Hello, good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Historic Steam Yacht Gondola.
My name is Julian I'm the manager here.
And today we're going to take you behind the scenes and show you the light up,
the starting of our boiler we're bringing up to pressure
and then we're going to take you out on the lake for a tour around beautiful Coniston
and show you how we greet our guests
onboard and introduce them to the incredible 160-year history of Gondola.
Gondola was wrecked for a long time, her moorings broke when she was a houseboat in 1963
and she blew into a field and local people led by the caretaker at Water Park
decided she should rise again.
They refloated the boat then they sank her to prevent the rusting of the hull.
And then they tried to raise the money to restore her,
and when they were unable to do that
the National Trust became involved in about 1976
and took over the restoration of the project and have run her ever since.
So it's time to prepare the fire and the first thing we do
is just give it a bit of a brush around, reduce the soot buildup from the previous day.
Now it's quite cold today because we didn't run yesterday.
Just give the fire bars a bit of a rake.
And then we light up.
Tied up newspaper just the same as grandma used to do it.
It's a little bit of duck oil, the traditional accelerant.
Considerable skill not to chop your thumb off at this job.
I've already checked the water levels on the boiler before i do this
must have enough water to be able to bring the boiler up to pressure
and then to bring more water in through the injector later.
Prometheus bringing fire from the gods.
And we open the clack valves and these are the non-return valves which allow
the water from the lake to be injected into the boiler to replenish the boiler as we say.
And one of the wonderful things about working at Coniston is that the water is so clean here
that we can use direct injection from the lake without any chemicals or - completely natural,
it still keeps the boiler in excellent condition
And then while that gets done time for a few more things on the checklist.
So that's the polishing just about done, time to look at my fire again.
Really good fire going there now, looks like we've got the air just about right on it.
It's quarter to ten so by about twenty past, twenty-five past we need to have steam.
We're just so starting to move on the gauge there now - looking good.
We're going to blow the boiler down now,
we don't use chemicals - the lake's very clean so we can just use the boiler water.
But twice a day we blow any scale or sediment out
of the bottom of the boiler using the boiler pressure.
So first I just have to check I've got enough water in the boiler on the glasses.
I open the hull valve.
And then I can open the valve at the bottom of the boiler.
Bit of a noise.
Give her one shot, just let her settle again for a moment, give her another shot.
Because of the purity of Coniston water,
and this process, we can keep a really, really clean boiler with no chemicals at all.
Which is great because we're not putting chemicals into the environment.
Just put a couple on to cook!
So what we're doing here is springing and this is the way that sailors have managed their ships in
tight corners for centuries really.
And what we do basically is we put a rope on and we use the rope as a hinge.
The other end of the vessel can float free and we can then use the power of the engine
quite powerfully to turn the ship very rapidly and the big advantage to this
is that we don't need to rely on skill, the boat remains tied up to the end of the pier.
This is how sailors have preferred to maneuver their boats in tight corners,
as I say, for centuries.
In the days before engines, they would use the sail, or they would have used
the power or the flood of a river or a tide to provide the motive power.
And you see how we can very accurately and very quickly turn the vessel
without any risk of drifting into shallow water.
A little bit of old-fashioned seamanship; it's still very much the way that all the
lake district steamers are managed today and that's why we have the running board on the
side of the vessel with the long rubbing strake, so that we can use this at any pier that we like.
So that's today at Gondola ladies and gentlemen,
I hope you've enjoyed being with us.
Please do come and see it yourself one day and smell the steam.
But in the meantime, thank you very much for your continued support for the National Trust.
It really does mean everything to us just at this time.
Thank you very much indeed, bye.