Random Writings

My plan for the day was to get to Keadby so that I could do some work on Sunday morning before locking through into the Trent in the afternoon. I went out to do the engine checks and found that the couple on nb Evening Star, moored next to me, were also getting going. We went through the first lock at Whitley together, and then they stopped for water. I trundled on, doing the lock at Pollington on my own and then chugging across the increasingly flat landscape in the direction of Goole. I swung right onto the New Junction canal and caught up a widebeam, “Mizuki” at the first bridge. They were a mother and daughter, and the daughter hopped off to operate the bridges for us both. After that I asked to tag along with them, and was grateful for it, as the New Junction has a lot of lift and swing bridges, mostly power-operated. At Bramwith, just outside Doncaster, we swung a very sharp left onto the Stainforth and Keadby canal and stopped at Bramwith lock. Having seen barely any boats all morning, Bramwith was a busy spot, and I shared with another narrowboat while the Mizukis waited until they could have the lock to themselves. The other boat kindly opened the swing bridge for me and suggested that I might stop at the New Inn in Stainforth for lunch. I took their recommendation and had a generous and tasty portion of braised steak with mash, veg and Yorkshire pud for about a fiver! Having then got chatting to some other boaters, I was reminded that I needed diesel and gas, and a gent pointed out that I should get going in order to be at Thorne before the boatyards shut. Thorne has four boatyards, three of which sell gas and diesel, and this had been my first opportunity to buy either since Huddersfield (where the yard had been shut when we arrived) and in fact I’d last bought diesel at Anderton Marina in Cheshire! When I arrived at Thorne I found myself following Evening Star again, who’d passed while I was lunching in the pub, and as we approached the lock I saw the first boatyard, Stanilands, who are also a yacht club. The club were having their annual regatta, which was more like a village fair, and I didn’t fancy fighting through crowds of people to try and find someone to sell me some fuel. Besides, I could share the lock with Evening Star. The next boatyard (one lock and two swing bridges later) looked rather shut and had two rather shiny cruisers on either end of its service mooring, so i didn’t fancy shoehorning myself in. On to the third one, which conveniently had a big sign saying “Diesel here” so you knew where to go. I manoeuvered in between two residential boats and stopped by the pump. An elderly gent waddled up and I said hello and that I was after some gas and diesel. “Not now you’re not” he said “we’re shut. Shut at 4. 9-4 weekdays and 10-4 saturdays”, he added as if I was stupid not to know that! I was glad he wasn’t the proprietor or I’d have torn him off a strip, he sounded so self-righteous! Anyway, I decided to plod on to Keadby (more swing bridges, woo!) and get diesel at Newark instead. At Vazon, just shy of Keadby, we had to wait about a quarter of an hour for the signalman to open the unusual sliding railway bridge, as you have to wait for a big enough gap between trains. Finally we arrived to find the visitor moorings deserted and I moored up, had a bite to eat and went to bed!

Day 61: Whitley Bridge to Keadby, 26 miles and 5 locks.

I had quite a productive morning this morning, despite interruptions. At about 10-ish, the boat was suddenly filled with a strange gurgling-bubbling sound. I looked outside and the navigation seemed to be bubbling enthusiastically. Most odd. I went back to the computer. Shortly afterwards, Innocenti lurched on the moorings and there was the sound of an engine. I went outside to see the oil barge “Humber Pride” passing, and went on to watch them manoeuvre through Castleford Flood Lock, which is actually more like a small basin as the two sets of gates aren’t in a straight line! The barge only just fits, and they had to close the lock gates at my end to give his prop something to work against! Apparently the bubbling is methane released from old mining landfills when the canal is disturbed.

I’d not long gone back to work when another very large barge, laden down with gravel, passed by. This one was “Heather Rose” and goes regularly to the Lafarge aggregates terminal near Wakefield.
After that I got chatting to the man on the widebeam next door and then it was lunchtime. Anyway, I had written a thousand words and tidied the thesis up a bit!

