t know the area particularly well. She doesn’t have the faintest clue right now what’s wrong with the bilge pump and anyway the dogs need to go out.

Remembering the day her engine mounts had disappeared under water and yet the boat was still afloat, she lifts a deck board tentatively and stares into the murky depths. There’s about 3cm of water in the bilges. Ah well, it can wait for a few minutes. Miss Inexperience takes the dogs out and frets a bit. Where on earth is she going to get the bits to repair or replace the bilge pump on a Sunday morning? It might just be a loose connection. She wanders along the towpath a bit further and frets some more. MsB is inside making coffee, currently blissfully unaware of the bilge pump situation.

Miss Inexperience returns with the dogs and explains to MsB what she has discovered. “Oh,” says MsB.

“Indeed. Oh.”

Miss Inexperience drinks her coffee, takes up the deck boards and pokes the bilge pump. It’s not clogged, although it is filthy. The fuse is still intact and none of the wires appear to be loose. She declares it dead. Dodo-esque in fact. “Oh.” Says MsB.

“Indeed. Oh.”

Miss Inexperience takes a walk down to Bridgewater Basin to see if they sell bilge pumps – they don’t. So MsB takes the Nicholson’s Guide and her phone and sits on the roof working out which is the next nearest boatyard and ringing them to see if they are a) open on a Sunday and b) sell bilge pumps. They are, and they do. Miss Inexperience gets her bike down from the roof and takes a ride… A six-and-a-half-mile ride, down some of the bumpiest towpath she’s ridden on for a long time, through Rickmansworth, past the “stink hole”, all the way back to bridge 180 and a tiny basin with a comprehensive chandlery who have, in stock, all the bits she needs to replace her bilge pump. She is in the chandlery for a total of about 20 minutes including locking and unlocking her bike. It took her nearly an hour to get there and will take nearly an hour to get back.

But bilge pumps are not optional.

On the way back she detours into Rickmansworth to confuse the other shoppers at Waitrose by riding her push bike through the multi-story car park that is the only road access to the store (the alternative involves taking her bike in the lift, or carrying it bodily up the stairs).

So, two hours cycling, 20 minutes in a chandlery, a 30 minute detour to Waitrose and about half an hour to fit the new bilge pump. Done.

It actually takes longer to pump the water out of the bilges than it did to fit the pump.

The deck board lattice

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a very small frog on a normal sized deck chair

Over the four years Miss Inexperience has owned the boat several of her deck boards have been replaced. The one on the front locker was replaced after a friend stepped on it and it fell through. Said friend was very embarrassed; it wasn’t her fault, the board was rotten and should have been replaced before that happened. After that three of the back deck boards were replaced for similar reasons. They were verging on dangerous and, as they were the ones that were mostly stood on, they got done, the same applied to the top of the gas locker. But that, sadly, was as far as it had gone. The less well used deck boards were in better nick than the rest so they were waiting, and had been waiting, for a while. In fact, they’d been waiting for so long that by this time they were a little dangerous and Miss Inexperience had been forced to carefully place things across them so they couldn’t be stood on.

About a week after Miss Inexperience stopped in Cassiobury Park, Thoroughly Decent Bloke (TDB), a friend she hasn’t seen for a while, turns up with his so-new-he’s-still-in-the-process-of-fitting-it-out wide-beam. He moors up next to them, taking the number of boats that have joined Miss Inexperience in Cassiobury Park to two, as AP has also turned up by this point. Miss Inexperience is grateful she doesn’t know anyone else who’s likely to be joining this bring-you-own-boat party as they are currently lending credence to the argument that scruffy boats always travel in packs (even though TDB’s boat really can’t be described as scruffy).

TDB stops by on his way back from work the following day, takes one look at her deck-boards and points out that they need replacing before someone falls through them. Miss Inexperience knows this, that’s why there are things strewn across the back deck in a seemingly random pattern, unfortunately she has no way of getting hold of the materials she needs to manufacture new ones and anyway, right now her priority has to be her dodgy water system, it can wait. Anyone who doesn’t know not to stand on the bits with stuff on them shouldn’t be on the back of her boat anyway.

