In the late 1960's a wee small lad was given a book for his birthday. Nothing unusual in that although perhaps not that many seven year olds even then would have sat down and read said book from cover to cover by bedtime. We're not talking "The cat jumped over the brown dog", the book in question was "Swallows and Amazons". The reader, who by the age of nine had a reading age off the scale, was none other than myself and the book was the start of a life long love of boats, sail or otherwise.
By the age of ten, I owned and had read several times over every book in the series. My all time favourite was and remains to this day "We Didn't Mean to Go To Sea". As any Ransome fan will know, this is the most realistic and gritty of the books. The more fanciful books like "Missy Lee" and "Peter Duck appealed far less and in fact have not seen the light of day for many a long year whereas the books that focus on sailing and adventure are still on my bookshelf and periodically get a dusting off and a re-read.During this period, there was a great upheaval in our family life. My father, having left the Merchant Navy shortly after my birth, was working for Rolls Royce Aerospace in Sunderland when it became all too obvious that the company was about to go to the wall. The shipyards where he'd served his time were in decline and the prospects in the North East did not look good. He and several colleagues headed to the Midlands to find work and some months later we followed suit to move to Daventry in landlocked Northamptonshire.
At the age of ten, we moved to a village on the East side of Northampton to the bungalow where my parents live to this day. Whilst Daventry had been outside the catchment area of the County grammar school, our new home was not and I was encouraged, having missed the main exam, to sit the 11+ re-sits which I passed, probably to everybodies surprise.
Northampton Town and County Grammar School was, until the left wing "educationalists" did their level best to destroy everything good about it two years later (to the great detriment of my education and those of many of my contempories but that's another story), a very traditional school. First term first years had to wear their blazers and caps at all times with all three buttons done up, second term we could undo the top button and so on. All rather silly and petty but oddly appealing to a boy steeped in the quasi-mythical Edwardian adventure stories of Ransome, Blyton and so on.
School sports were deemed very important and the whole of Wednesday afternoon was given over to them. as you might expect, rugger in winter and cricket in summer were the primary sports. I didn't mind rugger as long as I could play on the wing and avoid the rough stuff and in fact I was developing into a pretty useful back until injury put paid to rugby. Cricket I loathed passionately and when the opportunity arose to join the small group from the school who went sailing in the summer term I had my hand up so fast I almost dislocated my shoulder.
Summer Wednesdays from then on involved skipping lunch and cycling the seven miles across town and out into the countryside to Pitsford reservoir where, usually in the company of my schoolfriend David Bayliss, we would potter around the reservoir in a Cadet dinghy. Strictly speaking, as this was sports, we were supposed to be racing but David and I usually contrived to drop off the back of the fleet and explore the margins of the reservoir at our leisure. Despite my lack of competitive urgings, I did manage to win a cup as crew to another schoolfriend Graham Bailey. A scion of a competitive sailing family, Graham was simply out of our league as a sailor. I believe he went on to be a professional skipper and I also heard he narrowly missed out on Olympic selection.
I missed about six months schooling over the winter of my fourth year as a result of the first of two serious teenage accidents having fairly comprehensively smashed my left femur in a collision with a stationary car on my racing bike. To this day, I have no idea why I hit the car. Some witness reports suggested I was forced into it by a passing car but the police could not confirm this at the time and I have no memory of the minutes before the accident. My first recollection is of watching a car wheel pass down past the left side of my body with just inches to spare. My second recollection is that it bloody well hurt. A lot.
I made it back to school in time for the sailing season, just. Inevitably, my 'O' level results the following year were disappointing and I was left with the choice of putting in an extra year at school before re-sitting them or finding something else to do. My father was at that time, amongst other things, the training officer at the engineering firm where he worked and got wind of an apprenticeship at Express Lifts in Northampton. An interview was arranged which I attended in my first suit, purchased specially for the occasion in time honoured tradition, where much to my surprise I was offered a Technical Apprenticeship in Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
Schooldays behind me, with money to spend, motorbikes, beer and girls became my main interest in life. Although I continued to sail the frequency of outings declined rapidly as my late teens wore on. Matters were not helped by my second serious accident, this time on a motorcycle when a car pulled out of a side turning right under my nose, which resulted in a fracture of exactly the same damn bone as the first accident. That fracture, right in the workings of my left knee joint, left me with a permanent lifelong problem which made me useless, if indeed I'd ever been that useful to be honest, as a crew in dinghy racing. I could no longer hike or trapese, it was simply too painful.
