Friday the 13th, what could possibly go wrong? Well, nearly nothing, but I’ll talk about my rudder later.
So, it’s the start of another boating season and we couldn’t have wished for a nicer day. My first thoughts were of Baz Luhrmann so I didn’t forget the sunscreen and I don’t have any regrets.
Getting to Bossoms boatyard is a little bit tricky from Oundle but we were rewarded by the wonderful sight of the Oxford meadows upon arriving, this is such a special spot with the spires behind, horses chasing cows, rabbits watching and rowers on the river.
I was the last to arrive but fortunately the Edwin James is very easy to chuck in the water. Over the winter I’d made a little upgrade to the motor and taken out the hacked Minnkota outboard and fitted an Aquamot fixed pod motor and rudder. More about the rudder later.
In our little flotilla there was myself and Iain Sommerville on the Edwin James, a 20ft Canadian canoe, Nick Goldring with wife Yvonne and friend Barbara on Silent Adventure, a 16ft river launch powered by a Lynch motor, Toby and Sue on their 5 metre Ruban Bleu with a 1.6kW pod motor, Jeff Kenworthy, joined by his faithful co-pilot John Fitzhugh, on Primrose with a 55 lb thrust/52 amp/12 volt Bison outboard motor. Jeff also carries a Watersnake 24 lb thrust outboard, mainly as a spare, but sometimes runs it alongside the Bison for a bit more speed.
Hitching a ride today was Charles Lyne and his wife Barbara, who is on most occasions right, a fact that Charles often forgets but never her, and newcomers Dave and Stella.
We synchronised watches and set off at 10.30am, destination The Kings Arms at Sandford on Thames which is just two locks away and both were manned on the downstream stretch.
I’m sure I’ve said it before but one of the charming things about electric boating is being able to talk very easily to the people in the boat next to you, and having not seen each other over the winter it was nice to catch up. We’re a special bunch, us electric boaters, you wouldn’t want to sit next to us on a long train journey. We love talking about boats, motors, batteries, the state of the waterways, but if Moses was an electric boater there would have been eleven commandments, and it would be written that thou should not covet thy neighbours electric boat.
Fact is, we boast about our own boats but Nick’s boat is the best. Quiet, sleek, fast but he could lose the plastic flowers.
All of the things that you want Britain to be can be found on this tiny stretch of river; fine historical buildings which have produced, amongst other accolades, 73 Nobel Prize Laureates, exquisite green countryside, enviable boat houses, elegant river craft, and I think I even saw an otter.
Unfortunately Toby and Sue had to turn round at the first lock because they both had prior arrangements. Sue, an old school reunion, and Toby, bellringing. As I said, all things that you want Britain to be can be found on this stretch of water. Ding Dong.
It’s worth remarking that this stretch of river consists of things you don’t want Britain to be either. Here I’m talking about the tonnes of boats for homeless people along the side of the river. Many of them have sunk. It upsets me to see, in equal amounts, boats being mistreated like this, never cleaned or maintained with all sorts of detritus stored around the decks, and the people who are forced to live like this. The Environment Agency is toothless and penniless. Where has all the money gone?
Anyway – Lunch.
Charles was particularly happy that we were going to The Kings Arms, not only because he’s a regular and knows the menu intimately, his preference being lamb shank cottage pie, but he had a £10 voucher to redeem. And he did, but he also bought me a drink which was very kind of him.
The electric boat association has been going for forty years and the Goldrings and Barbara are some of the early members. As secretary of the EBA it was my privilege a couple of years ago to digitize the association’s magazine and it was whilst doing this that I met the Goldrings and Barbara, (Secretary until 2017). Young, strong, full of life force and determined. They’re no longer young or strong but their life force is as strong as ever and nothing was going to stop them getting into that pub.
Knees, hips, wobbly boats, recent operations, the sort of stuff that keeps others in front of the television, were no match for these river rats.
In total there were twelve of us for lunch and the food was good. We had one, two, maybe three drinks and they were needed to stave off dehydration and to give us the courage to head back upstream a little later.
You might well ask what the conversation was like around the table of, let’s just say, people who have been on this earth for quite a while. Well it was brilliant. Lively, funny, irreverent, in fact I think we were the noisiest table. It’s also a great place to ask obscure electrical questions, bearing in mind that our group consists of inventors, nuclear physicists, software programmers, chip designers and boat builders. It’s also a safe place to ask about religion to which the response would probably be ‘great story but a bit of a sad ending’. Fact is we just enjoy mucking around on boats, looking after the environment and taking the mickey out of each other.