“I’ve got some spare materials, I’ll make you some new deck boards.”

“Really?” Miss Inexperience replies. “Thank you.”

And he does. Without any hoohah at all. Miss Inexperience wakes up one morning to find that he has taken away her old deck boards to use as templates for the new ones and slowly, over the course of the day, he puts them back, only made out solid ply rather than the lace she had before. He also finds some green deck paint left over from doing his roof and paints the whole deck green (even the Hex Board) so that it matches itself, if not the rest of the boat.

“It’s no trouble” he says to her protestations. And it does mean that it’s now safe to walk on the back deck again.

Keep stirring, there’s one in there somewhere

It has been getting progressively harder for Miss Inexperience to change from forward to reverse over the course of the journey, and it’s becoming almost impossible to find neutral on the way. By this point the change requires actual thumping of the Morse handle in order to dislodge it, and changing gear is increasingly involving a nasty grinding noise and on occasion the boat not actually going into gear. This is really not a sustainable situation, and Miss Inexperience is struggling with the Morse lever one day when TDB comes past. He gives it a waggle.

“The gear cables could just be dry. Try putting some WD40 down them.”

“I beg your pardon?”

So he shows her, spraying it into the top of the cables and waggling the lever until it moves freely. It’s a revelation, such a simple thing that makes life so much easier. Sadly the free movement hardly lasts any time at all, those gear cables are very dry.

**

[1] Perrott, D and Mosse, J Waterways Guide 1: Grand Union, Oxford and the South East London: Nicholson 2006 p. 44

Miss Inexperience learns about mooring in London

Local restrictions

So far Miss Inexperience has only done a limited amount of cruising on any boat; she has travelled as far west as Newbury and as far East/South as Camden on her own boat and has done various stretches of canal on other peoples boats. On canals, and even canalised rivers, you can generally stop pretty much anywhere along the towpath for up to two weeks (depending on local restrictions). So, other than her brief sojourn on the Thames she has never really been anywhere with limited mooring. London is, therefore, a bit of a shock. Around Rickmansworth and Watford (as far north as you can get and still be on the tube network) it’s possible to moor pretty much anywhere. In London proper however, there are designated moorings and in most places it’s not physically possible to just bang in a couple of pins as there are high voltage cables and fibre optics running under the concrete towpaths…

Camden

(7 days – no breasting up, plus 2 boats worth of 2h ‘stop and shop’ moorings)

Miss Inexperience headed straight to the visitor mooring in Camden when she arrived in London for a couple of reasons: her job was in Camden (she might as well make life easy for herself) and it’s Camden. The latter is the reason most people head to Camden (it’s a very popular mooring).

When Miss Inexperience first arrived it was possible to moor there for 14 days during the winter and 7 days during the summer – it’s now 7 days all year round. She was lucky; when she arrived there was a space into which she could squeeze her boat. This is generally not the case, which means either a quick turn in ‘dead dogs’ tunnel’ [1] and heading back to Little Venice or carrying on down the Camden Flight to Islington.

The Camden visitor moorings (though not the stop-and-shop moorings) are theoretically locked overnight, although that is generally done by one of the boaters currently on the mooring. There is (or at least was) a warden for the mooring which somehow didn’t seem to make a difference, it was still done by whoever happened to be there at the appropriate moment and remembered, or occasionally by a boater from one of the other moorings as they passed through. Miss Inexperience is bad at confrontation and didn’t really want to have to ask locals to leave the mooring; however she quickly discovered that not locking the mooring meant towpath “parties” going on all night outside her boat with loud music and drunkenness that she also wasn’t very keen on. She also discovered that putting on a high-vis jacket when she went to lock the mooring lent her an air of credibility and meant she got far fewer questions.

