This week, Peter has very kindly videoed some footage of where he happens to be
as I can't be with him.
Hope you enjoy it!
[Music]
Well, here we are on a very windy bank holiday on the Oxford Canal in Banbury.
I'm on the towpath at the moment but Bandoneon isn't, because for the first time since I've been on the boat,
I'm in one of these places.
On the other side of the canal here is Sovereign Wharf.
This is a set of permanent moorings and a big tent there for doing work on boats,
painting or repairs and out of the weather.
A little way down I've taken a canal side berth
while I'm waiting for my appointment at Tooley's Boatyard, which is a few hundred meters along from
here, to get the boat going into their dry dock so we can have the bottom scraped and painted.
You can probably see Bandoneon over on the other side. It's a bit quiet today because it is a very windy.
Even if I wasn't in the mooring I wouldn't be moving anywhere on a day like this. I've
learned my lesson. The wind forecast this afternoon is 40 plus miles an hour
and in those conditions a narrowboat just gets blown all over the place.
And you can see there we are, tied up along with a couple of other boats on this wooden jetty
and now I'll walk across and we'll have a look at what the wharf has got to offer and I'll
explain why I'm actually here.
Here we are on the road entrance to Sovereign Wharf
and everything in the wharf is behind this gate. So when you take a berth here you get a key to the gate.
So everything behind there is secured for example, poking around the corner there, there's Marianne's
car and that's one of the reasons I'm here, is because I'm looking after her car at the moment
and it means I can put it somewhere safe and I know where it is.
So now we're just going to go inside and have a look at what facilities you get when you pay for
a mooring in a marina or a wharf...
and now we're on the inside of the gate. So here is, actually, a little toilet
and the other side of that is an Elsan and just beyond that are the bins. We'll be going
around there in a moment because that's where the boat is.
These boats are in, on the jetties
that are at right angles to the canal and the the wharf carries on beyond that tent.
There is a boat in there at the moment, the, the wet dock.
Here we are with the Elsan, and the bins,
and the bicycle rack,
and along this nice gravel path there's a power point
and I have actually, for this only the second time since I've had the boat, I've connected up my shoreline cable
because as with most marinas and wharves, they don't like you to run the engine in here
so you can see the power is going into the socket on the back of the boat there
for shore power, which means I've got permanent mains electricity at the moment.
I still need the solar panels to charge the batteries because the way my boat is wired it
doesn't charge the batteries when I'm on shore power. I need to make adjustments to that or
possibly buy another battery charger. We have this little wooden jetty we're tied up to...
and just by the front of the boat there is another power point with two sockets
and just behind that, on that grey box, there's a water, water tap so we have water as well
and so I can sit here, um, secure and behind locked doors and with all the facilities laid on!
Back inside now and Flann's come to get in the picture as he always does.
So, as you can see from the outside I'm in Banbury and for the first time in the three years I've been on the boat
I'm in a paid mooring...
and so the reasons for that, well first of all the reason I'm in Banbury is
on the 20th of this month I have a booking to go into the dry dock at
Tooley's Historic Boatyard, a few hundred meters from here, and they're going to
scrape the hull and reapply the bitumen blacking to the hull that needs doing every three years
or perhaps or so and also check the state of the six magnesium alloy anodes I've got on the hull
which are there to prevent rusting in the steel and replace any that need replacing.
I'm here early because Marianne and I set off on the journey and we were aiming to get here by the
end of the school holidays so that she could be on the boat with me and, as those of you who follow
the channel will know, unfortunately we had an accident when we are at the Cowroast Lock on the
on the summit of the Grand Union, near Tring and Marianne has been unable to continue.
She's at home recuperating but it was decided, we decided, that I would carry on anyway because...
excuse me. Is that you? Is that your fur? Um, yes, because Marianne's car was parked in a side road
back where we were where we set out from, at Denham, and I was anxious to collect the car,
so I carried on quickly to get to Banbury
and then as soon as I got here I got the train back to Denham and brought the car up here. Um,
Marianne can't drive at the moment and we don't know when she will be able to again and so she
decided it would perhaps be better if i kept the car with me because it does mean that I can
drive and visit her whereas otherwise I would have to do with trains and public transport.
My only concern with that was finding a secure parking for the car
and where I was, on the towpath by Spiceball Park in Banbury, there is a car park there and I did
park the car there for a while but I was a little bit concerned that at night it looked very lonely.
Um, it was off of any main road and so out of sight of anybody who, any casual passers by, and so
that was one of the reasons. The other thing is to sit here for three weeks or three and a half weeks
I would need to move the boat at least once because I would run into the 14 day mooring limit
imposed by my continuous cruiser license conditions.
I could go further down the canal to the other side of town and then I would have to
turn around to come back up and then turn around again because I can only get into
Tooley's dry dock from from the north. They, they made that clear when I made the booking.
Tooleys has been here as long as the canal has so it's well over 200 years but the town has built up
around it and so it's all a little tight and the only way to get in is, to get into their dry dock
is to approach from the north because it's at an angle with to the canal but quite a shallow angle
there's no possibility to turn around if you're coming from the south.
Um, also of course the usual things, water, rubbish disposal, Elsan, and so whilst I spoke to
the people who run Sovereign Wharf about whether I could get water there, um, something they said
caught my ear afterwards and I emailed them and said "do you actually have a berth free?" and they
said "yes, we can do that". So, Um I'm in here now. It's turning out to be useful in other ways
as well. Uh, well, the first thing I noticed is after I cleaned the boat, I cleaned one side when I
first arrived in town and then when I got here the other side of the boat was on the on the jetty so
I was able to clean that and I noticed afterwards the bird droppings on the roof in one spot
and also on the jetty right where I step out of the boat and I, I thought, oh that's going to
be a nuisance, but, uh, Ian, who runs the wharf, um, was walking by on first or first morning or so
and um said "oh have you noticed which branch the birds sit on when they're doing that"?
"Well, not really" but we had a look and he went and got a stepladder and some cutters and trimmed
the trees above them, above us, but it's a tall hedge and trimmed it all back and that's cured
the bird droppings problem. It also turns out he's a qualified boat electrician so a long-term job...
I could see you can see a paw hanging onto my chest there. That's Flann staking his claim.
Um, I just hope he's not going to pull a thread in this jumper when he pulls it away.
Yes, so I can get a battery monitor which I've had for a long time
and I've partially fitted but I haven't done the final part because it involves a bit of heavy
engineering that I don't really have the tools for so while I'm here Ian's going to do that for me
so I don't know if I'll be doing, uh, going into wharves or marinas very often. Probably not, but
in this case it's solving a lot of problems all at once, like getting my second Covid vaccination but
also things like tomorrow where I'll be driving to visit Marianne and that's why I'm in a wharf!
I hope you've enjoyed this week's video. I look forward to being able to get out there
and taking my own footage but I think you'll agree, Peter did a sterling job this week,
so until next week, and next week's video...
Byeee!
[Music]