This afternoon’s cruise was straightforward enough – down the lock at Bulholme (there was a lock-keeper on duty for the commercial traffic) and out into the River Aire again, past several reclaimed former collieries and the big power station at Ferrybridge. This is Power Station Country from here all the way to Nottingham, because of the coalfields and big rivers. At Ferrybridge itself the navigation becomes a canal again, the former Knottingley and Goole canal, which takes craft away from the winding lower reaches of the Aire and the scary tidal section of the Yorkshire Ouse. This canal is entirely responsible for the creation of Goole as a town and port – there was virtually nothing there before!

Just outside Knottingley is Kellingley Colliery, the only working coal mine I’ve seen on the whole trip, despite having passed dozens of worked-out and re-landscaped ones. It sends its coal by rail now, to the nearby power stations at Eggborough and Drax. The countryside opens out here, and the navigation briefly runs on a slight embankment, affording me a view of traffic on the parallel stretch of the M62 going at twenty times my speed! I’ve moored at Whitley Bridge for the night, which is on the edge of Eggborough village and is next to perhaps one of the least useful railway stations in the country. Whitley Bridge station has a train to Leeds (via Knottingley, Pontefract and Castleford) at 0730, but don’t miss it as the next one isn’t until 1912! There is a train back from Leeds, just the one, leaving Leeds just after 5pm and returning to Whitley Bridge at 6. The other end of the line is Goole, but woe betide you if you want to travel there from Whitley Bridge – you can only take the 6pm train and can’t come back until the following morning… honestly, why even bother to keep the station open? Apparently just 950 people used the station last year!

After I moored (literally within minutes of having tied the ropes and placed the fenders) I was passed by the now-empty “Heather Rose” on her way back. It’s noticeable in the pictures how much more freeboard she was when she’s empty!

Today is the sixtieth cruising day, which has included my six hundredth mile, and yesterday featured my five hundredth lock… hasn’t it been a long trip? I’ve just worked out (thanks to tide info from the lock-keeper at Keadby) that I should be in Leicester a week tomorrow (Sat 11th) and perhaps back in Cambridge during the first week of October, assuming all goes well. The thesis is nearly there now and I’ll send it out for comments early next week.

Day 60: Castleford to Whitley Bridge, 10 miles and 2 locks.
Total so far: 602 miles and 504 locks. Thesis 17457 words and 91 pages.

This morning I had a very productive thesis-hacking session, in which I chopped and changed various chapters and paragraphs to improve the overall flow. After lunch I headed back down the Aire & Calder navigation towards Castleford. The three locks were simple enough, although Lemonroyd Lock is extremely deep (4m!) and so climbing down the ladder to the boat felt like a very long way. I did briefly pull into Lemonroyd Marina in the hope of gas and diesel, but there were none. Oh well.

At Castleford I moored up next to an oil terminal (nicer than it sounds, actually, this mooring) and adjacent to a small motor-cruiser I’d seen in Leeds at the weekend. The two lads on it were barbecuing merrily – chatting to them, they said they’d come from Ripon. After I’d had my dinner I went for a wander and found Castleford to be a rather unremarkable and slightly depressing little town – with a high density of pawnbrokers and a Heron Foods (like Iceland only even cheaper…)

Someone had made an effort to give the place some sense of history with a selection of signboards pointing out the location of the original Roman fort (now a Wilkinson’s car park) and its bath-house (excavated in 1979 and then covered over again with a turfed area to protect it). Over the river Aire itself they’ve erected a smart new footbridge that stands right in the weir-stream, giving a spectacular view of the rushing water below. Just adjacent to the wier is the mill, a big old building which still grinds its flour using stone millstones. This is where Allinsons (wi’ nowt taken out!) flour comes from, although the mill’s now part of the much bigger ADM Milling group.
Apparently Castleford does still have plenty of industry – despite the big chemical works and the collieries now being history – Burberry’s factory is here and there’s also a Nestle chocolate factory that produces an appetising toasted-biscuit smell that I remember fondly from when I lived in York.