The boats in Camden also tend to be used as a backdrop for people’s photographs, which is mainly not a problem. It’s even perfectly acceptable to step onto someone’s boat to take a photograph providing they have given you permission. The following however, are all things Miss Inexperience has seen and DOES have a problem with:

  1. Young men leaning on her boat in order to impress their girlfriends – solution: open towpath side curtain and shout “oi” through the window – it’s amazing how high they jump.
  2. People climbing onto her boat WITHOUT PERMISSION in order to get better pictures of whatever it was they were trying to photograph: boats going past, the houses on St. Mark’s Crescent, ducks, kayaks, each other posing on a boat – solution: same as above but often with the door rather than the curtains.
  3. People climbing on her boat in order to honk her bicycle horn (the horn got nicked fairly soon after she arrived in London anyway so that became a moot point).
  4. Children casting the boats off in broad daylight – she discovered quite quickly that yelling like a fishwife and chasing them a short distance generally made them go away and not try it again until after the boat they’d been caught doing it to had left.
    Camden has bollards rather than rings which makes it a lot easier to cast a boat off, however fastening your ropes on your boat not the towpath and a chain padlocked at both ends (round the bollard, and round the boat) goes some way towards mitigating the problem. Motorbike padlocks and heavy duty chain are best for this as children in London have access to bolt croppers.
  5. People sitting on the roofs of the boats to: eat their lunch, drink a coffee, smoke a joint – yes really. This is usually dealt with by a yelled “get off my boat” from whichever of the local boaters happens to notice the imposters first, in the summer this is often someone on the back of a trip boat.

Despite these minor problems Miss Inexperience enjoyed mooring at Camden; there are two supermarkets in easy reach of the mooring as well as an “organic supermarket” (outside her price range but good for treats). In fact when Miss Inexperience gets her first winter mooring this is where she chooses to be (good job the canal didn’t freeze that year otherwise she’d have been stuffed as there’s no facilities on-site).

***

And finally: it’s all fun and games until someone sets fire to a wall.

Regents Park Road Bridge viewed from the water

Miss Inexperience was sitting in AP’s boat when she hears crackling and can smell burning outside. As her boat is next to AP’s she sticks her head out the door to see what’s going on, only to discover that someone has set light to the ivy covered wall next to the boats. It has been a dry summer and they’ve clearly put some accelerant on it as the flames are already 6 foot up the wall. Miss Inexperience rings the fire brigade and endeavours to explain that no, she doesn’t have a postcode for her current location, the nearest road is Regents Park Road and that the fire is on the towpath. In the mean time AP and some lovely Italians from a hire-boat attempt to extinguish the conflagration with buckets of water and at least one of the hire-boat’s fire extinguishers – Miss Inexperience didn’t manage to stop them in time, she still wonders how they explained that one when they got back. They did such an efficient job that the flames were gone by the time the fire service arrived, but, as the wall was still hot and there were crackling sounds (and a primary school on the other side of the wall) they decided to douse the wall thoroughly anyway while chatting with Miss Inexperience about living on a boat. Good fun was had by all.

Little Venice

(14 days)

The Grand Union (Paddington Branch) is considerably easier to moor on with several sections where it’s possible to put in pins. One of these is just beyond the official visitor mooring rings at Little Venice, however (as Miss Inexperience discovers when she moves in the middle of a week to get out of the way of the Canalway Cavalcade moorings) the whole stretch from Little Venice to the Harrow Road Bridge is counted as the Little Venice visitor mooring. The BW enforcement officer gently explains this to her and agrees that she can move her boat as soon as she gets a chance.

Volunteering at the Canalway Cavalcade (before she owned her own boat) was Miss Inexperience’s first introduction to the canal in London and she discovers (the first time she goes there when the Cavalcade isn’t on) that Little Venice looks oddly empty without it. As a local boater however she realises that it can make moving around a bit of a nightmare. There is a huge influx of boats at the beginning of the festival, meaning that you have to go further afield to find a mooring as the whole section is closed to visitors and, when they all leave again it’s possible to get stuck waiting to go through the Maida Hill Tunnel (272 yards, thanks for asking) for up to an hour. Generally, if at all possible, it’s a good idea to be a long way away from Little Venice when the Cavalcade is going on because boats that aren’t part of the festivities really just get in the way.

It is on the Little Venice visitor moorings that Miss Inexperience discovers children like to bang on the outsides of boats and then run away – a kind of water based equivalent of the doorbell game, and that anything not locked down, for example AP’s bike, will get nicked.

