Mike Stevens' UK Inland Waterways Pages

TRIP REPORTS : THE FELIS CATUS II YEARS

DELIVERY RUN ON THE THAMES, MAY 2000

In early May 2000 I was the speaker at an IWA Middlesex Branch Social. One of their members, Stu Carrie was asking for someone to crew with him on a delivery of a boat on the Thames the following week. As work was a bit slow at the time, I decided I could afford to take the time off work and join him for the run .

I joined Stu at Brentford mid-morning on the Monday, ready to lock out onto the tideway as soon as the locks opened at noon. We were both apprehensive for two reasons. Firstly it was not long since the Thames had been in spate with the red boards up, and rumours about how nearly back to normal it was varied quite a lot. Secondly the boat we were delivering, The Lady J was an inspection-launch replica with forward-control wheel steering, which neither Stu nor I (both tiller-steering narrowboat owners) was looking forward to. Stu had already brought the boat from Iver to Brentford over the weekend, and so had some chance to get used to its handling.

There had been a thunderstorm overnight at Brentford, and there was a lot of current flowing in the semi-tidal section where the boat was moored, roaring over a weir right by the lock, which did nothing to improve our confidence.

Possessions stowed, and introductions made to Stu's dog, Pepsi, (a very attractive & friendly Border Collie Cross who was a recent rescue case via Battersea Dog's Home), we took the boat across the canal to the lock mouth for a word with the lock-keeper. She told us that there was "a heck of a lot" of fresh still coming down the Thames, so we began to wonder what that would turn out to be in relation to the as-yet-unknown capabilities of The Lady J.

At 11:50 we were told the lock was ready for us to proceed. Unexpectedly, the lock she had readied was the one on the opposite side to where we were, necessitating a dog-leg of two 90% turns right next to the fast-flowing weir. That negotiated, we locked through, passed down the last few yards of Brentford Creek and turned up-river in warm, sunny weather.

From here to Teddington we knew we should be running with the tide, so this was going to be the easy bit. We passed through Richmond Half-Tide Barrier at 12:30 and reached Teddington at 13:00. The lock-keeper's signals told us the lock was ready for us, and we locked up straight away.

There was no licence formality to go through, as the boat was running under trade plates (proudly marked Thames Conservancy - which shows how often they up-date them!). Apprehensively we asked to lock-keeper what the flow was like in the river, and were told "Nothing to worry about", which didn't do much to quieten the internal butterflies. So as we pulled out of the lock cut into the flow towards Teddington weir, our hearts were in our mouths.

It all turned out much easier than we had feared. We found that we could make quite a respectable speed against the current at something between 1600 and 1800 rpm with the engine temperature remaining steady and within its safe range. At Hampton Court Bridge I took our time since Teddington and calculated that we were making 4.2 mph against the current, which seemed pretty comfortable. In retrospect I estimate the currents we met during the trip were between 3 and 6 mph.

Above Molesey lock we stopped briefly for Stu to walk the dog. The next few locks passed fairly smoothly, but did reveal more difficulties about handling the boat. The forward wheel steering made it very difficult to judge one's boat-handling in locks. Stu's extra couple of days' experience with her was noticeable, and we soon decided that it made sense for him to steer in the locks while I gave him a break from steering in some of the longer reaches and also looked after the navigation. I used the new edition of Chris Cove-Smith's The Thames Book as my main reference for this, and it proved excellent for the purpose.

Another problem with the boat was that its large forward well-deck was covered by a canopy which in plan came to within a few inches of the full width of the gunnels, leaving no room to throw a rope up at the locks without climbing out onto the fore-peak. In practice Stu took to placing the boat so that he could get off onto the lock steps and walk up with a rope. This wasn't helped by the requirement on the Thames that one switches off one's engine in locks. The Lady J's engine stop button was not on the control desk in the well-deck, but a long was aft adjacent to the engine.

>When one is boating the Thames on trade plates one has to carry a "journey log" which records what trips the plates have been used for. This one can be asked to show on demand to any lock-keeper, and some of them delighted in cavilling at minor discrepancies, such as the boat's name being listed there as Lady J rather than The Lady J, and my name & address as crew being in a different hand-writing from the rest of the page (!). But on the whole we found the lock-keepers cheerful and helpful with very few of them living down to the grumpy stereotype one sometimes hears tales of.

