After almost drowning in the sea of rain falling onto Fradley, a new menace threatened my journey as the furious weather switched tack, turning instead to attack me with blazing rays of sun at a million degrees. Parched, weak and craving to escape the furnace I hauled myself to the back of the boat and just about had enough energy to propel the boat in search of shade, even as my last drops of water were exhausted. This is that traumatic tale.
This is the vlog version of the trip shown in real-time in the last video; I leave Kings Orchard Marina near Lichfield and head north up the Coventry canal to Fradley Junction where it rains a lot and I moor above the locks.
A “slow TV” (real-time) bow-camera recording of the trip from Kings Orchard Marina at Lichfield to Fradley Junction on June 21st 2020.
In the second of my lockdown Skype interviews with other boaters, we cross the pond to Missouri, USA for a chat with Kay Davis and Jeff Hoesel who own a 1994 Gibson Cabin Yacht and take it for trips along the mighty Mississippi River.
Over recent months I have noticed a number of unsightly rusty spots erupting on the boat’s roof. Some, I assume, are from bits of grit rubbing through the paint as I’ve walked over it; for others I have no idea as to their origins. All needed tidying up and the rust stopped in its tracks though so in this video I show you my initial attempts, which fall short of a full repaint.
On Wednesday 13th May, the lockdown restrictions on the English waterways were relaxed slightly to permit day trips for leisure boaters. So I took the opportunity to fire up the narrowboat and do a five-hour cruise down towards Fazeley Junction and back.
A year after I moved aboard, I did a video about what the annual costs were of life afloat. Now, after four years on board, I present an updated version of the same using averaged figures over the full four years.
A little thing like a global pandemic and lockdown is not going to prevent further boat videos on this channel so I present the first in what may become a regular “virtual tour” series, as we meet Dimitrios and Carine Theologitis from Brussels and have a look around their amazing…
After a surprising number of requests from viewers in my Lockdown vlog for me to film a bread-making video, I decided to retrieve such footage from my archives of when I first attempted the process about a year or so ago. There’s no quality to this production at all because it was never really intended for wide distribution but so many folk said “just upload anything” that I have. So it’s your own fault, really.
Filmed entirely on a DJI Osmo Action camera – which has the most amazing stabilisation – with a Rode Videomicro microphone, this is a recording of the first brief walk I took after completing 14 days of self isolation having come back from overseas. The weather was beautiful, the birds were chirping like crazy but the waters were almost totally still. Hopefully this is a nice little background video to bring a window of peace and calm into your day.