Arriving in Banavie we skip spring and plunge into summer sun

The approach reach to Banavie, the furthest West that we go each spring, is lined with gorse in full flower, and this year it is hot as well.  It appears we have overtaken spring and arrived at summer somewhere along the Great Glen.

Adrian and Shireen are intoxicated with the air and seem to be dancing / practicing …?

 

No Star, but gold stars instead

This is our first journey West without Star, our dog.  Usually when we arrive in Kytra lock just West of Fort Augustus, Linda the lock keeper speaks exclusively to Star and gives her treats and a gold star on her life jacket.  This year I am concerned that we will not be allowed through the lock, so we all struggle into life vests as we approach the lock chamber.  I am not sure if the stars are for being a dog, or for wearing a life jacket.  I make up a packet of flapjacks to hand over with our ropes to seal the deal

Once in the lock chamber we hear that Linda too has lost her dog this year and we are given stars for wearing life jackets.  As it is drizzling lightly, the only place that the stars will stick is to our foreheads…

 

 

The Spring Migration; hot sun, no wind and no engine troubles

Crossing Loch Ness this year was a total pleasure; the water was limpid, the sun was warm and we had a very cheerful crew

the bathroom port hole is close to the water

the kitchen view is not bad either, which encourages lavish cooking and no problem washing up

I have never known the Loch so calm; usually it has a drama that definitely spikes the experience of crossing it over a period of 4 hours, this time it felt like a benign pool.

where is the boat?

when we set off on our spring migration, we often stay for a week in Dochgarroch to have a kind of trial run for the shock of moving after the winter stillness.  Thus we are only 5 minutes by car up the road to Inverness, and can return to pick up post from the canals office or have repairs done to any system that seizes up on the trial.  The first time we return to our permanent mooring in Muirtown is always a shock; our home has gone.  That very stable winter houseboat has suddenly vanished and become a boat travelling West, leaving a hole in the marina space.

It is usually grey, windy and cold when we leave, becoming spring and then summer in temperature as we arrive in Banavie

Hosting An Indian Exchange visit, July 2017

Yogesh, Anni and Karan stayed aboard Loch Ness Barge for a while in July.  I met Yogesh in Baroda in Gujarat in 2015.  I had been doing an art residency and series of performances leading up to an exhibition and Yogesh was introduced to me as someone who could make anything happen (by another artist from the Highlands who had worked in Yogesh’s ceramics studio for a number of months).  We became firm friends and I could never have achieved half of what I did in India without him.

I wanted to create performances celebrating the spectacular trees in Gujarat, and in Baroda there are some immense banyan trees.  Yogesh was my interpreter with a holy man who had a shrine in one tree;

part of each performance was climbing these trees… Yogesh facilitated it all and worried anxiously about my safety throughout!

So from Baroda Yogesh came to Scotland to stay aboard a boat.  From a country that is parched, with complex desert environments and full of huge desalination plants and immense heat, he visited a floating home in a country defined by it’s sea-going identity and northern latitude.  It was a wonderful exchange, full of complex conversations about politics and how landscapes shape us.

Midsummer sunset, the calm before the storm

at 10.30 pm the sun set spectacularly a few days before midsummer.  Midsummer  time is a feast of sky reflections each long evening.  This sunset has a brilliant yellow colour (not the orange/pink that often ends a beautiful day) and it seems to foretell the coming storm of the weather forecast

The Faroe Islands Food

This beautiful boat moored in Muirtown Basin today.  She is from the Faroe Islands and is in immaculate condition.  I couldn’t resist leaving my desk to go and look at her, there was a strong and strange smell wafting from her hatch.

I talked to her crew for a while, then went home with a tinfoil package for my lunch, it was half a sheep’s head.  Part of me was fascinated; it is not often that you get to see the anatomy of a head in perfect cross section, part of me was appalled.  Our food is not often presented so that you can see the animal it has come from and it is interesting how much it disturbed my appetite.

Changing Faces Day on Sail Caledonia 2017

In support of the organisation Changing Faces , whom Adrian has had contact with in his work, we told the Sail Caledonia fleet about the awareness day and offered a stack of facial transfers for people to wear.  There was a huge response from everyone, and it was a big race day across Loch Ness.  Here are some fabulous photographs taken by Jean to document the day

Wearing a transfer was particularly interesting for Jean, as she was the one who works hard behind the scenes, driving the minibus full of camping equipment, organising logistics, picking up fresh food.  As a result she came into contact with many people during her working day.  She reported afterwards that many people were shy about asking what was on her face.  Jean is very good at talking to people; so she was the perfect person to spread the message of the awareness day!

https://www.changingfaces.org.uk/adviceandsupport/scotland

Changing Faces says; ‘We promote a culture of confidence, positivity and acceptance around disfigurement. We campaign for face equality in schools and at work while challenging misrepresentation and discrimination’

This boat is not an island!

Sail Caledonia 2017 was enlightening in lots of ways; and it made me think more of the myth of the boat as an island, a symbol of freedom and independence. The more we cruise on Loch Ness Barge, the more I realise that our kind of boating on the Caledonian Canal is the product of teamwork and collaboration, interdependence on a large and small scale. The canal system is dedicated to moving boats through a narrow passage of water, locked into the land. This canal, our home waters, is dependent on complex coordination between lock and bridge keepers, large boats and small boats. The large boats often cannot easily pass each other in the canal reaches, but there is a nominated radio channel for all communication. However the large fleet of hire cruisers do not have radios and can be relatively inexperienced and unaware of protocols for moving through the canals. The larger boats (Loch Ness Barge is one of them) often run to timetables and deadlines set at the beginning of the season, but these timetables can be disrupted by weather conditions, engine or lock system failures and so all these systems have to be relatively flexible and based on constant communication by radio.

