Dan Q found GC7RN72 #33 D.J.F. – Moana

This checkin to GC7RN72 #33 D.J.F. – Moana reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Stared at its excellent camouflage for a while before realising what this was! Paddled down by inflatable canoe (picture attached) and landed right by here. Thought to check for local caches as we deflated the boats and was delighted that this one was right here in this picturesque spot! TFTC.

A pair of inflatable yellow canoes approach from the distance along a wide, calm river.

A pair of inflatable yellow canoes approach from the distance along a wide, calm river.×

Dan Q found GCYK2M Got A Light Boy ? Longships Lighthouse

This checkin to GCYK2M Got A Light Boy ? Longships Lighthouse reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I just launched my partner’s brother – shown in free attached picture – out in his rowboat to begin his attempt to row from Land’s End to John O’ Groats. Naturally this first involves rowing South, around the headland and past the lighthouse, to get to Land’s End! So I came up the hill to watch him get started. And while I was at it, I figured I’d find this cache! Took travel bug. TFTC!

Robin rows away from Sennen Cove and towards St. Ives

Robin rows away from Sennen Cove and towards St. Ives×

Narrowboating

I’ve had a tardy summer for blogging, falling way behind on many of the things I’d planned to write about. Perhaps the problem is that I’m still on Narrowboat Time, the timezone of a strange parallel universe in which everything happens more-slowly, in a gin-soaked, gently-rocking, slowly-crawling haze.

Matt, JTA and Ruth tie up the narrowboat after our first day's travel.
The apparent haze in the centre of this photograph is not the result of gin, however, but of a scuff on the lens of the camera I was using; a fault which was not apparent to me until after I looked at the pictures, and so – now I’ve pointed it out – you won’t be able to un-see it in any of the other snaps, either.

That’s believable, because this summer Ruth, JTA and I – joined for some of the journey by Matt – rented a narrowboat and spent a week drifting unhurriedly down the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal… and then another week making a leisurely cruise back up it again.

Matt takes a siesta atop the boat.
Symptoms of “boat-lag”, which is a result of spending any significant period on Narrowboat Time, include siestas, lounging, and a generally relaxed and laid-back attitude.

We picked up Nerys, out of Cambrian Cruisers, who also gave us an introduction to the operation of the boat (driving it, filling it with water, pumping out sewage, generating electricity for appliances, etc.) and safety instructions (virtually all of the canal is less than four feet deep, so if you fall in, the best thing to do is to simply walk to the shore), and set out towards Brecon. In order to explore the entire canal in the time available, we needed to cover an average of only five miles per day. When you’re going at about two and a half miles per hour and having to stop to operate locks (there are only six locks on the navigable stretch of the canal, but they’re all clustered towards the upper end), though, five miles is plenty.

Matt looks out over the Usk Valley, near our first mooring.
Time spent mooring up, casting off, refilling the water tank, and squeezing past other boats on the narrow canal willalso slow you down. But it’s still worth getting started moving on a morning, to ensure that you don’t need to compete for one of the more-beautiful spots to tie up at the end of your day’s travel.

The upper end of the canal is by far the busiest, with not only narrowboats cruising up and down but a significant number of day boats (mostly on loan from Brecon) and at least one tour boat: a 50-seater that you don’t want to have to wiggle past at sharp corner North of the Bryich Aqueduct. From a navigation perspective, though, it’s also the best-maintained: wide enough that two boats can pass one another without much thought, and deep enough across its entire width that you needn’t be concerned about running aground, it makes for a great starting point for people who want some narrowboating practice before they hit the more challenging bits to the South.

Dan and Ruth with a geocache.
The towpath is also a haven for geocachers. Ruth and I are here seen holding GC3698Y, “Jass @ Jammy”, which was hidden only a short walk from where we moored at the end of our first and third days.

Ruth was excited to find in me a driver who was confident holding the boat steady in a lock. Perhaps an expression of equal parts talent and arrogance, I was more than happy to take over the driving, leaving others to jump out and juggle the lock gates and lift bridges. Owing to Ruth’s delicate condition, we’d forbidden her from operating the entirely-manual locks, but she made sure to get a go at running one of the fancy hydraulic ones.

Ruth operates a hydraulic lock.
The hydraulic locks aren’t any faster than the unassisted ones, but they don’t take quite so much “pushing”.

After each day’s cruising, we’d find a nice place to moor up, open a bottle of wine or mix up some gin-and-tonics, and lounge in the warm, late summer air.

Matt, Dan and JTA enjoy wine on their moored-up boat.
Matt, Dan and JTA enjoy wine on their moored-up boat. Ruth, who of course can’t drink, is behind the camera.

As we wound our way further South, to the “other” end of the waterway, we discovered that the already-narrow canal was ill-dredged, and drifting anywhere close to the sides – especially on corners – was a recipe for running around. Crewmates who weren’t driving would take turns on “pole duty”, being on standby to push us off if we got too close to one or the other bank.

Moored up with a plank.
Another effect of the shallow sides was that we’d sometimes have to “walk the plank” to get ashore. On the upside, we could raise the plank at night and feel like we were isolated in our own little fortress, with its own little drawbridge.

Each night moored up in a separate place gives a deceptive feeling of travel. Deceptive, because I’ve had hiking trips where I’ve traveled further each day than we did on our boat! But the nature of the canal, winding its way from the urban centre of Brecon out through the old mining villages of South Wales.

