Bimbling about

[marshlander]

well after your explanation of how the handling can be effected by so many thing i can now see why my mates hired one on holiday and hit 3 boats trying to moor up - im amazed they just let anyone hire them out for a holiday at all without experience lol.  
cannot believe PA has not had a go at steering your boat yet - hes been on it a ton of times - give him the wheel   one day and go to the back and see how he gets on lol , might be a case of sink or swim literally   

strangely enough ive never been on a river boat - i get that romantic image of them - not the image where your engine goes bang or the weather can bring on vomiting lol

Mooring up is a skill and needs practice - lots of it - in different conditions and preferably away from other boats. It's a huge boost to the confidence when someone congratulates you on a manoeuvre well done, but there is rarely anyone to see when you do something well. Unfortunately, we all get things wrong from time to time and when you make an error there is invariably an audience.

A few months before I bought the boat I'm on now someone came up the river in a hire boat and somehow managed to bounce off three boats out of the four moored here. Several tiles fell off my shower wall. With no idea of the damage he'd caused all he could manage was to look back and say, "Oops." The local boatyard has a hire fleet including two day boats. The hirer gets about fifteen minutes instruction, an engineer from the marina manoeuvres the boat on to the river from the marina and then the hirer is let loose on the rest of the world. One evening I was out at work and PA was in the boat alone. Someone in one of the hire boats came by at speed and rocked my boat so hard that it moved about every axis resulting in a wave-shaped scrape mark in the paintwork that was about two feet long and nearly a foot high - that must have been some wake he caused! PA was terrified. He really thought the boat was going to take on water and go under. I was not best pleased. I had only just got the boat back from the yard after it had been there for the whole month being grit-blasted back to bare steel and having several layers of different paints applied at a cost of about £10,000. I was being very careful and deliberately not taking the boat out because the paint takes several weeks to go off properly.

A few years ago I got into difficulty in the marina turning the boat round. The biggest space for turning is in the residential section so there is an audience all round. The marina also seems to have its own weather systems and, naturally, the wind is always stronger there than anywhere else. Fortunately I didn't actually hit another boat, but I would have done had not one of the younger owners taken pity and leapt on to the front of my boat to help me out. It was after one of those experiences that I decided I needed to go out and experiment with turning the boat round - clockwise, anticlockwise, light winds and stronger winds blowing from different directions. There are boat-handling courses one can take, but they are not mandatory. I learned a lot from experimenting. I am lucky to be in an area where there is not much traffic and I had the opportunity to try things out to get the feel of how it all works.

I have mentioned that the boat is susceptible to the wind. Like many I don't take mine out at all if the wind is too strong. If I'm out and the wind gets up I'll try and moor up somewhere until it feels safer to carry on with my journey. With propulsion and steering from the back of the boat one only has control over direction when going forward. Even then constant corrections are needed by using the tiller to push the stern one way or the other. This gives the impression of moving the bow the opposite way so that you can head where you want to go. If I have to reverse there is no control whatsoever over the way the boat is going. The stern goes vaguely backwards, though not in any specific direction and the wind can make the bow swing anywhere. For that reason the only way to manage direction when going astern is to keep correcting the heading by putting the boat into forward gear and giving the stern a nudge with the tiller in the right direction. I don't know if that makes any sense? It's easier to demonstrate than to describe!

P.A. won't even touch the tiller with me there to guide him. I think the weight of the responsibility of fifty feet of steel narrowboat would be a little much to ask of him. Point of order ... it's a tiller rather than a wheel and if I went any further "to the back" I'd have to be in the river! 

Regarding the romantic image, bang and vomit are more likely experiences even if the nausea is mainly brought on by receiving an estimate for the next repair! After (not before, note) I bought the boat the man who sold it to me told me two truths. A boat is a boat-shaped hole in the water into which you throw money and B.O.A.T. = Bung On Another Thousand! Although many boat parts (specially those relating to the engine) are available from a car parts shop if there is any hint that the part is for a marinised engine be certain that someone will be charging a premium.