Red Kite Has Left the Building

Having already used 'Firebird Flies the Nest' as the title of the post when we sold Firebird, it was hard to know what to call this one.  We need to stop selling boats!

Moored at Windsor on my birthday

We had planned to carry on working until the end of August, then sell Red Kite, leave London and get back to the Canaries.  We had already booked our flights for this, so when the IT project that we were both working on got unexpectedly cancelled, we were left with five weeks on our hands.  It didn't take us long to come up with, unsurprisingly, the idea of a boat trip!  Seeing as we already had a boat, it would have been rude not to.



This gave us the opportunity to get some use out of Red Kite and let her stretch her legs, rather than just using the poor old girl as a houseboat.

We left Brentford Dock Marina, where we have been keeping her and set off up the Thames, full of excitement and enthusiasm.  However, it soon felt like the trip had been cursed and instead of being a leisurely cruise up the calm waters of the Thames, turned into an advanced boat maintenance practical exam.

Craning poor Red Kite into the boatyard

The first thing that went wrong was that our sterndrive (a bit like an outboard motor) started leaking oil into the river.  We didn't want to be polluting the Thames with it and also, it was embarrassing to enter a lock and have a slick slowly spreading out from our transom.  Crucially, however, if left unchecked, the gearbox would have seized, resulting in a very expensive repair.  There was no way of topping the oil up until the boat came out of the water, and we didn't know how long we had until this fatal damage occurred.  We looked up the nearest boatyard that could service the sterndrive, which was luckily only a day away.

Kate operating a lock out of hours (when the lock keeper is off duty)

We slowly made our way to Chertsey Meads Marine the next day, obviously pretty nervous about the sterndrive seizing at any moment.  Little did we know that the emergency of the day was actually going to be the engine cooling system.

Kate picking blackberries

We arrived at Molesley Lock and noticed steam coming out of the engine bay vents.  Upon investigation, we discovered that the coolant had mostly boiled away and it was lucky that we had noticed when we did.  Fortunately, the lock was actually also broken, so we couldn't make progress anyway.  A diver was in the water trying to fix a problem with one of the lock gates, so no boats could pass through the lock in either direction.



We immediately set to work fixing our

Me eating the blackberries

problem, which should have been a simple matter of pulling out the old, broken impeller, which pumps the river water up into the cooling system, and replacing it with the spare that we always carry.  Of course, it wasn't this simple as the old one was seized in place and the new one wouldn't slot in properly.  After much fiddling, tweaking and scratching our heads, dismantling most of the pump system in the process, we managed to get it all sorted.  We had literally finished pouring in fresh antifreeze mix, to replace that which boiled away, when the lock gate was fixed and we were able to carry on up the river!

We made it to the boatyard before the sterndrive self destructed and were greeted by the most friendly and helpful staff, who managed to get Red Kite all fixed up for us in just a couple of days.  We had been worried that this was going to take a week or two out of our trip.

Black Magic Pie

While we waited for the work to be done, we walked around the local hedgerows, harvesting tub after tub of blackberries.  I invented a gluten, sugar, dairy free blackberry and apple pie, which we called a Black Magic Pie.  We had to bake it in a bowl, as we didn't have anything else suitable, but it all worked a treat.

Taking Red Kite upstream after she was fixed up, looking for somewhere to moor for the night, we encountered emergency number three.  We had peeked our nose into a possible mooring spot, but it was too shallow and I managed to gently hit the bottom while I was reversing out onto the river again.  I didn't think too much about it until a few minutes later when there was a bang and the boat started shaking violently.  My immediate thought was that I must have hit the propellor earlier, weakened it, and now a blade had fallen off, unbalancing the prop and shaking our fillings out.  This was the last thing we needed: another haul out and a new propellor.

We limped over to the bank, where we inspected the damage.  As it happened, the propellor was fine, apart from the fact that tangled around it was a curious mess of white and brown.  Eugh, we had been nappied!  It turns out that disposable nappies are very strong and quite heavy when saturated with water.  A few minutes of poking at it with the boat hook took care of this problem.  The worst bit was trying to get the thing into a bin bag without touching it.  Here was us thinking that the Thames no longer contained biohazardous waste!

By now, we had received our fair share of bad luck and were looking forward to a stretch of being able to relax and enjoy the scenery.  This was not the case.

Pumping the bilge with an improvised tube

Emergency number four found us the following day when we stopped for lunch.  I shut the engine down, went below decks to write in the log and heard a familiar whirring noise.  The water pump was running, but why was it running?  I hastily shut the pump off and started investigating.  It didn't take me long to find out what had happened.  A joint in the pressurised water system had come apart.  Noticing a drop in pressure, the pump assumed that someone was running a tap and dutifully set about pumping water from our huge freshwater tank through the system.  Unfortunately, the 'system' now consisted of simply an open-ended pipe, which was happily pouring water down into the bilge.  The whole tank had been emptied, which must have taken quite a while to do because I had only filled it the day before.

When I lifted a floor board, I discovered that Red Kite's bilge has the same capacity as her water tank.  It was completely full to the brim!  Any more water and we would have seen it seeping up between the boards!

This was a pretty annoying problem, especially as I was looking forward to lunch and most things getting between me and food will make me angry.  As we didn't have anything stored in the bilge, it wasn't a serious problem (apart form delaying lunch).  Repairing the broken pipe was simple, but then we needed to empty Red Kite's new bathtub.  Bailing by hand would have taken forever, so that was out.  First we tried re-routing the freshwater system so that the pump would draw from the bilge, rather than the tank.  After all, the pump had filled the bilge, so it should jolly well clean up the mess.  This didn't work, though, because the pump wasn't strong enough to lift the water up such a height.  After some searching, we found some spare piping and could extend the bilge pump from the engine bay to the main cabin, which allowed me to pump the water out by hand in about twenty minutes.

This was our final emergency, thankfully.  I think we passed the test!

The rest of the trip was just as we had imagined.  We really enjoyed the scenery along the Upper Thames and the clichéd slow pace of life associated with inland waterways cruising.

One of the beautiful, peaceful mooring spots that we found

We put Red Kite on eBay and got lots of interest.  We sold her to a couple of families who will share the ownership and we're sure that Red Kite will be well looked after and will enjoy her new life.  We were just glad that all our emergencies happened at the beginning of the trip, so that nothing happened on any test rides and we could sell her with a clean conscience.

Showing two of the new owners the ropes

Now we're back out in the Canaries, on our new boat, which replaced Firebird about 16 months ago.  Details of the new boat will follow in the next post.

One of the many, many swans that can be found at Windsor