Sail Caledonia is also a system in itself; people book up to a year in advance to take part in the race and the support boats shepherd the fleet through the Great Glen to a strict timetable of a different mooring every night, a journey as well as a race, from West to East through Scotland, through 29 locks and 10 swinging bridges.

Within the Sail Caledonia fleet, there is a system of interdependence. The boats that race help each other within the locks, those with engines tow those without. The support boats support each other, with Ros Crana as the mother ship and ‘Safety’ RIB as the coordinator of all. Loch Ness Barge is too large and cumbersome when on the move to do anything useful during the racing, but we can carry extra equipment on her upper deck, wet gear in our engine room, fragile musical instruments lie in a row on the sofa in the saloon. Ros Crana is the boat that has taught us most and continues to teach me; systems of working and maintaining our engines, ways of skippering and a wonderful feeling of fellowship. This year a new boat joined called Ros Donn, and her skipper Ian was an incredible support on our worst day travelling during Sail Caledonia.

Not only was the weather dark and blustery, but we had the most locks and bridges to navigate in one day. Knowing we had a long distance to travel and many deadlines to meet, we had to move at our top cruising speed for much of the day, entering the narrows by a weir just before Abercalder Bridge we had a strong following wind and one engine suddenly failed. The bridge was swinging, the traffic on the road waiting and we could not turn around with only one engine in a narrow channel. Holding the wheel hard against the pressure of the one remaining propeller, I used one hand to radio the lock keeper, I could see the next lock had small cruisers in it, and was still shut and I couldn’t easily stop or steer with only one engine and the wind speeding us onwards. The lock keeper said he had another 5 minutes of filling the lock before he could open the gates, and that he would tell the cruisers that we couldn’t steer and to get out of the lock chamber as fast as possible and stay out of our way in the channel. My safest way of stopping would be to use the stone wall of the lock, with the lock keeper to take the ropes.  I was extremely pleased that the racing fleet were not ahead of me filling the lock chamber as seen below;

Ros Don heard my troubles on the radio and told me he would give me room to manoeuver and stop anyone coming near while we were stopping. We managed to slow down in the lock with a series of quickly learned skills I had never tried before, and the final part of the interdependence came into perfect focus; our wonderful crew on the barge:

Juliana came up onto the upper deck and was my eyes, telling me distances and changes of speed and direction in relation to the unseen approaching wall (normally I would walk to the rail, but with only one engine, I could not leave the wheel, as the pressure on the rudder requires one hand, and the constant change of revs on the throttle requires the other hand).

Adrian was alternately in the engine room trying to sort the problem, and on deck preparing with David for using the ropes to slow our speed as we approach the lock gates.

David was the anchorman on the stern warp; the most important brake we have when in this situation. All of us have worked together on Sail Caledonia for 5 years and our understanding of each other and the boat has grown over that time.

The drama was averted, we managed to stop without using the lock gates or the wall for a crash landing, and that was due to all of us working together. The lock keeper couldn’t let us stay in the lock chamber, the rest of the fleet was approaching and could not get past us in the narrow lock chamber to reach Fort Augustus by closing time. Again Scottish Canals communication and coordination cleared all boats from the approach to the next lock at Kytra, so we had the jetty and the lock chamber as options to help us to stop at the end of the next section of canal.  The lock keeper Linda radioed to me that all was clear, and we moved out onto the canal again.  Acceleration is no problem with the wind behind us, steering is easy with one engine in forward drive, and we had 20 minutes to try to sort out our engine failure before having to slow down again on the approach to Kytra lock. Adrian, the star of the day, fixed the engine in the last hundred meters from the lock. The approach is notoriously difficult combining a sharp bend in the canal, leading into a wind tunnel for westerly gusts.

While we were struggling with the immediate problems, Ros Crana was trying to re-jig the accommodation and kitchen arrangements for the evening in the event of us being stuck in Kytra (which has no road access and is some distance from the evening mooring) and Ros Don was keeping everyone informed of our progress on one radio channel so that I could concentrate on communicating with the lock keepers on another.

As I listened to the relief in the voice of the Ros Crana skipper, I realised that we do have a central role at each mooring, even if during the day we lumber along like an ungainly duckling in the wake of the mother ship. Our boat is one of the main spaces for relaxing in the evening, and this year the Billy Can Catering has been using our galley for producing breakfast and part of the evening meal, all the safety boat crews stay aboard each night, so we would be missed if we failed to arrive. I had an enormous feeling of fellowship in knowing we were useful, but also knowing that everyone was trying to help us when things go wrong; we are a flotilla, a floating interdependent community.

… and I must not forget another vital element; music floating across the lochs from our deck. Mark the piper is part of the glue that binds us all together, making us laugh, making us dance, making us appreciate the wonder of the landscape around as the notes drift outwards

Banavie

After 2 days on the move, we have arrived in Banavie.  We take a walk in the woods between the canal and the river; this is a precious slice of land that lines the Caledonian Canal banks, trees planted to bind the improbable construction have grown to a cathedral-like height and wonder.