The End of the Honeymoon?

There is no end to the honeymoon; don’t be ridiculous.

If there were, it would have occurred many, MANY, years ago. By this stage I am “all-in”, I’m “focused on the goal”, “lost to the mission”, maybe even “in too deep”, (hang on, there’s a worrying theme developing here…). I “can’t see the rocks for all these bloody mermaids”, I got “lost without trace”, “he died doing what he loved” (bloody hell, that escalated quickly; let’s try that again). I am “going hard, not going home” (it wouldn’t do me much good, home is another boat), “leaving it all on the field” (something I normally only do with my keys), and “putting my money where my mouth is” (despite the dubious hygiene).

That is to say I’m heavily invested in this (*waves arm vaguely*) whole thing.

So much so that dare I say a week in Los Angeles this month came as something of an annoyance; improbable as that sounds. Don’t get me wrong, I am extremely grateful for my work life, and the frankly astonishing opportunities it provides me; but I’m much more Ratty than Duuuude, and after the novelty of a morning walk on Venice Beach wore off I was itching to get back to, erm, Sandbach, for more stress-free narrowboating.

Hubris, you say? What of it?

I touched down in London on Saturday, and ignoring common sense took myself off to the boat. In my defence, it had been raining most of the week in Cheshire and as we have already seen, the open hold does collect a drop of rain, so there was a good reason for the trip.

From Sunny LA to….. Well, who wouldn’t pine for this?

“I’ll just shift off this mooring now the locks are open again” I thought to myself, with typical devil-may-care attitude to invoking bathos.

*CLICK* came the sound from below deck.

*CLICK* again.

Ah.

Not the reassuring thump of the engine that we have come to know and love?

Not a sniff of it, mate. Think you can swan off to America and we’ll all just sit here waiting patiently for you? Dream on.

Flat battery was the initial thought, well the initial thought was ‘is this rain ever going to let up?’, but that was closely followed by ‘flat battery’. 100 miles from home on a weekend (it was by now Sunday) and without on-hand support, solutions are few. There’s nothing for it, a trip to… Halfords… is called for (*insert horror movie sound effect from here*). It’s not something I undertake lightly, Halfords being to mechanical repairs what Alan Sugar is to skincare; but if you weigh up a 200 mile round for a battery from home, you may as well have got one from Halfords in Crewe and saved yourself the time and fuel. Trouble is, they don’t sell heavy duty batteries any more, or at least not in that branch. The best I could do was something that when it left the factory was probably dreaming of powering a few trips for the ‘big shop’ under the bonnet of a Fiesta. It took one look at the boat engine and- I kid you not- whimpered. Ok, maybe I do kid. I hadn’t expected much else, so it was pressed into service on the untested on-board generator to run a battery charger.

If you want to get ahead, get a generator…

Sometimes you get caught up in the optimism of it all. The Rain Gods of Cheshire would not be sated by a mere sixty pound battery; oh no, not this time. They demand a blood sacrifice* of the old world variety. Propitiation the order of the day my child; get on with it.

(*read ‘bloody expensive’ here)

You see, boating is never cheap. It is never ‘just’ a new nut or bolt, a bit of wire, or a fuse. It is invariably and without fail something MUCH more expensive. Think it’s going to be a case of charge the battery and ‘away we go’? Trusting fool.

There is an old adage (not the ‘contact sport’ one, we don’t mention that any more) that ‘boat’ is in fact an acronym which stands for Bring Out Another Thousand. This, I can attest from bitter and costly experience, is absolutely the truth.

This episode is a prime example of the phenomenon. The other day I pulled up to the mooring and switched off a perfectly happy and well-behaved boat. All was right with its world. Before I have managed to move a single metre further, and without so much as a warning, it has cost me a rough £600 in actual money, and three days of lost wages running up and down the motorway sorting it. It has therefore, almost unbelievably, cost over a grand. Adding in the mileage going back up on Saturday it’ll tip well over that mark, and that’s before I’ve even thought about coffee and bananas for the journey(s).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. As I said at the start here, the honeymoon will probably never end for me, it segueing neatly into my funeral seems the natural order of things.

But take this note as a cautionary tale and, you know, wear some protection on your bank card if you decide to indulge in a watery life. Carelessness costs, and if you are remiss enough to get into this game and not something infinitely more sensible- elite motorsport or owning a racehorse for instance, you too will soon be staring into an account that is awash with zeros without any other positive integers next to them.

So fast forward four days, several trips up and down the M6, the secondment of a proper battery from a D6 Crawler, some fresh wiring and new terminals, and a brand new starter motor- for all of these items have been needed, and we venture north once again in an attempt to move south once more.

At last the Rain Gods were satisfied; for now at least…

Stand by your email accounts for the next update in the coming days!