Ashton Boatman

People keep asking me when Hazel will be back in service. I had hoped by the end of the month, but, with only a week to go that's looking a bit unlikely. People wonder why it's taking so long. Here's my excuses.

1)   I keep being diverted on to other tasks. It would be nice if there were more volunteers to do the other tasks. It would be even nicer if they were self organising volunteers. A lot of the time I end up spending more time explaining how to do a job, finding tools and materials and checking its being done properly than it would take me to do it myself. I'm also still spending a day every week running the shop so that Christine can have a much needed day off.

2) I'm doing the job properly and carefully. The electrical cupboard was rather thrown together when it was first made as we were under pressure to get the boat into service. Whilst getting the boat back into service is important now, I intend the work that I'm doing to outlast me. I reckon that Hazel will need a comprehensive renovation sometime around 2045. It should last until then. It's conceivable that I'll still be around then, aged 92, but I won't be doing much boatbuilding.

3) I'm insisting on having a day off every week. Well, sort of. I've chosen Wednesday, so that I can attend Latihan, but most Wednesdays I seem to spend catching up with office work and writing.

4)  I put a brave face on it but I'm still not very well. I get tired easily. I put it down to Long Covid. Whatever it is, it's a blasted nuisance.

Anyway, having got my excuses in first, what have we been doing? Nessie has largely repainted the interior. Currently he's putting trims round the windows where we've bulked up the insulation (because of hot summers rather than cold winters). The trim is made of strips of copper cut from an old hot water tank that was donated as scrap. The extended central heating is nearly ready to be tested. The LiFePo batteries are now charging off the sun and running all the electrics. I'm just finishing off the woodwork around the electricity cupboard, which will now include shelf space for tools etc, and more accessible fuses, switches etc. 

The windows.

The electrical cupboard.

I haven't been posting much because, well, nothing very exciting has happened. I've been plodding away at repairs and improvements to Hazel. Just lately this has mostly been in the electrical cupboard. This is under the foredeck and it's where the batteries and all the fuses and switches go. I was never very happy with it as the woodwork was rather thrown together (under pressure to get the boat finished) and the fuses etc were very inaccessible. The need to replace the batteries gave an excuse to rip it all out and do it better.

The new LiFePo batteries are now installed and charging nicely off the solar panels. The switches and fuses etc are being re-fitted in a much more ergonomic manner. There will actually be more storage space inside the cupboard too. 

Joe the Tree Surgeon has finished docking his boat Benevolence  at Guide Bridge and has tied her next to Hazel while he returns to Cumbria where he has work. He's looking to base himself aboard Benevolence  half the time and try to get work around Greater Manchester. 

Joe the tree feller bought himself a wooden narrow boat called Benevolence. She was built in 1938 by Nursers of Braunston for John Green of Macclesfield. In the 1980s my late friend Martin Cox was given the Keay Award for his work on her, but, since then, she's been rather neglected. Joe brought her from Oxford to Ashton, narrowly missing getting stranded by the breach at Bosley.

This week Benevolence has been on dock at Ashton Packet Boats. Joe said he was just going to have a look, put some patches on leaky bits and measure up for future replanking. Instead he ripped out a substantial length of rotten plank. I wondered if he was going to be ready for launching on Saturday, but, today he let in a substantial length of temporary pine plank. He's still cutting it fine, but Joe is a grafter! 

When he gets back to his native Cumbria, Joe will be looking out for some nice big oak trees that need felling. 

Once upon a time Lancashire was packed with cotton mills. Each one had a huge steam engine to drive the looms via cotton ropes and line shafting. One of the main traffics of the Ashton canal was short distance runs of coal from local pits to feed the boilers of the mills that lined it's banks. Tropical plants grew in the water because of the amount of hot water flowing out of the mills. 

In the 1950s and 60s, one by one, they closed down.  Amazingly, in the deepest Lancashire village of Haslingden one survived in production, steam powered, up until 1979. The engine and one of the weaving sheds are still there and are being restored and developed as a museum. Yesterday I paid it a visit. The weaving shed wasn't open but I got to see the magnificent mil engine and the exhibition of bikes, cars and smaller steam and internal combustion engines .It's not a highly polished professionally presented museum but a reflection of the volunteer's love of old engineering. I rather like that. It's only open once a month, but well worth a visit.  Here's some pictures.

I've just come across some photos of Southam  on a recycling trip in summer 2012. Work on resurrecting her is currently paused while we concentrate on Hazel,  but will soon resume. 