On my return, the lads in the motorcruiser told me that they’d found Castleford very dull after the bright lights of Leeds and were off downriver to try Ferrybridge instead. Apparently the pub they’d been in had been very customer-hostile! I hope they found something better, as unlikely as it seems!

Day 59: 8 miles and 4 locks (it turns out that Canalplan counts flood locks, despite the fact that I’ve yet to actually need to operate one)
Total so far: 592 miles and 502 locks. Thesis 16401 words and 85 pages.

Leeds is the most northerly point on my cruise, so from now on I’m heading homeward! This afternoon I’ve cruised a short distance down the Aire to Knostrop to avoid flexing the definition of “48 hours” too far. I came out of Clarence Dock and turned upstream before winding under Crown Point Bridge (note to navigators, it’s surprisingly shallow in the area around the large storm drain) and going back to Leeds Lock rather than making the oblique angle turn required. Once I’d set the lock, a crewman appeared from the Leeds City Cruises boat “The Black Prince” – he had a boatload of Councillors going to Knostrop to open a nature reserve, they’d shown up late but still wanted to be there on time, could he go first? I let him, of course, and he kindly agreed to lock me through at Knostrop when I arrived, as the Councillors would be being worthy and cutting ribbons on some new nature reserve project. This he duly did, and I’m now moored just below the lock on a handy piece of wharf.

Day 58: Leeds (Clarence Dock) to Knostrop Fall Lock, 1 mile and 2 locks.
Total so far 584 miles and 498 locks. Thesis 16116 words and 84 pages.

I have further broadened my marine engineering skills over the last few days – as I mentioned before, Innocenti’s alternator has packed up and Tuesday morning’s task (after writing 600 words of thesis between being awake and coherent and the shops opening) was to try and get it repaired. This is where the internet and 3G mobiles come in really handy. A quick search revealed that a big auto-electrical firm, Sewell of Leeds was a ten minute walk around the corner, so having removed the alternator from the engine the night before (fiddly, but without dropping any Vital Bits into the Oily Black Void of the bottom of the engine bay), I double-wrapped it in plastic bags and took it round there in my rucksack. The chap kindly tested it and pronounced it knackered – it needed a new voltage regulator and new brushes as a minimum. They offered to fix it, but the parts would take a day or two to get. At this point I thanked him kindly and rang the next firm I’d found during my earlier research, Auto Generators, who said that they could fix it the same day. They’re in Wakefield, but close to the railway station and so the alternator and I took a train ride on a smart London-bound express and got off after twenty minutes. I found the place and stepped into a room entirely full of alternators and starter motors in various states of disrepair. The Helpful Chap took one look at the unit and said – ”
that’ll need new slip rings as well as the oil’s got to them, I can do it, but it’ll be £65″. However, he offered me a reconditioned unit for £95. This sounded like a good deal to me, but upon a rummage in the stockroom he didn’t have a suitable recon unit. He did, however, have a new one. After a confab with his boss he agreed to sell me the brand new one for £100. This seemed an excellent price given that the likes of Adverc charge about double that for a new unit – mind you, he was taking the old one in part-exchange.
I took the shiny new alternator down the road and was stopped in my tracks by a cafe with a sign saying “Coffee and bacon butty £2.50”. The cafe (Bean for Coffee) was a smart little place and had newspapers and free wifi, making it an abject bargain. Back at the station I saw a steam train – the Scarborough Spa Express, which runs regularly all through the summer and turns out to be priced at a very reasonable £19 for second class or £29 for first (I’ll keep that in mind for a fun day out in the future). My morning had gone well!
Then the train to Leeds was delayed by 20 minutes, and when I got back to the boat I fitted the new alternator with more than a little fiddling and faffing, only to find that there was no charge warning light with the ignition on, and no output when the engine ran. Connecting up the external charge regulator (Innocenti came with an Adverc charge regulator) produced output from the alternator but the warning lights, voltages and current went bananas. Bother. I poked around and checked things and reluctantly concluded that the new alternator was probably faulty. By now it was 4.30 and I left it for the day as I had an evening engagement.

