Meeting Report 6th March 2024

Our Reporter/Photographer Tony Taft reports:-

On a beautiful sunny spring day we had an attendance of 23 with 2 apologies and one visitor. 

Our speaker today was Carol Stephens and the title of her presentation was My Life Afloat. 

Carol and her husband Nick were or are the proud owners of a beautiful narrow boat called Liberator, the dimension’s of their boat is 7ft wide and 62ft long so a good size vessel to live a happy and adventurous life together on. 

They lived on the boat for five years and were moored up at a place called Rainbow Fields on the north Oxford Canal near Rugby, at first they made short trips because when your maximum speed is only four miles per hour you do not get to go very far in a day and after a while they thought they would like to do something more ambitious and decided to go on a two month trip to Liverpool. 

Carol told us fascinating stories of some of the events they experienced such as a trip to see the famous pier at Wigan, now when you think of a pier you vision a long pier with holiday makers on it all spending their money on the fancy machines, well Wigan pier is nothing like that as you can see in the photo it’s just a stump sticking out of a building, was it worth going to see?

Another place Carol spoke about was Heartbreak Hill locks which is the affectionate nickname for the thirty one locks on the Trent and Mersey canal between Middlewich and Kidsgrove and can take the best part of a day to navigate, that would be a hard day. 

One time when Carol and Nick were on the Oxford canal and they had only been moored up for an hour when there was a knock on their door it was the police to ask them if they had noticed anything suspicious along the canal, they said no but were interested to find out what it was all about, the police said they had just pulled a body out of the water

On another trip they were chugging along at what they thought was four miles an hour but found that they were not making much headway, on further investigation Carol went to the front of the boat and looked down in to the water only to find that a Sofa had attached itself to the front of the boat and they were slowly pushing it along the canal Carol shouted to Nick who was sixty two feet away to reverse and with aid of a pole Carol was able to push it to the side of the canal where it waited for its next victim. 

Carol talked about the day they went across the famous Llangollen Aqueduct and how spectacular the views were but what worried them most was their little dog, at times their dog would jump off the boat and run along side so they were afraid she might do that now and get confused about which side to jump off. 

At one time thinking that they had safely moored the boat up they returned back from an outing only to find the boat missing, they shouted to a passing boat had they seen a boat called Liberator and the people said yes and that she is moored up further along the canal, when they found her thieves had broken in and taken everything of value and at the engine end of the boat a brand new generator still in its crate had gone and they had even taken the gear box off the engine, I think Carol said the criminals were eventually caught. 

Carol told us many stories like this so many that I am not able to cover them all on this review, but we all found her talk fascinating, many questions were asked because a lot of our members have had holiday’s on the canals that she was talking about and were familiar with the locations that she covered in her presentation

Items that Carol brought for us to see

Tony Hare, (the website button pusher) writes:- Phew, what a splendid report from Tony Taft, a real Tour de Force! How does he manage it?
If you would like to add any comments to this post, tell of your own experience of canal boat living etc, please use the Comments section at the bottom of this page.