More Rust

Yes, I've not written about rust for a few posts now, time to redress the balance. Mary and I went up for the day on saturday to do some more work. The main things we did was to chip all the loose rust and old tar from the frames in the bilges and then re-coat with bitumen tar.  Here are some frames after cleaning....

Mary applies the bitumen.....

I take a rest after shovelling up another bucket of rust.

We also lowered the last bit of the floor needing it, in the kitchen area.

Mid-destruction.....

Mary demonstrates how it'll look one day. :)

There has been some more general progress on the interior. The wall panels are just being test fitted, as we have yet to get the insulation applied. This is happening next week.

Alan's team have also cut the access door from the engine room into the main interior. Steps will come down from the wheelhouse eventually, making this the main entrance into the boat.

They've also made a start on the wheelhouse floor.

All in all, slowly getting there.

Learning

One of the things we've done recently was to go on a barge handling course in France. There were a couple of reason behind this. The first is that Misterton is much bigger than the narrowboat we've previously been used to, and therefore the potential for damage is much greater. Secondly, we do have long term plans to take her to Europe one day, so this would be a taster of things to come (hopefully). I sold the concept to Mary with the idea of French sunshine and cuisine. Of course it was cold and wet and the food wasn't great, but hey, its the thought that counts.

There was another couple on the course, Ken and Rhonda from New Zealand and Australia. they'd already proved their worth by arriving at the course in their own barge (shown below)!

The instructor's barge was only slightly smaller than Misterton, so it was good to learn about how to manoeuvre and steer a ship of this size. We were shown how to correctly enter locks and throw ropes onto bollards etc. It sounds fairly easy, but in reality it wasn't. We were split into obvious teams, with Mary steering and me doing the ropes and then the same for Ken and Rhonda. Mary even looks like she was enjoying it, possibly as she was sheltered from the rain and I wasn't.

The canal/river we were on was unusually busy, due to the temporary closure of a much bigger waterway nearby. As a result the 'smaller' French and Belgian commercial barges were all around us.

The picture above shows a loaded one going past. Drakar in the photo below is unloaded and can only just make it under the bridge before the lock.

The car on the roof of this one gives an idea of scale.

At the end of the two days, we had a written test on the CEVNI signs - basically the European equivalent of the highway code. We all passed, and in conjunction with the practical work means that we now have our ICC of International Certificate of Competence for inland waterways craft of us to 24m. In reality, like passing your car test, its just the beginning of learning.......

Mary's View - part 14

More from Mary here. We've been busy with various things over the past few weeks, I'll update the blog over the next few days.

Slog

Pretty much more of the same I'm afraid. We did have a slightly different start to the weekend, as we detoured via Norfolk to see my mum and dad. This had nothing to do with me wanting to borrow dad and his estate car to go and pickup a brand new Isotherm 12v fridge/freezer that I'd won off ebay for a bargain price.  Anyway, here it is at Misterton's Norfolk storage facility,

Mum was worried about it getting damaged, so we covered it up with a quilt.....

...and of course it immediately became a cat platform.

We then went up to Goole on Saturday morning to carry on with the tidying up etc. Mary had discovered that the old Stanley range would get hot enough to cook on. Last week we had veggie burgers, this week she had greater plans and had borrowed an old baking tray from mum to make veggie kebabs.

Here are the end results, served on a bed of stacked plywood, lightly dusted with rust particles.

As well as cleaning up, I also continued with the work started by the boat builders and lowered the living area floor, it looks like I'm cutting through the bottom, but I was keen to avoid this.

The end result will be much more space, floor joists will be laid on top of the frames, so there will still be a reasonable gap for air to circulate in the bilges underneath.

During the weekend, we removed the workshop floor, which was made of rotting chipboard and also got rid of a few other remaining bits, so that's the last of the previous owners 'handiwork' I hope. I used a new sheet of plywood flooring to make a temporary island to store stuff. We do seem to spend a bit of time shifting the same stuff around from one place to another, but there is no where else to store it.

That's it. Tune in next time for more of the same (will it ever end?)

Unlucky for some

Part 13 of Marys view of the whole thing here.