Chapter Seventeen
Twenty-three Tonnes of Steel,
One Man and a Rope

WHILE ALL THIS HAD been going on, Charlie’s first and second visit to the boat had arrived and passed. It would be fair to say that on her first visit she had expected the boat to be bad. I think that by her second visit she half expected it to be completely finished. She loved the new bathroom but felt that, really, if that was as far as we had got, we ought to be putting a lot more effort in. She was willing to be slightly mollified with promises of graceful elegance in the future but we had sorely disappointed her with our present level of activity.

It’s amazing really: you can completely ignore your living conditions until somebody points them out to you. I think her exact words were, ‘Oh yuck.’ I have to admit she was right. With one bathroom dismantled, tools everywhere, boxes heaped haphazardly in odd cabins, Happy was looking a slightly sorry sight. However, even with all the disappointment, we had a fun weekend and at least Charlie agreed to come back. But she did expect it to be a lot better by then. (We had our orders.)

Hardly anything on Happy changed over the next couple of weeks (hoo boy, were we going to be in trouble) and one morning, with Sam safe at school, we decided to head into Ely for a pump out and a full refill with fresh water. It had been irritating to discover that the river had no turning spaces for a boat of Happy’s length. To travel into Ely, we had to spend three quarters of an hour heading in the opposite direction and turn her at the ‘Lazy Otter’, so every time we made the journey Geoff desperately searched for likely spots that might have just enough space for us to squeeze our way around and allow us to knock some time off the journey.

He had spotted one such place where the bank had been eroded over time, forming a nice semi-circle shaped ‘bite’ out of the bank, where, he hoped, we might be able to jam her nose into the apex and use it like a winding hole. So bundled up in jumpers, woolly socks, hats and gloves, we decided to give it a try.

I have always found it difficult to envisage 70 foot. You look at ‘normal’ narrow boats – most of which are around 55 foot – and then you take a look at our monstrosity. Well, that day we found out exactly how long 70 foot is ... About three foot longer than the width of the bloody river.

Under normal circumstances being across the river wouldn’t have caused us any real problems. There would have been grumping and sighing, but we should have been able to kick off from the bank or use a pole to push her backwards, swing her straight and off we’d go. That day the circumstances were anything other than ‘normal’. We slowed right down as we approached Geoff’s possible turning place and turned Happy’s nose into the bank. All was going to plan, and as she was turning in, I increased the power just to get her turning a little faster and, in a foul and horrible moment of déjà vu, her nose lifted, and came to a complete stop. Oh damn. Well, at least, unlike the other times we had grounded, it was only Happy’s nose that was stuck; it should have been easy to get her afloat again.

The river had eroded the bank, but it was actually only the bank that had eroded. Two inches below the surface, the original line of the Old West River was still there, lurking under the water, a huge soft mud bank. Happy, like a pig hunting for truffles, stuck her nose in deep and there she contentedly stopped.

For the next hour and a half we did every single thing we could think of to get ourselves free: we rocked her; we got off and pushed from the bank; we stayed on and pushed against the bank with bars. Happy just lived up to her name and with every action made a deeper nest for herself in the mud (oink!). Finally out of options, we sat on her roof, each clasping a cup of tea and thought about our predicament.

Looking back on the incident I have decided that while ‘necessity’ may be the mother of invention, she also had three other children: Stupidity, Danger and Futility (those three obviously left home early and didn’t go to university). Deciding that we needed better leverage it was decided that I would push with a pole from the front and Geoff would take a rope into the river and swim with it to the far bank in an attempt to provide extra ‘oomph’ by pulling her back end toward him. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Geoff prepared to clamber into the freezing cold, fast-running river. Looking at the speed of the water that day, and knowing that Geoff wasn’t the strongest swimmer in the world – he’s like a shark, if he stops moving he sinks – I insisted that we attach another rope to his waist, which I would hold, ready to pull him back if anything horrible happened.

Taking a deep breath, he slipped into the river and headed for the far bank. Holding his safety rope, I held my breath until he was safely out of the water, then shouted over to him to untie the rope around his waist, as I didn’t want any chance of it getting tangled when, and if, we came free and I had to start the engine.

‘Untie the rope,’ I shouted across the water.

Geoff was busy shivering. ‘What?’

‘Untie the rope,’ I bellowed again. Not sure that he had heard me, I demonstrated which rope by giving it a little tug.