In response to my request on various Newsgroups & mailing lists for up-to-date info on good overnight moorings, Mattt had suggested the Swan at Staines, which chimed with a memory of mine from 1978, so we decided to stop there. The pub has its own landing jetty overlooked by a terrace where we revived ourselves with a few pints of Fuller's London Pride (me) and Guinness (Stu) before eating on board. I asked at the bar whether it was OK for us to stay on the mooring overnight and received a highly ambiguous answer that I decided to take as a "yes".

Then we sat out in the well-deck drinking rather too much scotch before taking to our beds. We watched the waters of the Rive Colne joining the Thames almost opposite us, and realised that we were about 3 miles as the crow flies from Iver where the boat had started its journey.

Today was always going to be the big one where we did most of the journey, so we had decided to set off at 07:00, and almost made that deadline despite the previous night's scotch.

As we approached Bell Weir lock we knew that the lock-keeper would not yet be on duty, and hoped that there was truth in the stories we had heard that the electric power is turned on for boaters to use from 7 am. Fortunately it was, and we were through without any difficulty.

As we approached Old Windsor Lock, we saw a large cruiser nosing into it. That stopped in the lock and spent a long time dismantling its flying bridge (I assume it wasn't launching any strike aircraft that day). Stu called to me that he didn't think we'd fit in with the cruiser and backed off (not without difficulty) and we tied to the lay-by. The cruiser then noticed us an beckoned us in, but we decided to stay put and leave them to their own devices. Stu walked up to watch them and was glad that we hadn't joined them as he thought their very large very noisy Alsatian would have upset Pepsi.

By the time the cruiser had cleared the lock, the lock-keeper was on duty so we had an assisted passage. This chap found another quibble about our journey log, in that it only gave one date for the trip, rather than the three days we planned to take.

The day's boating was fairly straightforward, as Stu got ever more used to handling the boat in the locks and I monitored our progress against a couple of alternative notional time-scales I'd worked out in advance. Apart from the delay at the second lock we were running pretty well to the formula I'd worked out from the previous day's performance.

There was plenty of wild-life. I am always pleased nowadays when I go on the Thames to see how Great Crested Grebe have recolonised the river, once having been quite rare.

As the day went on, the river grew busier and we saw several boats we knew. But the weather worsened. It remained mostly sunny but with an increasingly cold, strong wind, so we both ended up in pullovers and waterproofs to keep the wind out.

Our last lock of the day was Shiplake, where the keeper was just going off duty as we arrived. He let us in and left us to work the lock for ourselves. No effete electrical assistance here, the hydraulics had to be pumped manually which was very slow and very hard work.

That evening's target was Sonning, where there were said to be moorings before the bridge, but what was said about them in various guide books and personal notes from newsgroups etc varied tremendously. They may or may not belong to a pub a little further along (whose name was variously quoted) which may or may not charge one to use them. In fact when we arrived there at about 19:30 we found a good long stretch of moorings, labelled as belonging to the pub but also labelled "Free mooring for up to 24 hours", which suited us fine.

Stu took to dog for a walk and looked at the pub. We considered eating ashore, but decided we were too tired so snacked on board and finished the gin & tonic.

As we moored the evening before, we noted that the current here was probably the fastest all day, and the wind was still rising, so decided that our start time in the morning would depend on the conditions. Overnight it came on to blow a hooley — or so Stu told me in the morning. I'd slept though it all, but he'd been up several times adjusting our mooring lines.

The morning was still very windy, so Stu decided to take a walk into the village for some ciggies and a newspaper before we set off, which we finally did at 08:08.

Sonning Lock also requires manual rather then electrical operation when the lock-keeper's off duty, but either this one was much easier to work than Shiplake, or I'd regained some strength since the previous evening.

Past Kennet Mouth (resisting the temptation to turn left and play with some real locks) we reached Caversham Lock, manned by a very new temporary assistant lock-keeper who took one look at our trade plates and said "I've not seen any of them before, I'll go and get the man from the office to tell me what to do."

On we went, still very much chilled by the wind, through Mapledurham and Whitchurch locks (pausing at the latter to use their sanitary station) before reaching our assigned mooring at Beale Park, Pangbourne, where preparations were in progress for a BMIF boat show over the weekend. We arrived at 11:48 and were soon joined by John Currer, on whose behalf we had delivered the boat. He was setting up the company's stand in one of the marquees and broke off to drive us to Stu's live-aboard home at Cowley Peachey whence I went home by train.

In retrospect

It was Stu's first trip on the Thames, and my first with any significant amount of current running. We both vowed we'd not want to do the trip again in a boat like The Lady J but would have enjoyed the trip hugely in a boat we were used to. We were also very glad to be making the journey upstream with the amount of flow we had encountered.