This morning I rang Adverc, where the helpful lady agreed with my diagnosis, and then Auto Generators who said “bring it in and we’ll sort it”, so I took another train ride to Wakefield. I was in the shop less than ten minutes – they span up the alternator on the test rig, confirmed the symptoms and then fiddled with it and gave it back. Apparently a screw was loose inside – my guess was that the connection between the voltage regulator and the field brushes was at fault – and I dragged the unit back to Leeds again. Having installed it this afternoon it all seems to work fine, so fingers crossed for no more problems!

Tonight I’m moving off the Clarence Dock public moorings (once my laundry’s done) and will then be moving out to Knostrop for the night before continuing to Castleford tomorrow.

Kevin came out for a Sunday afternoon jaunt from Wakefield to Leeds. It started easily enough, getting into the boatyard over the wall and getting away without being arrested…

At Fall Ing Lock the Calder and Hebble joins the Aire and Calder Navigation. The lock was occupied by two boats when we arrived, but wouldn’t equalise – it took three of us to push the gate open.
We carried on to Stanley Ferry where we stopped for a pump-out and lunch. The pumpout here also has a stupidly short hose but fortunately it just reached.
The A&C is a big, big navigation, with huge power-operated locks. On a weekend there are no lock-keepers but it’s easy enough to work the locks. Unfortunately, the lock-moorings are not placed sensibly and with the high winds (gusting 40mph!) I managed to spanner Innocenti sideways into a line of moored boats, prompting some shouts of “you bloody idiot” or words to that effect. Honestly, what’s with placing long-term moorings right at the approach to locks? BW seem to do it in all sorts of places (Hatton Top Lock is my particular un-favourite, as there’s almost nowhere to stop and wait for the lock), best stop grumbling before I turn into a correspondent for Narrowboatworld.

At Castleford we turned left and headed through the flatlands of relandscaped collieries and up towards Leeds. At Woodlesford Lock I stopped on the right-hand landing and tied Innocenti with the centre line while Kevin went to drain the lock. As I stood and waited, suddenly the bows was drawn out by the wash from the paddles, and the centre line caused the boat to heel sharply to starboard. There was a loud crash from the cabin, and Kevin hit the emergency stop to close the paddles. I got alongside again, tied up using bow and stern lines, and went inside. Most of my crockery had escaped the cupboards during the roll, but the final casualty list was just two sideplates and two cereal bowls! Lucky…
According to the lock-keeper, who surfaced shortly afterwards, this does happen from time to time, but no-one seems to have seen fit to erect a warning sign…

We motored on into Leeds and finally moored in the very smart new Clarence Dock development (the smartest visitor moorings ever, with water and power at the piers!) and went for an excellent curry.

Day 57, Wakefield to Leeds, 17 miles and 11 locks.
Total so far 583 miles and 496 locks.

Innocenti’s alternator hasn’t been quite right since Manchester. I thought it was a fan belt problem at first, and indeed the fan belt was very difficult to get tight – but successive modifications (the final one being in Huddersfield, with Richard doing battle with the awkward nuts and bolts) have resolved that problem. Unfortunately the fault remains – the alternator and rev counter work for a few seconds when the engine is first started from cold, and then give up. After a certain amount of poking about we concluded that the internal electronics in the alternator had given up – either the regulator or the diodes or both. So I’ve been relying on running the generator each morning and evening to top up the batteries. Anyway, in Mirfield we decided to go on to Wakefield and see about getting a specialist to look at the alternator. We also needed a pump-out fairly urgently. A mile down the cut is a boatyard – “Shepley Bridge Marina” – where we stopped to get a pumpout. Sadly his hose was too short to reach Innocenti’s tank (honestly, boatyard owners, will another few metres of suction hose break the bank?) and we had to press on. We went to Wakefield, enjoying the broad navigation, and moored up at Wakefield Wharf – we’d met the owner on the Hudds Narrow and he’d offered us a weekend mooring. When we came to leave the yard we found it was locked! Some entertaining wall-climbing allowed us out into town and I was fortunately also able to get back in…

Day 56: 9 miles and 10 locks.

