Exploring London by boat

Today I travelled from Paddington basin to Limehouse basin.  The route, along the Regent's canal, provides an amazing sampler of very varied areas of London.  The roll call of places visited is itself a litany of the variety of London:- Paddington, Little Venice, Maida Vale, Marylebone, Regent's Park, Primrose Hill, Camden, Kentish Town, St Pancras, King's Cross, Pentonville, Islington, Shoreditch, Haggerston (I had never even hard of this one before), Bethnal Green, South Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Mile End, Stepney, Limehouse.  And at the end it delivers this view, from my kitchen window.

The first part of the run is very attractive - Nash designed houses, a lot of vegetation, well set up gardens and houses, the zoo, and virtually no boat traffic.  Though the footpath is well used, by comparison with the Paddington basin, and the far end of the route there were far fewer people using the footpath.  When I got to Camden, there was a mass of people there, viewing my operating the locks as part of their Sunday morning entertainment, but again there were far fewer than I had anticipated.  After this the use of the towpath was very heavy, all the way down to Limehouse.

The locks are in pretty poor condition and the access for working the boat is quite difficult.  At one of the locks, the approach was blocked by two boats on the waterpoint by the lock, and I had to gain access to the lock over them.  On the way back, I may try to go slowly, and take some photos, but working the boat tends to make it difficult to sensibly use the camera; and vica versa.  Limehouse basin is currently housing a very wide variety of boats, including a "gin palace" that would not feel out of place in Monaco.  

Over the last couple of decades I have been down to Canary Wharf on a couple of occasions for business meetings, but the last time I was in this area, able to look and see what the place is like, it was to visit a friend who then lived in the Isle of Dogs.  This was before any of the Canary Wharf development, and the Isle of Dogs then was the bleakest urban landscape I have ever seen (including the 60's tower block redevelopment of Glasgow).  Now of course, there are expensive apartments, huge office developments, and massive amounts of new developments.  It is an attractive piece of urban landscape, that seems to work, and forms a living and vital  community.

All in all, a good day.

Extremophiles and me

I had thought that extremophiles were confined to bacteria; but as time goes on I am becoming convinced that I am one.   Give me days like this one and the last two - glorious sunshine, high temperatures, no cloud, and no wind - and I revel in it.  The temperature over the last two days at the rear of the boat, where I stand (in direct sunshine), has been between 34 and 37C.  I tend to enjoy this type of weather until I my body gets dehydrated (and I fail to recognise the symptoms until too late).

Put me on the slopes of Everest with daytime temperatures of 20oC and night time temperatures of -20C and again everything is marvellous.  Get stuck in Scotland over Xmas and New Year, with temperatures of -25C, and snowfall of nine inches in one night, and life is fun.

However,  in between days are dire - drear, depressing, dank, damp, and dicey.  I will shelter indoors, unwilling to emerge into the light (or the dusk, dawn, or night) and I sit and vegatate.

So I think I must be an extremophile.

Boathooks and magnets

I had occasion to go up to Milton Keynes today, from Berkhamsted which is where I am moored.  Relying on public transport and shank's pony, I did not get back to Berhamsted until about 19:40 and had been travelling virtually continuously since 10:30.  After walking most of the way back to my boat (about a 30 minute walk) and looking forward to something to eat and a rest, I got to the lock just above my mooring and saw two Wyvern boats (the nearest hire boat company) moored right by the locks.  By the lock side was James Griffin the owner of Wyvern boats, and somebody I have met a number of times.  We chatted briefly, and it became apparent that the rearmost of the two Wyvern boats had managed to drop their rear fender into the lock near the downhill gates.  This was quite an achievement in itself - the fenders that Wyvern use are rope covered metal cylinders stoppered at one end with rubber.  The cylinder is about one foot in diameter, and perhaps 18" in length.  It is normally bolted to the boat, and then additionally secured by a safety chain.  The person running the boat must have caught the fender on the bottom gate or rammed the gate fairly hard going in reverse - or both.  Anyway, James was trying to recover the fender from the full lock using magnets he had brought out, but they were proving insufficiently powerful to lift the fender, though he could locate and attach to the fender with the magnets.  After chatting for a little while I went down to my boat to pick up a boat hook that has a very large, sharp point, but which has a broken shaft.  Returning to the lock, we attached this hook to one of the Wyvern boat's barge poles, put the boat back in the lock, emptied it and went fishing with the resulting boat hook and the magnets.  We could locate the fender but we could not retrieve it.  Whilst this was going on, one of the women on the boat was providing coffee and biscuits.  After trying for a good while to stab it; hook it; lift it; shift it, we opened the lower gate to try and trap it between the gate and the lock wall.  At this point it became obvious that the fender was in such a position that the gate was having to go over the fender to open, and that two times out of three it was stopping the lock operating.  After continued unsuccessful efforts, we eventually called a halt.  I recovered my boat hook and walked back to the boat to finally get something to eat and drink and to sit down to rest and do this blog at about 21:30.  Not what I expected to be doing as I was coming back to the boat.