Diary of an Extreme Narrowboater
Adventure No.1
Ooff. Remind me never to do that again.
In fact, I’d rather sandpaper a tiger’s arse in a phone booth, than do that again.
‘Come on, it’ll be fun’ they said.
It wasn’t. Not even retrospectively, was it fun.
My reasoning behind agreeing to do it was; I’d done the Manchester Ship Canal, I may as well go with this new plan.
The new plan was crossing the tidal River Mersey. A journey from Ellesmere Port, along the Ship Canal, into the sea lock at Eastham Port and across the Mersey, arriving in Liverpool through the Brunswick sea lock.
It seemed straight forward enough, to be honest with you. Well, in my tiny mind it did, anyway.
I hadn’t really considered the technicalities of such a voyage. I didn’t really need to, as all the vital and precise planning was being done by the instigator of the trip, Chas Warren. He was confident, well informed and meticulous. That was good enough for me.
All 3 skippers of the boats that were due to take the voyage had a long meeting with our pilot the day before the crossing. This was not a trip to be taken lightly or without a professional pilot guiding us. The major priority was getting the tide and wind exactly right.
As the pilot left, that evening Chas spread out his charts and marine forecasts for one final check. He wasn’t happy. Although the pilot believed we were good to go in a top-end south-easterly Force 4, Chas wasn’t convinced.
He suggested delaying until the following day, when conditions looked far more favourable. I think he’s still kicking himself for not trusting his instincts as skipper of his own boat, even now.
The morning of the crossing found me bricking-it-and-giddy-with-dread. Chas looked concerned but calm. Mike on the third boat resembled a whippet in a trap, desperate to get moving.
The pilot boarded Chas’s boat, Whincroft, our lead boat. I followed in tiny Dawn Piper with my female crew — Miss March and Miss August from the Boat Girls calendar. I figured that if they could get their boobs out for charity, they could handle anything the Mersey threw at them.
Mike on Rosie Leigh with crew, brought up the rear to keep an eye on my boat and hold the convoy together.
All good.
We set off with lifejackets cinched tight and excitement crackling through us like static.
The transit up the Manchester Ship Canal went smoothly. The pilot’s communication with Eastham Port — gateway to the River Mersey itself — was good. We knew a massive dredger would be sharing the lock with us and had already been briefed where to position ourselves to avoid her wake once we entered the river proper.
Eastham Lock itself feels like an historic maritime threshold: the front door to industrial Manchester along the 36-mile Victorian ship canal that transformed the North by turning Manchester into an inland seaport for ocean-going cargo vessels.
And there was Dawn Piper in the middle of it all, looking like a tiny green maggot.
Everything went smoothly until the actual crossing to Brunswick Dock and the entrance to Liverpool’s incomparable dock system.
As we began crossing the Mersey, the boats began to roll and pitch. At first Brunswick Lock seemed reassuringly close ahead of us, but conditions deteriorated rapidly as we reached mid-river. Wind against tide and beam-on seas turned the crossing vicious. Actually, vicious doesn’t do it justice. It became brutally ferocious.
My little 30-foot narrowboat — despite being as well-equipped as the others — began corkscrewing violently. All three boats were being savagely thrown around.
I didn’t have time to be scared. I didn’t have that luxury.
What became immediately obvious was that it had been seriously underestimated how differently keelless narrowboats behave compared with proper sea-going craft in conditions such as this. The pilot should have recognised this.
One moment Dawn Piper was climbing the waves; the next she disappeared into troughs so deep I lost sight of the other boats entirely. I realised I was at the absolute limit of my navigational ability.
I shouted for my crew to crouch low on the stern deck amongst the upturned coffee cups, scattered phones and loose debris being hurled around the boat. Partly to lower the ballast — but mainly to stop them being swept overboard.
Between a solid year’s worth of swearing, I kept repeating the emergency procedures we’d discussed beforehand (thank god I’d listened, for once) because honestly, it felt as though my beloved boat was going to capsize and sink.
How the hell had it come to this? And so quickly?
There had been no indication from the pilot that conditions could deteriorate so severely. We should have trusted Chas’s instincts and waited a day.
Instead it was a sh*t curdling rollercoaster of potential catastrophe.
In the end you could say it came down to luck. Luck that all boats had their diesel cleaned beforehand. Stalling an engine through churned up dirty diesel would have been catastrophic.
Luck that no crew member, or skipper come to that, went overboard. Because knowing what we know now, we could not have helped anyone in distress. We were all fighting to retain what tenuous control we had of our own boats.
We eventually made it through Brunswick sea lock and into the safety so Salthouse Dock. Chas’s boat had taken on a massive amount of water through the pump out vent, threatening to flood his boat via his foul tank. It was within inches of doing so. Mike’s boat, his home, had everything thrown out of cupboards and smashed, glass and crockery debris everywhere, and my boat flooded via a dislodged sink fitting. All skippers and crew looked extremely traumatised and profoundly relieved to be safe and the pilot beat a hasty retreat as soon as we docked. You bet he bloody did.
God it was awful. And never to be repeated. Ever.
Except now I knew what Dawn Piper was capable of…