Brownings Island, Little Venice

There is a wicked cross wind at times on the Little Venice visitor moorings; this is fine if you manage to find a space on the section with rings, however, if you’re trying to moor single handed and your boat is being blown out while you’re trying to knock a pin in things can get a bit dicey. Miss Inexperience struggles with this for about twenty minutes one day with a particularly vicious wind before coming to the conclusion (having checked the towpath both ways) that if she just loops the rope over a section of fence while she quickly puts the pin in, it’ll be fine. This blocks the towpath but she’s keeping an eye out and putting the pin in as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, as she hits it for the last time a cyclist appears.

“Mind the …” the cyclist slows and looks up to see what’s going on … and is promptly taken off her bike by the “…rope”.

Miss Inexperience picks her up and apologises profusely. The cyclist, a little shaken but otherwise unhurt, accepts the apology and the explanation, ducks under the rope and leaves saying that she has learnt an important lesson about mooring boats “to slow down and look for ropes”. Miss Inexperience takes the rope down, ties it to the pin and vows never to do that again.

She also arrived back at her boat one evening to find that one of the pins had come out (some people seem to think that slowing down past moored boats is a slur on their boat handling) and the boat was almost completely blocking the canal (quite impressive since it’s only a 40’ boat and the canal here is quite wide). Given the strength of the wind and the length of the centre line it takes Miss Inexperience, MsB and AP quite a while to get the boat safely back to the bank. Fortunately, Miss Inexperience has ‘D’ pins and always threads the rope through them so she just has to bang the pin, and a couple of spares, in.

Paddington Basin

(7 days)

The Paddington Basin mooring is a bit of a concrete jungle however it does have a couple of things in its favour, notably its proximity to supermarkets, Paddington Station and St. Mary’s Hospital – on at least one occasion someone who has had an accident on a boat has been hauled onto the roof and taken round to the back to St. Mary’s where the skipper has yelled “a little help here” in the general direction of the ambulance bay. It also extends the amount of time you can stay in the area of Little Venice to three weeks.

That said, Miss Inexperience isn’t a fan of Paddington Basin, most of the moorings are down slippery pontoons and those that are on concrete are generally under bridges. There is one mooring, near the glass bridge that has a security guard opposite it (which oddly didn’t make Miss Inexperience feel that much more secure) and the level of wind in there is such that lighter boats (like Miss Inexperience’s) sometimes have to crab to get anywhere. The wind means that manoeuvring has to be done at some speed and Miss Inexperience has been yelled at more than once by boaters who appear not to understand that not all boats handle the same. She has, on more than one occasion, wondered aloud whether the boat owner in question would prefer her wash hit his boat or her boat did so as she was being blown in his direction.

However, apart from its lack of trees and slippery surfaces in places, Paddington Basin is quite a safe place to moor; in fact the worst thing that happened when she was moored there was the discovery by AP of a group of builders sitting on the back of Miss Inexperience’s boat drinking cans of beer on their lunch break. They probably thought it made them less conspicuous. For all Miss Inexperience knew they could have been doing it for days, but, as they didn’t leave any mess and didn’t argue when AP pointed out that it wasn’t their boat and they shouldn’t be there she wasn’t too worried about it.

Kensal Green

(14 days plus 5 boat lengths of 24 hour)

Opposite the cemetery at Kensal Green is actually quite a nice place to moor. It’s a long mooring on a wide section of towpath which allows the possibility of safe barbeques and general sitting around on the towpath (something of a rarity in the middle of London).

There is also a huge Sainsbury’s which Miss Inexperience and MsB regularly cruised to at Christmas (subject to ice) to collect last minute shopping and alcohol (a quick lift of the trolley over the magnetic wot-not and you can offload straight onto the boat before slipping the trolley back into the supermarket the same way you got it out – no damage done).

It is however a bad plan to attempt to moor here during the Notting Hill Carnival, as Miss Inexperience and one of her friends discovered. They set off for the mooring one evening during the festival, thinking it would be fun to cruise through. However, by the time they’d had a few bottles, rocks and other missiles thrown at them by drunken festival goers who appeared to equate boats with target practice. Had been leered at, jollied at and generally irritated by being the only sober people in a crowd of louts (albeit louts that couldn’t get at them and were drunk enough that they couldn’t even manage to hit a narrowboat moving at 3 miles an hour) it started to lose its appeal. She didn’t make the same mistake twice.