As far as sailing was concerned, that was pretty much that. Boats on the other hand would soon loom large in my life once again ....
The Canal Years
By now married with two small children, by my mid-twenties I was pretty much all work and no play. Money was tight, work was demanding with long hours and there was little time for leisure pursuits. My wife and eldest son spotted a Hoseasons canal holiday advert on TV and on the spur of the moment, egged on by the offspring, Jane sent off for the brochure.
By coincidence, at about the same time, my bachelor brother was walking along the banks of the Llangollen canal at Chirk whilst on holiday with our parents and thinking to himself that a canal holiday looked like a good wheeze.
Serendipity struck and a one week holiday on a rather elderly (and therefore cheap) narrowboat was duly booked. It was a week of fantastic weather and glorious scenery as we boated from Middlewich to Llangollen and back again. Before the week was out, we were poring over adverts in the magazine discussing what boat to have!
A week on the Peak Forest Canals was booked for the following year and by the time we went on that holiday we had already purchased a little GRP canal boat. I say we but to be strictly accurate all three of our canal boats were purchased and the running expenses paid for by my brother Glen. Jane and I could barely afford the mortgage let alone owning a boat. Entirely through his generosity, our growing family enjoyed numerous wonderful holidays on the canals and the boats were really run as family boats.
That first boat, when lifted out for the winter, proved to have the worst case of osmosis I've ever seen and she was promptly traded in on a somewhat larger Dawncraft 25 called Arcturus. Arcturus served us well for many years and undertook some quite extensive trips. It never ceased to amaze people when three adults and three children of varying sizes emerged from such a small boat but she never felt cramped or uncomfortable.
In due course, Arcturus gave way to a steel narrowboat. Badger was a 37 foot 1969 Springer. In fact, she was the very boat that was pictured in the adverts for Springer boats throughout the early 1970's. There is a very real possibility that she was, in fact, the very first Springer narrowboat although we could only prove for definite that she was one of the first seven.
This may not seem of any great import unless you know that these little Springers were the very first purpose built canal leisure boats built for the mass market. Although leisure boating on the canals had begun to take off by the late 1950's, as the commercial trade went into its terminal decline, apart from a few one off commissions most leisure craft up until then had been converted from old working boats.
Like Arcturus before her, Badger carried us around the canals for the best part of ten years. Great adventures and epic voyages were undertaken ... well OK, 24 hours non-stop boating around the canals of Birmingham was quite an adventure let me tell you! And fly-boating (non stop boating) from the Black Country Museum in Dudley to the Boat Inn at Stoke Bruerne, for no better reason than we wanted a pint in a favourite pub on Friday night, was a pretty epic voyage in our estimation.
During these years, Glen and I had become heavily involved with the Inland Waterways Association at branch level. In fact, I went on to be an elected trustee of the Association for three years and redeveloped the IWA web site as well as improving the head office IT no end. Glen increasingly became involved with the IWA's restoration Waterway Recovery Group.
For a while we seemed to spend more time running other peoples boats than going out on our own. We ran a pair of working boats delivering coal down the Grand Union, up the Thames and back up the very shallow Oxford canal, took working boats to rallies and events and we were involved with the steam narrowboat President for some years. During a period of unemployment, I was quite heavily involved in the restoration and conversion of the butty Kildare for use as a crew boat to President.
Under the tutelage and influence of the well known local artist and boat painter Brian Collings, I had developed into a pretty good traditional boat painter. I should, perhaps, have tried harder to make a living at it but my business acumen is totally non-existent. Never the less, there are to this day quite a few boats still carrying my brushwork on their cabins and my roses and castles attracted much admiration.