Completely unnoticed by either of us, as Geoff had been swimming, the poorly tied rope had loosened and, as he had pulled himself out onto the bank and had stood up, it had slipped down around his ankles. My ‘little tug’ pulled him straight off his feet, onto his backside. He then slid, down the muddy slope and straight back into the river. I winced at the splash; at least he was far enough away that all his screaming and cursing were muffled by distance.

With Geoff out of the water for the second time, I took myself and the barge pole to the front of the boat. With a big shout of ‘go!’ Geoff pulled, I pushed and Happy grudgingly left her pig wallow and headed backward, swinging her back end toward Geoff heaving from the other bank.

No one can think of everything in a situation like this and we found ourselves with a little problem. With Geoff on the far bank and me desperately trying to pull the barge pole back from where it had sunk into the mud at the front, there was no one at the tiller and before I had time to race down the roof, Happy had run backwards into the far bank, the current sweeping her nose sideways and ploughing it hard back into the mud wallow – again.

As all movement ceased and Happy made happy squelching noises in the mud at the bow, we found ourselves diagonally across the river, and, rather than being a little stuck at the front as we had been, we were now stuck at both ends.

At least Geoff didn’t have to get back into the water – he just stepped aboard the back plate and stood there, studying our latest predicament, dripping and shivering.

‘Go and get changed,’ I said to him, ‘we’re not going anywhere. Surely if we just wait a little while, another boat will come along and they can push us off.’

Unable to speak through his chattering teeth, Geoff just nodded and went below to find some warm, dry clothes. I put the kettle on.

Waiting for him to return, I sat scanning the river. Surely a disaster of such epic proportions as this should have provided entertainment for a hundred onlookers – an unrivalled opportunity for pointing and laughing; and then it struck me, this was the exception to the rule. We needed help, therefore, there wasn’t likely to be a boat down the river for another six hours.

A well-wrapped husband, still slightly blue, appeared at the engine room door and reached, with a shaking hand, for his tea. I gave him a hug. ‘Sorry about pulling you into the river, I didn’t notice that the rope had slipped.’

Geoff grinned. ‘Ah well, I was already wet, so you’re one up on last time.’

Studying the back end, it was far worse than we feared. Happy had hit the bank rudder first, this had then sunk deep into the mud, and was acting like an anchor; there was no way we could just swing her off at the back end. We wandered down to the front and found the force of the current had lifted Happy so far up onto the mud bank that she was at least four inches higher than normal; completely and utterly stuck.

So there we stayed, blocking the entire river. We had already been there for an hour and there were only another two before one of us had to go and pick up Sam from school. With the complete lack of onlookers, I was beginning to wonder if a bomb had dropped or aliens had attacked and we were the only ones left in the world; no joggers, no dog walkers and no other boats – it really was very unfair.

Over yet another cup of tea, I stood at the back leaning on the immobile tiller and watched Geoff now trying to dig us out with a spade. Finally losing my temper with the whole situation, I grasped the tiller in both hands and gave it a good wrench backwards and forwards.

What’s this? What’s this? The wretched thing actually moved, only about an inch but it had really, truly moved. I rolled my sleeves up and shouted at Geoff that I had got the tiller to move a bit and that I was going to try and just keep moving it backward and forward in the hope that it would dig its way out of the mud.

It took me about ten minutes, and to this day I hate to think what damage I caused to the already dodgy shims, but eventually the rudder began to move more freely in wider and wider arcs. Eventually, I managed to get it facing in the other direction. Geoff had come to give me a hand about halfway through the exercise and, seeing that we now had a possibility of movement, he rushed off to the front of the boat and leapt off on to the bank to give her another push. I turned the engine on and with the rudder no longer attaching us to the bank, Happy moved her bum elegantly round into mid-stream and we were finally back in free water.

Happy and I were now in the middle of the river, Geoff was on the bank – not the best place for him really. He motioned me to keep going and trotted alongside, both of us looking for a good launch point from which he could jump on. Approaching on the left was a flattened muddy area where cows came down to drink, which Geoff pointed to, giving me the thumbs-up sign. I slowed right down and watched him sprint ahead, readying himself for a big jump.

He jumped. He slipped. Grabbing the gunwales, he only ended up waist deep in the river; he struggled onto the boat and sloshed toward me.

‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘we’re all where we are supposed to be and at least I’m only half wet this time.’

With him still dripping on to my feet, we rounded a corner and both watched in silence as a perfectly good, man-made mooring slid past. We looked down at his trainers and jeans gently trickling over the back deck, we both looked back at the mooring, we did not look at each other and neither of us said a word.