Welcome to Cruising Alba! We invite you to join us on our adventure
living off-grid and travelling the UK canal network. I'm Myles and I'm Marina
Are you bringing your tea with you?
Myles bought this vintage outboard only a few days ago
so most evenings we go for a minute adventure on the dinghy
No fuel? Didn't you check just before we went? Oh we're waving. Lucky you, you get some serenity
Yeah I get some serenity. The good news is that we're up the stream
so eventually we're gonna get to the boat That one's yours, we'll do it together!
Are we topping up and going out again? I'm not going out. You can get three people max in here
it's a bit tiny and it's always about balance so you kind of dictated to where you can sit
Take seven or ten? well we didn't run out of fuel so it wasn't our fault
Did you hear that? That was a bit of life
Good morning it's 7am i've been up for about 40 minutes and as soon as I woke up I
realized that the boat was leaning so I got in the water to push Alba but I couldn't do it
for a while so I had to go from the front that wasn't stuck and just like a push
every bit of it until I got to the point where I swung the front out quite a lot
I think that pulled the back and that was fine yeah I had to loosen the ropes as well so it's all
fine but i've been in the water for a while it's pretty warm so I thought i might as well just go through for a swim
We've got friends over this weekend, this morning we went swimming altogether for the first time
in the Thames for them. I will introduce you guys to them in a minute but you'll see them later
so we've not been able to moor up and Myles left the mullet there so we need to now find
a mooring spot somewhere nearby and then come back for the mullet
Even though we don't have a guest bedroom we can have three friends over at the same time
The sofa bed in the living room sleeps two and we can fit an extra person
on the floor on the mattress in the bedroom
(Myles telling the story) it(GoPro) just just went, no it sank to the bottom Ihad to go swimming in cold...
I was miserable... Do you knew the story? Was there a lot keeper on on that day? We've not seen a
lock keeper before today's first time but no I think because of Covid they've not been on
Our guests expressed some interest in learning how to drive the boat
So Myles and I are giving them a few lessons
This is going to keep turning for about 20 seconds there's a bit of a delay
So we want to start turning this way, now the boat turns from the middle
It's really nice to have a lock keeper on duty so we don't actually have to do much work
all I do is hold the ropes pretty good
We ran the ground after the lock but the steady walking plank aka scaffolding board saved the day
Living on a boat is one thing but being able to set off at any time and arrive to a beautiful spot
like this while carrying your whole home with you is just another dimension I feel really lucky to
be able to do this! We've arrived to this beautiful place i'm going to show you guys what's happening
so my friend Yello really liked Myles' haircut which I did and I am going to cut his hair now
exactly the same thing, pretty much.
Thanks for dinner guys that was...
We haven't seen our friends since the beginning of lockdown. It was the most magical evening together
feeling extra gratitude for a simple pleasure of having friends next to you
in nature by the water and being able to spend time together face to face rather than
over zoom
Do you think we'd turn around here? Don't think so. No I didn't think that
So yesterday as well we got to use the dinghy in new ways and the reason we bought
the engine is for the convenience so we had a bit of an emergency yesterday we tried to moor up
on the bank not too dissimilar to this but the wind caught us and we thrown the peg and the mallet
over, we were holding the boat but it was swinging out so we had to emergency jump back on, move down
the river and find somewhere else but we were able then to use the dinghy with the engine
to drive all the way back to the incident site and pick up the mallet and pegs so that was really useful
And then we got to use it last night we've got some guests over today and they wanted to go
for a walk. We knew that there was a lovely walk on the other side of the river so we used it as a
water taxi Uber floats we called it we took them over to shore and then picked them up afterwards
So white is closed so you want to leave them in white
yeah we need to open the paddle to fill this pound up
What're you guys making? We are making special birthday curry for Yoshi
A big pan of salad. Because we don't own a salad bowl!
Today is my friend Yoshi's birthday so we are having birthday lunch that we made ourselves
We woke up quite early had a few walks, fuffed around for a long time and now we're on our way back to Oxford
cruising in the sunshine enjoying the weather and each other's company
Myles are you ready?
Happy Birthday to you!
We're in!
You match the boat today
no today you match the outside of the boat normally we match the inside of the boat
the colour choices... It's like the Mediterranean here oh yeah I can see the bottom
We're going away in the next few weeks so Zoë agreed to boat sit for us so Myles is showing her how everything works on Alba
We're back in Oxford we just said goodbye to our friends
and we're gonna go on a quick dinghy ride, whoa that's a big step! Untie us darling! We're off
(music)
So i've just screwed these two bits together because we lost one it fell off there we go
For the next few days we stayed in Oxford
it's harder to move when you find a spectacular spot like this. The broken drain pump ended up
being a bit of a gift as we went swimming every day. We saw horses played on the dinghy
in the evenings and generally soaked up as much of the weather as we could. It was our
floating home that allowed us to experience this side of life we never knew possible
(music)
In the next episode we managed to peel ourselves away from Port Meadow it was pretty hard I tell you
and we are off to explore the new and equally spectacular places on the Thames
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