You first experience of boating.....

[Lady Muck]

Sunday school boat trip on one of the Aire and Calder barges aged about five. Then a kayaking holiday in Yorkshire, aged 11, to some Scout centre at aldwark bridge on the river Ure. Went with school and it was followed by a horrendous tummy bug ( the water wasn't clean apparently and we all swallowed tons of it) it was pre health and safety days - thry ran out of space for us, we had the short straw and slept in the canoe store. The instructor was a psycho and hit you over the head with an oar if you refused to do your eskimo rolls. It did not put me off boating!

 

My boating experience is pathetic compared to my partners though, he was rowing before he started school, sailing aged nine.

Edited May 29, 2015 by Lady Muck

[baz gimson]

First canal boating was Husbands Bosworth tunnel October/November 1987.

 

I'd finished a contract job and a work mate had got a job with the contractors dredging the tunnel on the day shift. He put me forward for the night shift 7pm till 7am.

 

Went down ,met the foreman and was told to turn up at 7 that night....so I became the safety boat man...with no boat experience!!

 

I had a small boat with an outboard and a car battery connected to a hand spot lamp for navigation. There was also a Motorola mobile phone the size of a small house for emergency use only...but no one told me how use it!!!

 

The job consisted of dropping off the dredger crew in the tunnel then going back out and waiting for anything to happen, About 1 am I would go down the canal and check the booster pumps and the pump that put the water from the settling lagoon back into the canal.

 

The only problem we had was exhaust fumes building up in the tunnel. The dredger crew's gas alarm would go off and they would sound the air horn to call me in and pick them up.When the fumes cleared i would take them back in.

 

After spending a night sitting in the tunnel mouth to avoid the rain I built myself a shelter on the bank out of saplings and builders plastic. I had a camp fire going all night and the kettle was always on.

 

Cold, wet, muddy and good fun !!!

Edited May 30, 2015 by baz gimson

[frahkn]

In 1974 my girlfriend and I hired an absolutely tiny cruiser - no running water, outboard, little two ring plate connected to a gas bottle etc.

 

We got it from a little yard in Stoke, just south of a working steelworks. Neither the yard or the steelworks has survived but I remember them as a nice young couple. We collected the boat late and got stuck under the first bridge, on a sunken cooker.

 

We had a week to Market Drayton and back and had very few years without some canal time since. Hire boats, shared ownership and now (retired) our own boat. To be honest, to date owning our own has been more stressful than our first night in Stoke!

 

 

 

 

[captain birdseye]

My fascination with boats started when my granddad, who worked for the Manchester Ship Canal Company would take us down to Barton to the swing aquaduct to watch it open and close, this was in the sixties. We would watch the coal barges going to and from the power station. We even got to stand on the tank whilst it swung.

Boating, it would be on the Ashton canal on Joel in 1974 I was thirteen then. I made friendships then that I still have today.

[bassplayer]

A post in another thread got me thinking about what was my first ever experience of boating in the inland waterways.

 

Mine I can still remember vividly was age around 10 or 11 and was when my farther hired a Broads cruiser form Jenners of Thorpe (Near Norwich). So it would be around 1969-70. We travelled by train from Darlington changing at York which made the whole thing a bigger adventure. Several more broads holidays followed with us subsequently setting out from Wroxham in later years.

 

The first boat was a Windboats 26 exactly like this one with a Seacrete hull at a time GRP was becoming popular in place of wood. The yard we hired from has long gone along with many others that were around at the time.

 

All our photos are on slides so cant post up as I don't have a slide scanner.

 

What was your first experience of boating?

Oddly enough the earliest memory I have is also a Broads trip with my parents and it would have been about the same time. I've got no idea where it was but I do remember the panic when the trip boat made contact with a small open boat after someone had decided to cut across our bow. The skipper was pretty sharp and managed to get the trip boat slightly beam on before contact, God knows what would happened if it T boned it!

[Naughty Cal]

Mine was hiring this hideous little creation for a week on the Broads back in 2003.

 

 

Despite the boat being cramped, not very well laid out and a nightmare to get on and off, we had a great action packed and eventful holiday which ignited our passion for being on the water.

 

We also met by chance some people who many years on are now firm friends. A great and memorable holiday which I'm sure neither of us will forget.

[X Alan W]

My grand mother ( dads side) lived at Hallam Fields near ilkeston & the Erewash canal,it must have been around the last year of WW2 & I used to walk or ride my bike along the towpath to Stanton Iron works & offer to help with the locks of the ash boats going loaded towards Trent lock or if no boats i would ride to Sandiacre or thereabouts & do the same for the emptys coming back to Stanton I would have been 8 or so at the time. Took a few meetings with the boaters to get their trust to allow me to assist in any way.A year or so to reach the dizzy heights of having my bike on the cabin top & a ride on the boats & an even greater thrill to be allowed to steer for a short period. On one occasion a loaded pair ( with timber) for Vic Hallams yard at Langley Mill They let me assist, ride on, lock wheel & I ended up at Langley Mill, by the time i'd cycled back to Hallam Fields I was completely knackered, I think it was one of the last loads before the Erewash was left to sink into dereliction until the restoration.

[AMModels]

First time was about 6 days old, 'hired' Mr Yates' Pacific/Mallard for a trip to Llangollen and back. After that pretty much every weekend and holiday was spent on a canal, literally every spare minute from age 3ish til 18, work and family meant a lot less since and not very much at all in recent years but I miss it every day, my favourite smell in the world is canal water as it rushes through a paddle into a lock.