Sorry! I'm afraid I haven't been posting much lately. To be honest, I've been a bit down and depressed. Usually irrepressibly optimistic, all I've been able to see is all the things that are wrong, starting with me, not having the energy that I used to have, and going out into the whole world, which seems to be increasingly run by psychopaths intent on destroying eveyrthing that is beautiful.

While my pessimism may be, as pesseimists always claim, mere realism, staying in that mindset is counter productive. You drive all the positive people away and find yourself surrounded with Eeyors. 

Nevertheless, we've been making good use of the sunny weather to get on with work on the boats. 

Work started on fitting Southam's  missing top strake.

We started boarding Southam's  Conversion.

Tony and Nessie got the plank fitted.

Unfortunately further stripping uncovered more problems with the conversion.

Tony has mostly been working on Forget me Not, particularly painting.

The sitting room window had been leaking on Hazel  so that was taken out and refitted.

Joe the tree surgeon moved his boat Benevolence  to Knowl St, Stalybridge. He winded above lock 7 and backed the rest of the way to the boatyard.

The electricity cupboard under Hazel's foredeck had to be stripped out. The wood was deteriorating and has to be replaced and the main batteries need renewing after 10 years. The opportunity is being taken to make it a bit more ergonomic as the switches and fuses used to be very inaccessible.

Nessie set to work removing the cabinside by the bathroom as some of the wood was getting soft. 

The side bedroom window had been refitted and well sealed. Extra insulation was added to the inside. 

The old AGM batteries had lasted well. They were removed from the boat to be replaced by LiFePo batteries.

The gaping hole in the side of the bathroom was a bit of a surprise for Helen when she came to stay.

But it's now been filled in.

About every 3 months we run a short trip so that a man with a long squirty pole can clean the windows at Cavendish Mill, which is now flats. There's no towpath access since the retaining wall started to collapse in 2002. Since then CRT (previously BWB) and Tameside council have been arguing about who should pay to repair it. For the most recent trip, on Thursday, John Tickner came to take some of his excellent photos. As the gearbox is stil not quite ready I had to shaft the boat there and back.

On this occasion, Matt, the window cleaner, forgot to turn on a valve in his van, so I had to climb out over a spiky fence to turn it on for him. I'm not complaining but it may occur to some people that it was the 72 year old cancer survivor who did the climbing. Anyway, here's John's photos. They're his copyright.

Emuna alerted me to the fact that a traditional Pace Egging play was to be performed at Heptonstall on Good Friday. "Let's go" I said, so we set out over the Pennines, passports at the ready, into Yorkshire. For those who don't know about pace egging, let me explain that it's a form of messing about in silly costumes that goes back into the sands of time.

https://www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/history/pace-egging.shtml

On our way we stopped at Todmorden, another lovely stone town, for coffee and cake. This turned out to be a mistake, though the coffee and cake were nice.

        We're taking a break on work on Southam to get Hazel ready for the summer. There's a motorway bridge that makes excellent shelter for working on cabins, painting etc at Guide Bridge. We moved Hazel there so that we could work on the cabin.

Unfortunately, a day or two beforehand the pump on the central heating failed. I ordered two replacements, one as spare so that I could do a quick change if another failed. I get them from a company called Solar Project in Lancashire. https://solarproject.co.uk/  . I used to use Chinese made pumps which were about half the price, but noisy and used twice the amount of electricity. I was a bit disappointed that this one had only lasted two years though.

The pumps arrived and I fitted one, but struggled with leaks. Nessie fixed the leaks the following day. The downside of being under the bridge is that we need boatsitters every night to make sure nobody messes with the boat or our tools etc. Helen Kanes stayed for a couple of nights which was very helpful.

Part of the reason for staying under the bridge is the anticipated visit of Kira to repaint the name on Hazel's  stern. She arrived on 25th March and immediately set to work. Like many of our volunteers, Kira is camera shy, so only her reverse side appears in the photos!

Life was getting complicated. We're short staffed at the shop after Mike left (he got a job driving executives around in posh cars (he says), but it always seems to be at night, Mona Lisa springs to mind). Anyway, the upshot is that I have to run the shop one day a week and do deliveries in the van another day.

Joe Hodgson is a tree surgeon from Cumbria. He helped us to get some of the oak for rejuvenating Hazel . Since then he's been trying to get established on the cut. After several false starts he bought the 1938 built Nurser motor Benevolence from Oxford. After a journey of several months, including sinking once and getting held up by stoppages, he finally arrived.

Benevolence seems to be pretty good but has an iffy plank on the waterline (hence the sinking). She had lots of work done on her in the 1980s by Martin Cox. If I remember rightly, Martin was ousted from the job by others who offered to do it cheaper. Being a generous spirited person, however, he told me they'd done a good job.

