How (not?) to drive a barge...
 
Well I feel more than a little fraudulent writing on how to drive a barge. There’s no doubt... we’ve had many hours of pleasant and incident free driving. But, we most certainly still have our ‘P’ plates on! Here’s several reasons why you should not listen to us:
 
(1) For those of you who have read our account of our experiences in dry dock, you’ll know that when setting off to the dry dock last year, we got 10 metres from our mooring before our engine conked out. Fortunately, a passing tug rescued us as we drifted backwards down the river.  I can certainly attest that having no motor is very unpleasant.
 
(2) What we didn’t mention was that on the way out of the dry dock, replete with our new, very expensive paint job, I reversed into a tree (which joined us for the rest of the trip), before managing to scrape our barge all along the side of the boat entering the dry dock. At least they were going in for new paint... we already had ours!
 
(3) Our very first trip out to Kingston resulted in us crashing into the jetty outside John Lewis... three times! Well it was a training trip. Unfortunately, John Lewis has a cafe with glass windows... so I think we provided a lot of entertainment that day.
 
(4) And in our latest trip we got swept side-on down the Thames...  now that was extremely scary!
 
So, probably the best advice I can give is not to take my comments too seriously... take a course (we did the barge handling course at Bisham Abbey) and buy the excellent book ‘A guide to barge handling’. Anyway, that all said, here goes...!
 
1) “Slow, slow and slower still.” Our problems at John Lewis stemmed purely and simply from coming in to fast. As you approach the jetty, your barge will experience the ‘bank effect’. As your boat pushes water out of the way, a suction effect takes hold... pulling you towards the side. The faster you go, the more water is being displaced... and the greater the effect. Each time we approached... I remember thinking ‘this is going okay’, before events would quickly unravel. I’ve learnt now that if the barge feels like it is crawling along... and people are waving at me to hurry up, I am probably going at the right speed!
 
2) “Watch for fenders and ropes.” In an effort to be super equipped, we have more rope, and more fenders than any boat that’s ever sailed. Now when these are hanging off your boat, they have a nasty habit of attaching themselves to other, generally quite ‘fixed’ objects.... usually with disastrous consequences. Take the time we motored off only to find a trailing rope had pa-lied up with a cleat... on the jetty we had just left! Or indeed, the time our ‘super fender’ wrapped its steel cables around a piling as we approached a mooring... tipping the barge alarmingly. So, get your ropes on-board, your fenders properly fitted, and take care to avoid bringing a bollard or two with you on your trip.
 
3) “Clean your fuel lines... and your tank!” Nothing has caused us more problems than blocked fuel lines. Of course, our experience in the North Sea has scarred us for life... but having experienced it again on the Thames, it’s at best no fun, and at worst, a serious situation. Some of our problems stemmed from having the heating and engine attached to the same fuel lines. Now, of course, we don’t run the heating while running the engine, but often the line running to the engine would be clogged, or have air gaps.
 
4) “Learn to love ‘prop walk’!” In the early days of driving our barge, prop walk was not something we really experienced... and I must confess to wondering what the fuss was about. Well, during our ‘dry dock’, we discovered a large crack on the ‘anti-cavitation’ plate above the prop. Well of course we fixed this and didn’t think much about it. But then I reversed out of the dock into a tree... discovering ‘prop-walk’ in the process. Suddenly, our barge would move clock-wise whenever it was reverse. Not a small amount, but actually, quite a lot. At first I struggled with this, but have come to find it quite useful! Learning where you can use prop-walk to your advantage has certainly improved our confidence greatly. Failure to work with it can cause problems... hence our trip down the Thames side-ways!
Saturday, 22 November 2008