Pratice Makes Perfect

Or so you would think........................

I have always been an advocator of practice makes perfect and this weekend has been another example of the truth in this much quoted statement.

A group of us headed off upstream on the tidal Trent with the aim of reaching Newark for a night out on Saturday, before dropping off one of the boats at Farndon Marina a little further upstream and heading back to Burton Waters on Sunday complete with the now boatless crew.

The locks onto the tidal Trent are all large manned locks which are only open during their specified tidal windows. This means that the lockies don’t have a specific working calendar. All of the locks are large locks designed to accommodate the larger commercial vessels that still ply their trade on the River Trent. The downside of this is that the mooring dolphins are well spaced apart so British Waterways have installed a number of “sliders” within the concrete lock walls. To navigate the locks safely the lock keepers insist you are roped to a slider at both the bow and the stern of the boat. The sliders are little more than a bar recessed into the lock wall through which you pass the end of your mooring rope. As the water rises of falls the rope slides up or down the bar and the boat is held safely next to the wall.

Now this can be no easy task depending on the shape of your boat. Sea going cruisers tend to be very pointy at the front but a little chubby around the middle. End result the bow will be nowhere near the lock wall when the point amidships is touching the lock wall. Now each cruiser is again a different shape and the technique to rope onto the sliders will vary from vessel to vessel.

We feel that with all the practice we have had over the last couple of years that we have almost mastered the technique with Cal, but as we found out at the weekend there will be times when even the most practised of deck hands get it wrong. Upon entering Cromwell Lock, the biggest of the manned Trent locks at the end of the tidal section of the River Trent, it began to blow a gale. The OH was driving and I missed the slider resulting in the boat landing skewed across the lock. Luckily the lock wasn’t too busy so we didn’t lose too much face and no damage was done as the lock is so huge we managed to recover the manoeuvre and land her safely on the opposite lock wall. This time I managed to pick up the slider first time.

You can’t buy experience and there is only one way to gain it. Get out there and get used to your boat. We all have the good and the bad times and we will all have times when we wonder why we decided to do what we did, but it is all part of the learning curve. Remember, practice makes perfect..............