Joe had to return to Cumbria, but he left me the code to the lock and permission to use the boat for towing.

Battery technology has moved on and the replacements are Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries (LiFePo). These have the advantages of lithium but without the risk of thermal runaway (which is a posh name for fire). We have to extract the old batteries, which will probably have further use on Southam, then insert the new ones and rebuild the woodwork around them, making it all rather more ergonomic (and properly sealed). Most of the wood used will be reclaimed mahogany rather than T&G. At present, changing a fuse or checking the state of charge is very awkward, so that needs to change,

One problem with being under the bridge is that if we need to work on the other side of the boat we have to take her to the winding hole, wind, then bring her back. One day, when I was working at the Knowl St boatyard, I asked Nessie and Aaron to do this. As Aaron shafted the boat under Hanover St bridge on the return trip, Nessie noticed that somebody was throwing our stuff into the canal. He made a death defying leap to the bank and ran round to confront the culprit, a man in his forties.

Nessie is no stranger to physical confrontation. He met the man at the top of the steep wooded slope that leads down to the canal side. He er, persuaded, the fellow to return to the scene of the crime and help to bring back our power tools and firewood from the bramble bushes where he'd stashed them. The man claimed that two others had run off with our generator (the good solid old fashioned one).

Over the decades Nessie has learned to moderate his anger, and so the man lived to steal another day. It was tempting to tie him up and throw him in the brambles,  but, aware that false imprisonment is a serious offence, he was let go. It was then that Nessie spotted some yellow metal lurking in the water and managed to fish out the generator.

I stayed on the boat that night but, the following night, the boatsitter, hearing of the aforementioned incident, decided not to stay "in case he came back". I had to go there at short notice.

On Wednesday April 2nd I spent most of the day meeting potential new volunteers before returning to Hazel to boatsit. I cooked myself a nice meal then just fell asleep, exhausted. April 2nd 2025 would also have been the 40th birthday of my son Dylan. I had intended to spend a little time sitting in the woods remembering his short life, but it didn't happen.

Now, all the boats are back at Portland Basin. I have so many jobs on the go that I don't know whether I'm coming or going. I think some people imagine that when they can't see me I'm at home with my feet up. Chance would be a fine thing!

When you live and work on and around the water you always have an awareness of rats. Long long ago when I was living on Forget me Not on the bank at Guide Bridge I had a long term battle with the rodents. I used poison to begin with. A terrible smell developed in my cabin, which I eventually traced to the decomposing remains of a poisoned rat that had crawled under my bed to take its final breaths. When I saw a rat dying from poison I resolved never to use it again. I don't like rats, but I've no wish to see them suffer like that. I decided that using traditional traps that rapidly smack them over the head was preferable, I despatched many in this way, but each one left the raiding rights to my cabin to a relative in its will.

When I first became romantically involved with Emuna I was living in the monstrosity of a back cabin built by a previous owner. For insulation I had lined it with old carpet. The first time she stayed over, in the middle of the night, I heard a rat scrabbling about between the carpet and the roof and started punching the carpet to get rid of it. After that, if I wanted to spend time with her, I had to cycle over to her flat in Royton!

At Portland Basin we've never really had much of a rodent problem. For many years Captain Kit Crewbucket, our resident cat, saw to that. We sometimes have had a problem with mink. Tackling one of these once resulted in Kit having an expensive trip to the vets. Since the Captain moved to Emuna's home for aged cats, and later on to pussycat heaven, we did have some of the vermin living in a brick shed on the wharf. They didn't stray on to the boats and were dealt with by the council.

Wherever I go I like to grow some of my own food. In recent years I've been growing potatoes in upturned road cones at the boatyard. To facilitate this I take all our kitchen waste there for composting. For many years the boatyard has been the happy hunting ground of many local felines. In fact, whenever I entered the yard they stared indignantly at me as if I were trespassing. Just lately they seem to have disappeared. I know some of their elderly "owners" (nobody owns a cat) have died. Possibly surviving cats have been rehomed.

This has caused a problem. My compost bins have turned into rodent feeding stations. I bought some rat traps, but these rats seem to be wise to these. I think they've learned to use a stick to spring the trap before enjoying the bait. I was at a loss to know what to do, but, suddenly, all evidence of rodent activity ceased. Today I discovered why. Basking in the sun on the roof of the woodstore was a fine big tomcat. I've no idea where he lives, but, I'm going to encourage him to spend time in the boatyard.