Perhaps it is true that all good things come to an end and by the start of the new millenium our interest in the canals had begun to wane. The cost of boat ownership on the canals was becoming prohibitive, Badger was badly in need of major renovation - her wooden cabin was rotten - and conflicting interests always seemed to take priority over sorting out the boat or going boating. For various reasons we'd dropped out of our involvement with the working boat fraternity and many of our friends had drifted away from the cut.
The untimely deaths of three close boating friends and increasing ill-health coupled with an acrimonious dispute with some members of a forum I was involved in running were the final straws and I dropped out of the canal scene almost entirely
Sails over the horizon
My interest in sailing had always been lurking in the back of my mind. Anything on the subject, be it fictional works such as Hornblower or factual information such as documentaries was avidly absorbed and digested.
For some years I'd been playing around with boat design more, if I'm honest, out of academic interest than any real intent to build my own boat. That said, it was something I seriously contemplated on and off and one or two of my design efforts might, I think, have actually been half decent boats. Realistically however I knew all too well what would happen if I set out on the serious undertaking of building my own boat. Like so many of my flight of fancy over the years, once the initial enthusiasm gave way to the hard slog of getting the job done my interest would wander to some other project and I'd have wasted untold time and money on another white elephant.
We seriously contemplated selling upand heading of into the sunset to cruise around the world until the money ran out and even went some way towards actually putting the crazy scheme into effect before we had a reality check and decided the long term consequences for our finances would not be good.
Finally, in he autumn of 2009, my patience ran out and I decided it was time to stop dreamng and talking about going sailing and get on with actually doing something about it!
After much searching on the t'interweb, I found a yacht charter company who would happily hire a boat to a bunch of total novices. Given our background on the canals and lack of experience in tidal waters, the restriction to the non-tidal waters of the Caledonian canal and it's lochs was an advantage rather than a drawback. An added bonus was that for many years we had talked about chartering a boat on the Caley.
It helped greatly that the price was very good too, around half what we might expect to pay for a charter on tidal waters. A week on a Moody 28 was duly booked for the following May and the winter was spent in impatient anticipation before the day arrived to set off for sunny Scotland.
Lochs, locks and a small boat
Our charter yacht was an elderly Moody 28 called 'Arrow' operated by West Highland Sailung at Laggan Locks. She'd clearly been around the block a few times (and I believe the sailing boats at West Highland were all acquired second hand from the Yacht Cruising Association, the precursor to Sunsail) but she was well maintained as far as the essentials were concerned and tidy. Well used to old tired boats with a bit of character, and somehow even the most characterless boat when new acquires some character with age in my view, we felt right at home.
The week was a resounding success. More wind would have been nice as we ended up spending rather more time under motor than sail than I would have wished but we had enough opportunities to hoist the canvas to discover that I hadn't forgotten the basics.
We also learnt that Glen rapidly loses patience with ghosting along making slow progress in light winds. He's definitely an engine man and was dubbed 'Roger', after the youngest of the Swallows who was always keen to start up the engine, much to his annoyance at the time but amusement later - in fact this has developed into what I suspect will become a tradition of crying 'Roger' at the first mention of starting the engine because of slow progress!
Our youngest son Mark thoroughly enjoyed the experience and proved to be a natural on the helm. His girlfriend Heather wasa little dubious about boats that tip over and bounce up and down but began to get used to it by the end of the week.
Critically, from my point of view, Jane was not put off by the experience. Far from it, she was keen to do more in the future.
Much discussion ensued on our return home about what we might want and, crucially, what we could afford. By the autumn of 2010 we'd all but decided to hire 'Arrow' again for a second year until we added up all the costs of a one week trip to Scotland and decided that it wasn't far off the cost of buying a small trailer sailer. If we pushed the boat out (sorry!) we could just about afford it.
And that led to the serious hunt for a boat which will be the subject of the next article ...