No, I haven’t been giving a lift to a certain famous young wizard, but have instead been experiencing the delights of the Yorkshire waterways. This started with the Huddersfield Broad Canal, a rather unsung waterway that links the aforementioned town with the river Calder at Cooper Bridge. It features nine short fat locks – 57′ x 14′. Those that have been paying attention will remember that Innocenti is 59′ long, so some careful navigating was required. You go in at a slight angle, with the bows tucked in behind one of the bottom gates and the stern in the centre of the lock, since the cill is concave and you get more length there. Once the lock equalises you open the other bottom gate and use your bow thruster (thanks Richard!) to pull the bows across into the open gate. With a 60′ boat it is apparently sometimes necessary to wind the boat before the lock flight and go down backwards!
At Cooper Bridge there is a rather tricky junction – you turn left out of the Hudds Broad and go upstream before making what turns out to be a 170-degree turn to enter the navigation cut… the sharpness of the turn isn’t immediately apparent until it’s too late, and we hit the bank. Oh well, nothing was damaged.

The Calder and Hebble Navigation is also designed for the same “Yorkshire Craft” as the Hudds Broad, except for bonus points a lot of the paddlegear is operated by a “handspike” – a piece of stout wood – which you insert into the ratchet wheel to raise the paddle. It’s very slow, and on a lot of the locks conventional paddlegear has been fitted as well. My handspike has now joined my national collection of obscure lock-operating equipment, but will doubtless be deployed next time I have to repel boarders, as it’s a seriously heavy blunt instrument.

We moored in Mirfield, on a pleasant little navigation cut.

Day 55: 5 miles and 11 locks.
Thesis 15579 words and 85 pages (thanks to some pagination and adding acknowledgements and contents table…)

“The Huddersfield Narrow Canal isn’t so much a canal as two lock-flight seperated by this pig of a tunnel” — Steve Haywood, in “Narrowboat Dreams”.

We stayed overnight outside the visitor centre at the east end of the tunnel, and were told that the flight down would open at 8am. In the event, there were four boats ahead of us in the queue and it wasn’t until 9:15 that we were going down the flight. The first ten locks have very short pounds, so two BW lockies keep an eye on everything and help out while you use them. We stopped about four locks down because a boat ahead had flooded one pound – it took a little while to sort out. By 1030 we’d descended to the reservoir at Sparth, where we offered the lockies tea (milk and two please) and then pressed on to Slaithwaite. The aforementioned town goes by a variety of pronunciations, none of which is the way it’s spelled (slay-thwaite) – I’ve heard “sluthwaite”, “slow-it” and “slaw-it” from locals, though “slow-it” seems the most popular. There are 21 locks from Tunnel End to Slowit and some of them are Hard Work. Locks that leak is a speciality of the Huddersfield, especially those that leak into the surrounding ground and thus leak outwards into the canal through the wing embankments when full. There are also car-wash locks which spraywater down the length of the boat from between the stones.
A particularly awkward lock is Shuttle Lock, just at the edge of Slowit, which has been given an East Anglian style guillotine gate because the adjacent bridge is now too wide to allow for a mitre gate. This gate has a paddle in it, which amused me (call us stupid, but down in the Fens we’ve realised you can just raise a guillotine a bit to let the water out, you don’t need a paddle) but its operation is with a windlass via a series of mechanical and hydraulic gearboxes. It’s a dispiriting thing to wind, and takes forever. Anyway, we moored up just below it, next to the tearoom-narrowboat “Pennine Moonraker”, and I did some work while Richard went shopping. He also did a recce, and discovered much nicer visitor moorings two locks down. We went down and moored up, and I found Sluthwaite/Slowit to be a very nice little town indeed, and with everything for the passing boater right there on the canalside: sanitary station, bakery, greengrocer, butcher/piemonger, car parts shop, laundrette, chippy, pub. Ashby’s chippy comes highly recommended – £3.75 for fish and chips, cooked fresh, very tasty and free scraps and tartar sauce! In the laundrette I met two other boaters, Bruce and Kirsty, from “Pipistrelle”, and it turns out that Bruce owns a boatyard in Wakefield. A Useful Man To Know, definitely…

