The Best Little Museum in Canaldom

We finally managed to get to the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port and what a little cracker it is.

In our cruising, we have visited the London Canal Museum and Gloucester, but this one is the jewel in the crown.

Ellesmere Port was basically a transhipment port.

It sits between the Manchester Ship Canal and the Shropshire Union Canal. The location is only a few miles from the tidal River Mersey with the great port of Liverpool a few miles downstream.

Beyond that, the World.

Cargo would come in to Liverpool or the ports on the ship canal, in large ocean going vessels and get transhipped into wide beam barges or Mersey sailing flats.

Smaller coastal ships or the wide beam barges would enter the lower basins of Ellesmere Port and then their cargoes would be transhipped into working narrowboats in the upper basins.

Once loaded, the narrowboats would travel the canal network, reaching potteries, coal mines, factories and so on. Of course, it would also work the other way round, with British exports originating in the heart of England, being shipped to the colonies and the world market.

Transhipment was achieved by cranes and railway trucks around the dock.

The museum is huge - the waterways are still intact, but some of the transhipment quay buildings and warehouses have been replaced by sympathetic modern buildings like apartments, offices and even a Holiday Inn Hotel. The British Sub-Aqua club have their offices in the modern part of the complex.

In the photo above, you can see how the port looks when entering from the Shropshire Union.

You can see the Whitby Locks (well the lower ones anyway), which allow narrowboats to enter the lower basin.

"Ferret" is shown here. Built by Yarwoods at nearby Northwich in 1926, she is a motor and would have towed an unpowered butty. The building behind is the old dock office.

Bacup is one of the last Leeds and Liverpool Canal motor short boats to be built (1950).

One of the saddest things about the museum is the fact that so much of it is undergoing restoration. It must cost an absolute fortune to keep the buildings in a good state of repair and to renovate the boats. They have done a fantastic job and there were lots of busy volunteers in attendance, working on the boats, surveying, tending the gardens, etc.

There are, however, a lot of boats in very poor condition. Some I imagine are too far gone and some are work in progress.

There is a beauty in their decay and even in death, they still have the power to excite the true boat enthusiast.

"Mendip" is a case in point. They were hard at work on her.

She was an F.M.C boat, also built at Yarwoods and was the fifth boat of six ordered, being

delivered in 1947.

These workers cottages are open to the public. Built in 1833, they had no running water, electric or even gas. They had a shared earth toilet out back. Although this seems primitive now, it was pretty normal for the time.

This boat caught my eye. Amaryllis is a 1954 motor cruiser with mahogany planking on oak frames. Powered by a Morris Vedette engine, she still turns heads with her curvy bilges.

Below is her cockpit - I love the speaker !!

Don't miss part 2 of the Best Little Museum in Canaldom, where I plan to go into some more detail about the basins and lock arrangements and show a few more pictures of boats and wrecks.

Now You See It; Now You Don't

The other morning I woke up to find that Moo, our cat, had been out mousing at dawn and had left the rear half of a largish mouse on the roof. Quite used to this, I vowed to deal with it after breakfast.

Coming out again later, dressed and ready with miniature body bag for the mutilated rodent, I found that it had disappeared.

I inquired to the first mate if either of the cats had gone out on deck again - nope - still inside, curled up asleep.

Slightly mystified and wondering if a large carrion bird like a magpie or crow could fly away with half a mouse suspended beneath them, I absently gazed out of the window and saw a female Sparrowhawk like the one shown in this illustration, about 10 yards away, gazing back at me.

Apparently, they like easy kills.

Mystery solved.

What A Ke-racker !!

Fed up with the UK weather, I took a job for a few days in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

In the port lies the replica of the 16th century carrack, the "Karaka".

Built about 6 years ago from GRP at Murter Shipyard in Croatia, she is 30m long and powered by twin Caterpillar diesels.

Costing around 5 million Euros to build, "Karaka" now takes corporate guests for short cruises down the stunning coastline in air conditioned, opulent luxury.

She was used for a Mastervolt dealer conference in Croatia.

It now looks like she will be chartered to Abu Dhabi for 2 years.

Sveti Vlaho (also known as Saint Blaize) is the patron saint of Dubrovnik.

During the war in 1991, the Croatians requisitioned a tour boat from the marina and fitted her with armour plate and machine guns. She was used to run the blockade that immobilised Dubrovnik, carrying guns and supplies before being taken out of action by a Soviet made anti-tank missile.

Now she is a museum piece and makes a good landmark by the side of the harbour.

Guess Who I Met Today ?

Guess who I met on the cut today ?

This Black Swan wanted me to feed it, but I didn't have anything with me.

Very tame and possibly an escapee from a private lake stock.

