Third Time Lucky on Lake Windermere
Whilst the hub of the Electric Boat Association centres around the Thames and the Norfolk Broads there are many electric boats in the Lake District. I just need to do a better job of herding them.
My boating base is in Oundle on the River Nene and it’s a good few hours up the M6 to get to junction 36. I travelled up on Friday night and found myself grinning from ear to ear with a real sense of happiness. I was towing DB1, our new solar electric boat.
It was a small rally with only three boats but there were a lot of overlaps in the Venn diagrams of the boats and their owners.
Jeff Kenworthy’s boat is a boat he built himself. It’s a ply boat that was stitched together using copper wire and sealed with epoxy and glass fibre tape. His motor is a trolling motor and very waterproof, proved by the fact that it fell off and was only held into place by the power cables. You’ll have to ask him about the batteries! Does this boat work? Yes it does and it works very well. Easy to handle, easy to tow, easy to store.
Chris Jones’ boat, Winterbourne, we think, is a Frolic but we’re not sure. Chris converted this boat from diesel to electric. He tried one or two motors before settling on one that came off a chinese quad bike. Does this boat work? Yes it does and it works very well. She looks very elegant on the water and her efficient hull pushes through the water just fine.
And there’s me with DB1. I have a thing about solar electric boats and also a thing about being a boat manufacturing tycoon. I’ve had this boat in my head for ten years but only began building it three years ago when we were a little quiet in the Mothership Marine workshop. After much design and redesign and iterations commensurate with prototyping I had a boat ready that was ready to be dragged up to Windermere.
Jeff, Chris and myself are all tinkerers and doers and builders. Now I’m going to get nostalgic and patriotic at the same time here. These traits are very apparent within the membership of the Electric Boat Association, but they used to be far more present in wider British society a few years ago. Up to you why the willingness to have a go has declined, but the net result is that most people can’t wire a plug let alone build a boat in their spare time. Power to the tinkerers.
We all set off at the official time of 10ish. Our destination as always was lunch and this was to be at the Wateredge Inn. It’s a big lake and whilst it was sunny it was windy too. The wind was fetching up relatively large waves half a metre high in the middle of the lake. It wasn’t a problem for us in our little boats but we did have to pay attention. I was particularly worried about DB1’s solar canopy. I knew it was vulnerable and it’s one of the things we need to work on over the winter.
Setting off from Ferry Nab were three captains and three ideas of the course to take to the Watersedge Inn roughly six miles north. Our paths did cross on occasions but somehow we all managed to get there roughly at the same time.
There were three main origins of waves on the lake. The first and possibly the largest was that from the wind, the second was from passing, let’s call them ‘tourist ships’, and thirdly and perhaps the most violent was the wake from wakeboats. Wakeboarding is a low-speed watersport but it’s incredible that they are able to produce such a big wake at just ten miles an hour which is the speed limit on Lake Windermere. I’ve got nothing against wakeboats but it would be nice if they were electric so I could enjoy their boombox ‘doof doof’ music without the noise of their V8 engines in the background.
From a distance Primrose, against the skyscraping peaks and the expanse of this lake, looked very small. Winterbourne just fitted in like she’d been there since the mountains were formed and DB1 looked just fine from where I was sitting. It was a sunny day but I was grateful of the canopy as after a sun-filled summer I’m not sure my forehead can take much more.
As we neared the Watersedge Inn the waves grew bigger but I was fearful that the weather might turn so I got my drone up. That was the easy bit. I flew around, took some pictures and, conscious of the battery, I decided to land. I handed the controls of DB1 to my brother in law Jamie and asked him to turn into the wind and gently move forward.
I stood on the foredeck and tried to land the drone on the canopy in the wind, bobbing up and down and moving forward. I called for the ghost of ‘Winkle’ Brown but he did not appear. But after five minutes of trying and with the battery power reducing like a ticking bomb I managed to get the blasted thing down and then for my ‘doh’ moment. If only I’d turned the drone 180 degrees I wouldn’t have had to do everything in reverse.
We’d all made it to lunch and on time, and we tied up our boats on the public piers. I was quite pleased to impress a few of the ice cream lickers and stone skimmers on the shoreline when I lowered the canopy using my remote control.
Lunch was great and very convivial, we talked about running a pub and electric boats and about education and electric boats and forensic science and electric boats, you get the picture. They’re just a nice bunch of people doing things that they enjoy doing whilst lunching. What could be a better way of passing the time?
Some statistics, and I hope these are correct. We all covered the same distance in roughly the same time travelling at a little over four miles an hour. On DB1 I was using about 0.5kW to move along and the other two boats were using about 1kW. DB1 was the only boat with solar and has a 5kWh lithium battery. DB1’s state of charge was 94% which meant that I had only used 300W getting up to the Watersedge Inn. Witchcraft or high torque, low speed motors with big props and solar? You choose.
Chris invited Mark to join him for the day. Mark’s friendship with Chris goes back to short pant school, and they share a boat together, kept in the boat shed at Mark’s holiday home. Mark kindly invited everybody to finish the day with tea on his lawn which is a little further south than Windermere Marina Village. Because he was good company we all agreed as serendipity kicked in again.
We cast off and in our inimitable and individual way we headed south, separately. But this time into the wind and waves. If you’re on a bicycle you really notice it but it’s harder to detect in a boat because whilst the land seems to go by slowly the waves seem to pass by at a good speed.
I think the wakeboarders had a good lunch too and maybe a lager because they were falling off more readily than before and with their towboats making quick turns the wake was quite confused. Add in a tourist ship and you might as well be on a bouncy castle with a group of school children high on e-numbers and red juice.
And then we were looking out for a man waving his arms on the lawn, and what a lovely lawn, and a nice cup of tea thanks to Mark’s wife Anita. Mark and Anita talked with a locals perspective on the state of the lake and how the level fluctuates hugely throughout the year. A fact I hadn’t really appreciated before. We chatted about a whole bunch of other things boat related and then it was time for Primrose and DB1 to head off. Winterbourne was to be a guest in Mark’s boat house.
Jeff and I recovered our boats at Ferry Nab, it doesn’t take long. Jeff and his party were staying another day so they were in no rush but for me I needed to get a shufty on as I was going to drive down to Oundle that evening and I wanted to get over the mountain and onto the M6 before it got dark.
I achieved my objective and was eating a Taco Bell at about 8 o’clock whilst driving past Manchester in the dark. Reflections of the day, lovely bunch of people, canopy proved itself, and I might be onto something with DB1 and my dream of being a boat building tycoon might be within grasp.
Footnote: I got into Oundle at sixteen minutes past midnight on the Sunday morning the 9th of August and DB1’s state of charge was 99%.