Day 53: Marsden to Slaithwaite, 4 miles and 21 locks.

Today I’ve done a far chunk of thesising this morning and then Richard and I have plodded on down 21 locks to Huddersfield. I can say that some of the locks were even harder work than before, especially the ones further down (9E – 5E, I think) which have improbably stiff paddles on the bottom gates. For bonus points, the anti-vandal system on the locks in Huddersfield itself (4E – 1E) is operated using a BW Yale key rather than the usual device – unlike all the rest of the locks on the flight. The new tunnels under the engineering works’ built over the canal are interesting and rather spooky, especially as they’re both curved!

On arriving at the bottom lock, some swift arithmetic revealed that we had done 101 locks since leaving Castlefield in Manchester (9 on the Rochdale, 18 on the Ashton, 32 on the west side of the Huddersfield and 42 on the east side) and that Lock 1E of the Huddersfield Narrow was the last narrow lock until the staircase at Foxton, south of Leicester!

Day 54: Slaithwaite to Huddersfield, 5 miles and 21 locks.
Total so far: 552 miles and 464 locks. Thesis 14565 words and 65 pages.

There was a misunderstanding this morning. I went outside at about 9am to fiddle with the fan belt tension once again, and found that the other two boats on the mooring had gone. This made me nervous, as I didn’t think I was expected up the flight until 1130, and Richard was due to arrive by train around then. I called Standedge visitor centre – apparently I needed to be at the tunnel portal at 1130 for my 1330 passage! Oh.

Some urgent singlehanding followed, up the eight locks to the tunnel mouth, and Richard arrived as I was mid-way up. At the tunnel, the BW man took one look at my chimney and said “that won’t fit”. Some minor surgery followed – by removing the stovepipe inside and pushing the chimney down, we got it down to the height of the handrails relatively easily. We were also advised to remove the navigation lights, which was simple enough.
Finally, at about a quarter to two, the BW team were ready. Terry accompanied us on the boat, and Brian would drive the van along the old railway tunnel alongside and check on our progress.
Standedge is very interesting – lots of it is hewn from bare rock, and the tunnel changes shape every hundred metres or so. At regular intervals there are cross-passages to the disused and active railway tunnels, so you feel the rushes of air caused by trains passing through, and there are all sorts of interesting chambers formed where the tunnels connect. The tunnel is three miles long, and 637ft below the moorland above – and 645 feet above sea level (and don’t I know it, all those locks!). It took seventeen years to build, using hand drills and gunpowder for blasting.

About two-thirds of the way through, Terry pointed out a plaque on the wall put there by the tunnel-keepers of the 1940s. As I looked, Innocenti slewed briefly to the right and we hit an inconveniently-placed outcrop in the wall. Crunch. 20 tonnes of boat came to a halt rather suddenly, and once we emerged from the tunnel it became clear that we’d stove-in a section of the overhang at the front of the cabin – nothing structural, fortunately. We’re spending the night here at Marsden and will go down the locks to Slaithwaite tomorrow.

Day 52: Dobcross to Marsden, 5 miles and 8 locks (of which 3 miles were underground).
Total so far 543 miles and 422 locks. Thesis 13496 words and 69 pages.