Cygnus atratus is a native of Australia.

Plunged Into Darkness and Dead Ships

Its been a strange week of sensory deprivation.

Whilst visiting a company late in the afternoon, I had occasion to visit the toilet.

It was a large company and therefore a large toilet - usually the type you see in films like Harry Potter (where Myrtle the ghost resides) or where you see the hero getting six shades of shite kicked out of him by the villain.

I was standing in an open cubicle, doing what men do standing up, when suddenly the lights went out. As it was already night time outside, it became completely black and I mean as dark as the darkest hole in the darkest corner of Hades.

There I stood, peeing in the dark. A very strange experience - you should try it.

Without being too graphic, I managed to stay on target by sound. When the pressure started dropping, I moved to the next phase by using the light of my iPod. Luckily, I have a torch application for just such as occasion.

Its rather surreal, peeing by iPod, I can tell you.

Anyway, I managed to clean my shoes (only joking) and navigated myself out of the urinal eclispe, to discover that the office cleaner had turned the lights off, thinking no-one was home.

There is a restaurant in Berlin called the Unsicht Bar, where you eat your food in complete darkness.
The staff are blind or visually impaired and its supposed to be a sensory rush.

To be honest, I've met people who cook so badly, they could get a job as the chef. At least you wouldn't see the burnt offering until you tasted it.

http://www.unsicht-bar-berlin.de/unsicht-bar-berlin-v2/en/html/home_1_idea.html

My second experience was on a ship.

I visited a ship in the UK to conduct a pre-installation survey.

When I got there, I discovered that there were only a couple of people on the ship, as the ship has no work and all the crew had been sent home earlier the same day.

If you ever saw the movie based on the Stephen King book, the Shining, you will have some idea of how I felt.

Ships are normally vibrant places, with engines vibrating, smells of cooking, sounds of habitation. Much like hotels.

A dead ship is a creepy place to be.

I moved around the ship, trying to find the things that I needed to eyeball and identify.

Normally a friendly crew member would assist me with local knowledge.

Not possible this trip, hombre.

Puzzled as to why I couldn't find one particular item that I needed to locate, I searched and searched.

It completely fazed me for thirty minutes.

Eventually, I noticed a mismatch between the level of the wheelhouse floor and the deck below.
A mezzanine level showed me a 4ft difference which I couldn't account for.

There was a hidden compartment !!!

I knew it was there, but couldn't find an entrance.

In the end, I found an entrance hatch in a completely different place. It was unmarked and I only discovered it through determination and bloody-mindedness.

I opened the hatch to find a huge space, which was clean and well lit. Unfortunately, it was only 4ft high and I turned into a hunched cave dweller.

On all fours, I crawled between beams and girder sections until I located what I needed.

I had gone from being suspended 100ft in the air, with the wind and gulls, having an excellent view of the harbour, to being a troglodyte in a white steel cave.

I breathed a sign of relief as I strided up the windy quayside back to my car.

Dead ships are for dead men - creepy indeed.

Under Pressure

Not a boat related post this time, but still gadget related.

We have a modest and quite economical 4X4 car which we use to ferry us and all our kit backwards and forwards to the boat.

Very useful its been too, especially in all the wintry weather that we've seen just recently.

The first mate is always fooled by the balloon-like tyres fitted to the car and she often asks me if I think this tyre or another looks a bit on the flat side.

So, I've fitted this device to the car.

Its a wireless tyre sensor.

The dust caps on the valves are replaced by little barrel shaped wireless transmitters which lock on to the tyre valve with a special key.

The four of them independently transmit coded messages to the receiver/display at the driving position and as you can see from the photographs, these are continuously displayed.







This is the pressure display in PSI.




This is the tyre temperature display in Degrees Centigrade.

The display has an inbuilt alarm which will detect high tyre temperature, high tyre pressure, low tyre pressure and quickly failing tyre pressures, for all four wheels.




A few years ago, I had a Renault which had this as standard. Beautiful car - could cruise on the motorway all day and when you got out, you still felt as fresh as a daisy.
It had one of these devices fitted as factory standard fit.

Anyway, one day, driving down the M3, it told me that one tyre was slowly losing air - slow puncture ?
As I was doing 70mph, I was able to slow down to a safer speed, pull off the motorway at the first opportunity and top up the air.

By monitoring the loss of pressure and regularly topping up, I got to Southampton, just a few minutes late. The wheel was changed and all was fine (there was a nail in the leaking one).

Had I not had this, I could have run flat at speed.

Always left a lasting impression did that gadget.

Anyway, lets see how it works out on this car.

Happy New Year To All

A very Happy New Year to all bloggers and blogwatchers - enjoy 2011.