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Isabella - How It All Started |
Isabella:- <How It all Started>
Construction at Liverpool Boats
Fit-Out:-
Thinking of fitting out your own boat?
Our most expensive holiday!
Would you be happy spending £200 on a 4 day long weekend holiday, that ended up costing nearly £20,000.... We were!!!
We hired a Blackwater Boats narrowboat on the Chelmer and Blackwater canal, liked it so much decided to buy a boat of our own. We are now the proud owners of Isabella, a new 35ft narrowboat, moored on the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation canal.
It all started off one weekend whilst out shopping at Lakeside shopping centre. Whilst perusing the magazine shelves at W.H.Smith (the lower shelves, not the top ones!!!), I noticed there were three different magazines, each dedicated to canals in the UK, one had a list of hire boats companies, renting out narrowboats (or were they longboats, what was the difference?). The last (and only) time I had been on a narrow boat holiday was some 30 years ago, with my parents and cousins when I was around 15 years old. Leigh (my wife) and I had talked about taking a short break away the following weekend, I wondered how a short boating holiday may suit us. I bought the magazine. Looking through it at home over the weekend we agreed that 4 days on a narrowboat would be different, so on Monday morning from work..... I mean after work!!. I phoned around a few of the hire boat companies advertised in the magazine. Blackwater Boats, based at Chelmsford, had a 27ft narrowboat available, £210 for 4 days. This was around half the price of another narrowboat hire, so I gave them my credit card number in return for confirmed booking.
The Chelmer and Blackwater Canal (sorry, Navigation)!.... never heard of it. Having lived in Essex just about all my life I knew Chelmsford, I knew the river Chelmer, or was it Chelm, ran through the town. I knew the river Blackwater, Maldon, Osea Island, St Lawrence bay and Bradwell, but not the C&BN. I had no idea there was a canal or canal boats in Essex. I thought you had to travel north of Watford to find a canal and narrowboat!.
Having received booking confirmation, rental information and location map / directions to Sandford Mill from Blackwater boats, we duly arrived on Friday morning at 11:00am to be greeted by Ron Abbot. Ron spent around an hour with us, explaining boat and lock handling, before we set off down stream towards Maldon. The first mile or so, under / alongside the A12 was noisy, but we managed the 1st lock without any damage to boat or lock, the beers and wine in the fridge were getting cooler, the kettle was boiling....we had stocked up at Asda, only a few minutes from Sandford lock, with sufficient provisions for 4 days (although anyone would have thought we had enough for a week)..... we were getting confident, the scenery was beautiful, now so quite and picturesque.... Unbelievable. We just could not believe we were still in Essex, only 30 miles from London, just half an hour drive from our home (Chafford Hundred, near Lakeside). We moored up for the night in the middle of nowhere. We watched large fish swim alongside the boat in almost crystal clear water, saw bats fly over us at dusk, listened to the absolute silence of the night, with just the odd rustle of tree leaves in the wind. A completely different world to what we were used to.
The most relaxing, restful, stress free holiday we had ever experienced (apart from the 20 seconds when, downstream of a lock, waiting to enter, we could not hold onto the boat as the lock paddles were opened and the water flow caught the bow of the boat causing it to crash heavily against the canal side.... Don't tell Ron!!!!.... But with no damage occurred this showed the strength and advantage of a steel boat, and the weakness of a bottle of wine on the galley worktop). Lesson 1; always ensure the rope has a couple of turns around the adjacent bollard and the wine bottle is secure in the fridge door.
In our 4 days we never made Heybridge Basin, only getting as far as Beeleigh falls. Neither did we manage to get to Springfield basin in Chelmsford. We managed just 8 of the 12 locks, we could easily have managed all of them if we wanted to, but we were just happy going at our own pace. Neither of us wanted to leave the boat on Monday afternoon and we were a little late handing back the boat. That was October 11th 1999.
That's how it all started, we were hooked on canal boating, and decided to get afloat ourselves. We looked at some of the second-hand fibreglass boats for sale along the canal, but we really liked the looks and practicalities of an all steel narrowboat. The narrowboat we hired from Blackwater Boats was 27ft, we liked it very much, and did seriously contemplate buying a similar boat, but we had thoughts of living on board for up to two weeks at a time, and felt something with a slightly bigger kitchen / galley and bathroom would be more comfortable. We bought many canal magazines, and started looking at new narrowboat sailaways.
A 'sailaway' narrowboat is a completed shell (hull and deck), fully watertight with front and back doors, all windows, working engine and steering. Within 2 weeks we had toured England and Wales visiting boat builders, we placed an order with Liverpool Boats, and inspected the boat during construction, we also looked at other canals and moorings. 6 weeks later (December 13th) our brand new 35ft narrowboat (Isabella) arrived on the back of a large truck and was craned in at Papermill Lock. We motored her up to Sandford Mill Lock, only a stones throw from Blackwater Boats, where the fit-out began. The boat interior was completely empty, except for the floor and foam insulation to the interior sides and roof!!!!.
We completed the fit-out of the boat ourselves, she was around 95% complete when we had a 10 day vacation on her in August 2000. She is now 99% complete (does anybody own a 100% completed boat, with no work outstanding?) and is now moored at Hoe Mill Lock on the C&BN. We are delighted with her (or is she now an it!!) and we can often be seen cruising along the canal at the weekends, and look forward to the next (our 3rd) Springfield Rally at Chelmsford.