Narrowboat Nomads by Steve Haywood

Author:Steve Haywood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publisher

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The bridge across the Wey from which Weybridge gets its name is to the south-east of the town, a stylish three-arched structure topped by attractive filigree cast-iron railings. Cruising the Wey you don’t pass under it though, for at this point the navigable route becomes canalised and you have to swing 90 degrees to a lock on the right, through a second bridge of much narrower and more industrial construction. As you approach, it seems to be just a hole in a brick wall, a steel joist above it marked ‘Navigation’ the only indication of where you’re supposed to be going. Again I was on the tiller. I wasn’t expecting this sort of complication that early in the morning and my approach was hopelessly misjudged, my angle completely wrong. I hit the bridge side on and jammed the bow of the boat which stopped dead, skewering the stern around and slamming it against one wall of the bridge before bouncing it on the rebound back against the other, like a snooker ball rattling around in the jaws of a pocket.

Em stood on the lockside watching all this in horror, wincing and shaking her head. I didn’t need to see her scorecard to know I was getting nul points for that manoeuvre. But at least I was in the lock and the worst was over. Or that’s what I thought. Both of us had been shaken by what had happened. The boat had been shaken even more. We’d have been better taking time out to compose ourselves before going on. Instead we began to go through the lock without thinking. It was as if we were consoling ourselves in routines we were familiar with and which we’d done a thousand times before.

The problem was we’d forgotten that they do things differently on the Wey.

It was entirely our fault. We’d been warned by the lock-keeper coming on to the river that the locks on the Wey could be particularly fierce and that going uphill we shouldn’t depend on being able to control the boat with a single centre rope as we would in normal locks. We were told – no, ‘instructed’ would be a better word – to use both bow and stern ropes together. We’d even been given a Visitors’ Guide which said the same thing, so we had it in writing as well.

But still stressed by the trauma of getting into the lock in the first place, all this went out of the window. I wound our single centre rope around a bollard as usual and Em opened the paddles. Moments later the force of the water hit us. The rope tightened and I attempted to restrain it but it was a waste of time. When water flows this furiously there’s no holding any boat against it. Em tried to close the paddles but it was like trying to get an omelette back into eggs: the damage had been done and there was no retrieving it. The surge wrenched the

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