Hottest day of the year so…

• Interior

…it seemed like a good idea to post this

Our stove in winter

This is how our lit fire looks during the winter months.

Summer Stove

It looks rather boring in the summer, so Helen created our summer “fire”.

Good isn’t it?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mods and Locks

• Challenges
• Fittings
• Interior
• Living aboard
• Moving
• On the move

While we were in the USA visiting Nick and his family, we left Brandy Pad in a marina at Stretford (Manchester).  When the boat was built, we had decided to keep the saloon “open plan”. Hire boats we have had in the past worked well with a table, 4 chairs and a couple of armchairs and we wanted to see if something similar would work for us. Having tried a couple of different combinations we eventually came to realise that the hire boats had been quite a bit longer and hence had more room in the saloon than we have. So, we decided to have a dinette built in. This should give us a more appropriate sitting/dining area and also double up as a spare bed for visitors. Stretford Marine were due to do the work while we were away, but Mal, the carpenter, was delayed on another project and wasn’t able to start until we came back.  Just as well really as we had to make quite a lot of decisions on the design as it was being built.  This was the saloon before:

Empty space (the folding table we had been using is on the bottom left)

The dinette is now completed successfully and we are very happy with the end result as it is proving more practical (and comfortable) than the previous arrangement:

Yesterday (Thursday) we tackled the Wigan flight of locks.  This is a rise of just under 215 feet over 21 challenging locks. Due to water shortages in the pounds between the locks, boats are only allowed into or out of the flight between 8-9am and 2-3pm.  So, we were up early and ready to get going at 8am.  We were first in the queue, having moved up to wait there the night before, and “buddied” up with Jeremy and Mary on nb Angelica. This meant we went up through all the locks together as the locks are wide enough for two narrowboats at once.  This saves water and shares the work.  In fact, we roped together at the bottom and stayed that way to the top.  We have not used this particular technique before, but it means that one boat does most of the driving and steering calling for assistance from the second boat when necessary. The water level was so low in one of the pounds between locks that Brandy Pad ran aground, so I had to call for Helen to run some more water through the next lock into our pound to float us off.

We completed the whole climb in around 5 hours and slept very well last night 😉

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Winter sets in

• Interior
• Living aboard

Last night was really cold apparently – but not on Brandy Pad. Thanks to the thick coating of insulation, the double glazed porthole and our multi-fuel stove, we were warm and toasty. We have “bungs” that pop into the portholes at night, which also helps insulation (they double up as cushions when not in the portholes). The only difficulty is trying to make sure the heat from the stove, in the saloon, gets through the bathroom into the bedroom. We have now purchased a small fan that sits on top of the stove. There is a “thermocouple” in the unit that makes use of the heat from the the stove to spin the fan and encourage a flow of warm air. It will be interesting to see if it helps shift the heat, although not too much as a slightly cooler bedroom is helpful for sleep – or so I am told.

Forecast is for around -7C tonight, so it will be interesting to see if the fan helps. Of course, we also have the central heating!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.