FINDING THE FIX 13th Jan 2012
To avoid any more botching, I was going to need someone with Springer know-how.
Someone who might have worked for Sam Springer 40 years ago? Someone who drank in the same pub as the old fabricators? Failing that someone who knew what he was doing; who had established a reputation. With Springers.
My Surveyor knew someone and he worked only ten miles away .. At Hillmorton .. It was arranged for me to have the boat at the dry dock for Monday 06Feb 2012 at 8am. The way it works, dry docks are always flooded on Mondays and Thursdays at 8am [PHOTOS]
The delivery was fun. Out of the marina onto the Leicester arm, then to Norton Junction just shouting distance from Watling Street . A couple of miles along and into Braunston tunnel: 1¼ miles of sheer terror for many narrowboat skippers.
Down the locks by the Admiral Nelson and into Braunston. Eight miles to Hillmorton and ... the dry dock at Galbraith's Bridge.
Hindsight! If only it had been that simple.
However, in early May, Pentargon emerged with a new bottom. On budget too ... there was no spare money squirrelled away ... all the parties knew that ... and it was all completed in canal time
To avoid any more botching, I was going to need someone with Springer know-how.
Someone who might have worked for Sam Springer 40 years ago? Someone who drank in the same pub as the old fabricators? Failing that someone who knew what he was doing; who had established a reputation. With Springers.
My Surveyor knew someone and he worked only ten miles away .. At Hillmorton .. It was arranged for me to have the boat at the dry dock for Monday 06Feb 2012 at 8am. The way it works, dry docks are always flooded on Mondays and Thursdays at 8am [PHOTOS]
The delivery was fun. Out of the marina onto the Leicester arm, then to Norton Junction just shouting distance from Watling Street . A couple of miles along and into Braunston tunnel: 1¼ miles of sheer terror for many narrowboat skippers.
Down the locks by the Admiral Nelson and into Braunston. Eight miles to Hillmorton and ... the dry dock at Galbraith's Bridge.
Hindsight! If only it had been that simple.
However, in early May, Pentargon emerged with a new bottom. On budget too ... there was no spare money squirrelled away ... all the parties knew that ... and it was all completed in canal time
It took from early February 'til late March to get Pentargon [PHOTO] into the dry dock and early April before useful work actually started. By mid April, work was proceeding inexorably, but not yet finished, for all sorts of reasons. The finished boat eventually came out of Galbraith's yard on Tue.7th May 2012 at 8.15am, three months after she should have gone in for ten days.
And yes! Ten days of work had been done ... to the very highest standard ... Paul could be recommended for any fabrication one might ever need on a canal boat.
Pentargon was in and out of the dry dock quite a few times during those three months, to make space for other boats booked in by boaters who were cash rich and time poor. You don't really want to know, but anytime it got turfed out I got in some practice cruising, and boaters with unlimited cash reserves got in for services or blacking or painting or signwriting.
"Canal Time" is NOT a fact of life for these gentle-folk. They pay their way around any time problem. I need to be circumspect!
Canal time is one concept of timelessness.
You don't get that at sea. You might be harboured by weather but you would make yourself 'busy' at husbandry or you could be caught at sea with no wind in the centre of a high when a lot of brass polishing and varnishing might happen. There is precious little brass polishing on Pentargon. Life is tooooo short ... [PHOTO OF BELL]
When at sea, you are totally engrossed and often in 'peril'. But on the inland waterways there is a prevailing timelessness: all the time. Thus you find me in the middle of telling you how I changed an awkward gosling into a graceful gander by inviting you to sit back for a banter and hear
Billy's Story.
And yes! Ten days of work had been done ... to the very highest standard ... Paul could be recommended for any fabrication one might ever need on a canal boat.
Pentargon was in and out of the dry dock quite a few times during those three months, to make space for other boats booked in by boaters who were cash rich and time poor. You don't really want to know, but anytime it got turfed out I got in some practice cruising, and boaters with unlimited cash reserves got in for services or blacking or painting or signwriting.
"Canal Time" is NOT a fact of life for these gentle-folk. They pay their way around any time problem. I need to be circumspect!
Canal time is one concept of timelessness.
You don't get that at sea. You might be harboured by weather but you would make yourself 'busy' at husbandry or you could be caught at sea with no wind in the centre of a high when a lot of brass polishing and varnishing might happen. There is precious little brass polishing on Pentargon. Life is tooooo short ... [PHOTO OF BELL]
When at sea, you are totally engrossed and often in 'peril'. But on the inland waterways there is a prevailing timelessness: all the time. Thus you find me in the middle of telling you how I changed an awkward gosling into a graceful gander by inviting you to sit back for a banter and hear
Billy's Story.
The 2019 Covid lockdown provided the first opportunity in eight years of canal time to gather together all of the documentary evidence to sort out what I was doing in the first half of 2012. 1000 photos re-indexed to suit modern computer storage systems ...
© MMXXiv
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e-mail the author
[email protected]
@poguemuhone.bsky.social
Publish at All Costs
Or at No Cost At All