Plates finished, bills settled, vouchers redeemed, time to jump back in the boats. Let’s talk about weed. Now there’s more weed in the River Thames than there was at Woodstock and it’s proliferating at a rapid rate in the country’s rivers.
Weed is becoming a huge problem, its main causes are:
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Eutrophication – which is agricultural run-off, urban run-off and sewage, and this is arguably the most significant contributor.
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Climate Change – warmer temperatures mean aquatic plants especially invasive species are thriving in warmer waters.
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Invasive Species – such as floating pennywort, water fern, parrots feather and himalayan balsam.
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Drought causing slower moving rivers.
Weed sucks because it wraps itself around your propeller and massively reduces efficiency. But the fact is if you want to go boating you’ve got to learn to cope with weeds. Narrowboats have weed hatches, most other boats don’t. If you’ve got a big thumping diesel motor you wouldn’t have noticed that you had weed on your propeller until the next time you’re at the fuel bowser. Different story with electric motors because you can monitor power consumption very easily.
On the trip down and whilst trying to extract the boat from the mooring position at The Kings Arms I managed to get quite a lot of weed wrapped around my propeller and I noticed a significant decrease in the boat’s speed. I’m sure I could have asked Barbara to jump in and undo the garden that was forming around my propeller but she’d just had lunch and my mother always told me it was dangerous to go swimming just after you’d had lunch. I still don’t know why. So when i got back I googled it:
‘Debunking the Myth
Swimming right after you’ve had something to eat isn’t dangerous at all. The concern was that because digestion diverts some of your blood flow from your muscles to your stomach, swimming might somehow inhibit that necessary blood flow to the stomach, causing cramps so severe that you could drown.’
So next time Barbara, bring your bikini.
It seems weed has changed. It used to be possible to clean your prop by running the motor in forward and reverse quickly. Whilst this helps to some extent this technique doesn’t yield the same results as it once did.
Three solutions that I can think of; weed hatches, rim motors or succumb to an outboard.
On the subject of rim motors, these are a relatively new invention whereby the motor windings and magnets are in a ‘halo’ around propeller blades. Because there is no shaft there’s nowhere for the weeds to lodge so they pass through. I’m not sure about the efficiency of these motors but it is worth a further look.
Whether you’re walking down a country path, down a mountain after summiting or heading back to your cars after a days boating the journey always looks very different and although you travelled the same track only hours ago there are still conversations about which way is it. This is another instance where Barbara was right. Aboriginals famous for their walkabouts always spend plenty of time looking back at their path recently trodden to ensure they recognise the way home. I wonder which tribe Barbara belongs to?
Range anxiety is a big subject these days that the motoring community seems to own but electric boaters have been suffering this complaint with more dire consequences for a long time. However, we’ve dealt with it, and apart from a change of batteries, motor or monitoring equipment we’ve grown to be confident with our systems. But confidence doesn’t mean complacency and whilst we’re going along we’re doing back up mental arithmetic that gives us a rough value as to the state of our batteries. It’s the sort of thing old fashioned accountants used to do and in many ways a battery’s state of charge is a bit like a set of books, with electrons coming in and electrons going out.
I was nervous of my new Aquamot system because it was the first proper long run I did with it. I have 4.1kWh of lithium battery to use and my cruising speed used approximately 0.4 kW, I had 10 hours to play with and we were on the water for a total of 5. So I decided to go a little bit faster and beat Nick to the finishing line. Just.
Coming back to a slipway to recover your boat is a moment of mixed emotions. Yes we made it back, yes we had a great day but it would be really nice to stay in the water a little bit longer, but as the boat yard was closing at 4 o’clock we needed to put a spurt on, which we did and we were all out of the water and heading back to our homes by 4.30. Many thanks to Toby for coming to help us after his bellringing.
Now back to the subject of Friday the 13th and my rudder. My route back home took me along the M4 turning off towards Bracknell and then down some country lanes. Very luckily the incident happened on these lanes. Whilst driving along, music turned up, I heard a massive scraping noise from behind. My immediate thoughts were that the trailer’s jockey wheel had dropped, but it hadn’t. The rudder had slipped down the rudder tube and, whilst it still held, it was ploughing a furrow in the road. It doesn’t bear thinking about what could have happened if the rudder had dropped whilst on the motorway, but it is a reminder that things do go wrong.
Take care, be safe,
Tim