Islington

(14 days, locked at night)

As Miss Inexperience quickly discovered; the Islington Visitor Mooring is a funny place. It starts about 10 meters east of the Islington Tunnel (the longest on the Regent’s Canal – it only has two tunnels, one of them has to be the longest) and is in a deep cutting surrounded by houses.

Kings Place

When Miss Inexperience moored here the first time she was very new to boating; she knew about the “8 ‘til 8 rule” regarding running engines but, as she was getting home late and her batteries weren’t holding charge, she put her engine on at about 1950 one evening (for half an hour so she could shower) and got yelled at by someone who pretty much moors there full time. Sadly, the irony was lost on her as she didn’t really understand the continuous cruising rules at this time. The reason for the bawling out was gently explained by another boater. There is at least one local who has a problem with the boats and who always reports boats running their engines after the 2000 cut off.

She explained the situation; he nodded and responded that when he needed to do it he went for a half hour cruise as they couldn’t say anything about boats moving. Wide eyed with terror (there are two locks east of the mooring and a tunnel west of it) she nodded and pointed out that single-handing at night was a bit scary. So he helped her top up her batteries and introduced her to the concept of “batt aid”.

Miss Inexperience eventually tried to avoid mooring at Islington for a variety of reasons, not just the grumpy local(s). The Northern Line is reliably unreliable which lead to Miss Inexperience attempting to cycle to work. Not knowing the way she got herself in the wrong lane going down Pentonville Road and nearly got knocked off by a van while trying to do a legal right turn (legal only for bicycles, buses and taxis; everyone else carries straight on) meaning that she arrived in work on time but very shaken. On top of that was the difficulty of negotiating the very busy centre of Islington (it’s a bit like Oxford Street but less … linear) from the supermarket to the mooring, and the embarrassment of the day she had to figure out how to get to a position where she could call down to AP to let her in because she’d arrived back after the mooring had been locked and she’d forgotten to take her BW key and phone with her.

Victoria Park

(14 days)

Somewhere between Islington and Victoria Park

The visitor moorings in Victoria Park are notoriously difficult to get on to. They’re generally two boats deep along the whole length of the park and many of the boats present appear to be continuous moorers. Whenever Miss Inexperience headed down that way she inevitably ended up turning back having not found anywhere to moor. The further East you go on the canal in London the more dodgy boats and continuous mooring there is to be found. The enforcement officer at the time Miss Inexperience was there had done a marvellous job of clearing the rule-breakers out of central London, but unfortunately, as with many problems, it was just moved; in this instance to Victoria Park and later to the bottom of the Hertford Union and the Lee Navigation. It is possible to walk around the edges of Victoria Park, and at night it is advisable to do so – though it’s better than it used to be. It’s a great place to moor if you’re going to one of the festivals, or even if you just want to listen to one of the festivals, since you can hear the music from the towpath; that’s if you can find somewhere to moor.

Mile End Park

(14 days – if you last that long)

Very few people moor in Mile End Park even though there are a couple of places you can do so, and even fewer do so more than once. Miss Inexperience didn’t try it, as a single female being that far away from the safety of other boats

Lillies, somewhere towards Limehouse

seemed like a bad plan. There were too many horror stories and she wasn’t keen on ending up as a statistic. After Miss Inexperience moved onto her mooring and stopped continuous cruising in London she briefly had a job in Mile End. Having seen the park at night (and had to purchase Kevlar tyres for her bike because of the quantity of broken glass lying around in the park) Miss Inexperience is very glad she didn’t try and moor there. Not recommended for anyone.

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1 Dead Dogs’ Tunnel is actually a disused loading bay.

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NOTE: NOT ALL OF THE PICTURES WILL APPEAR RELEVENT. THEY’RE NOT, BUT I APPEAR TO HAVE LOST PRETY MUCH ALL OF MY PHOTOS OF LONDON, THESE ARE FROM AN OLD PHONE AND ARE THE BEST I CAN DO. SORRY.