A gentleman "pumps out" our boat.
Modern narrowboats have a chemical toilet that needs to be “pumped out”. Slightly icky, but probably less nasty than the distant historical alternative, presumably, of putting your bum over the edge.

The canal, already quite narrow and shallow, only became harder to navigate as we got further South. Our weed hatch (that’s the door to the propeller box, that is, not a slang term for the secret compartment where you keep your drugs) saw plenty of use, and we found ourselves disentangling all manner of curious flora in order to keep our engine pushing us forwards (and not catching fire).

JTA fishes crap our of the weed hatch.
Reaching into a dirty, cold, damp hole and pulling out gunky, slimy strands of crap isn’t the most-fun job. And you really want to make sure you’ve taken the key out of the ignition, too, assuming that you’re fond of your fingers.

Eventually, we had to give up navigating the waterway, tie up, and finish the journey on foot. We could have gotten the boat all the way to the end, but it’d have been a stop-start day of pushing ourselves off the shallow banks and cleaning out the weed hatch. Walking the last few miles – with a stop either way at a wonderful little pub called The Open Hearth – let us get all the way to both ends of the navigable stretch of the canal, with a lot less hassle and grime.

Ruth and JTA at Five Locks
Ruth and JTA at the head of Five Locks, the lowest remaining navigable point of the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal.

It’s a little sad coming to the end of a waterway, cut short – in this case – by a road. There’s no easy way – short of the removal of an important road, or the challenging and expensive installation of a drop lock, that this waterway will ever be connected at this point again. The surrounding landscape doesn’t even make it look likely that it’ll be connected again by a different route, either: this canal is broken here.

Ruth and JTA look into the Cwmbran Tunnel.
The Cwmbran Tunnel is narrow, 87 yards long, and both ends are badly in need of dredging. Knowing our luck, we’d have gotten grounded in there if we’d have brought the boat that far.

I found myself remarking on quite how well-laid-out the inside of the narrowboat was. Naturally, on a vehicle/home that’s so long and thin, a great number of clever decisions had clearly been made. The main living space could be converted between a living room, dining room, and bedroom by re-arranging planks and poles; the kitchen made use of carefully-engineered cupboards to hold the crockery in place in case of a… bump; and little space-saving features added up all along the boat, such as the central bedroom’s wardrobe door being adaptable to function as a privacy door between the two main bedrooms.

Ruth and JTA set up Arkham Horror in the narrowboat.
In dining room configuration, we were even able (with judicious use of nearby shelves and the seats alongside us) to play a game of Arkham Horror. And we won, which was perhaps even more-remarkable.

On the way back up the canal, we watched the new boaters setting out in their narrowboats for the first time. We felt like pros, by now, gliding around the corners with ease and passing other vessels with narry a hint of a bump. We were a well-oiled machine, handling every lock with ease. Well: some ease. Unfortunately, we’d managed to lose not one but both of our windlasses on the way down the canal and had to buy a replacement pair on the way back up, which somewhat dented our “what pros we are” feeling.

Our final pass through Brynich Lock
Our final pass through Brynich Lock was slick and seamless.

Coming to the end of our narrowboating journey, we took a quick trip to Fourteen Locks, a beautiful and series of locks with a sophisticated basin network, disconnected from the remains of the South Wales canal network. They’ve got a particular lock (lock 11), there, whose unusual shape hints at a function that’s no-longer understood, which I think it quite fabulously wonderful – that we could as a nation built a machine just 200 years ago, used it for a hundred years, and now have no idea how it worked.

Our trolley full of shelves, in Ikea.
Our “big” trip to Ikea a few weeks later was significantly bigger, even, than this one, though.

Our next stop was Ikea, where we’d only meant to buy a couple of shelves for our new home, but you know how it is when you go to Ikea.

We wrapped up our holiday with a visit to Sian and Andy (and their little one), and Andy showed off his talent of singing songs that send babies to sleep. I swear, if he makes an album of children’s songs and they’re as effective as he is in person, we’ll buy a copy.

Andy, Sian, and baby
MiniRegz and parents.

Altogether, a wonderfully laid-back holiday that clearly knocked my sense of urgency so far off that I didn’t blog about it for several months.

Edit, 22 June 2018: after somebody from the Canal & River Trust noticed that my link to their page on the Brynich Aqueduct was broken after they’d rearranged their site, I removed it. They suggested an alternative page, but it didn’t really have the same content (about the aqueduct itself) so I’ve just removed the link. Boo, Canal & River Trust! Cool URIs Don’t Change!

Matt, JTA and Ruth tie up the narrowboat after our first day's travel.× Matt takes a siesta atop the boat.× Matt looks out over the Usk Valley, near our first mooring.× Dan and Ruth with a geocache.× Ruth operates a hydraulic lock.× Matt, Dan and JTA enjoy wine on their moored-up boat.× Moored up with a plank.× A gentleman "pumps out" our boat.× JTA fishes crap our of the weed hatch.× Ruth and JTA at Five Locks× Ruth and JTA look into the Cwmbran Tunnel.× Ruth and JTA set up Arkham Horror in the narrowboat.× Our final pass through Brynich Lock× Our trolley full of shelves, in Ikea.× Andy, Sian, and baby×

TIL that ‘Hellburners’, 16th century fire-ships filled with decks of gunpowder sandwiched between bricks and tombstones, are considered to be an early WMD.

This link was originally posted to /r/todayilearned. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

The original link was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellburners

Hellburners (Dutch: hellebranders) were specialised fireships used in the Siege of Antwerp (1584-1585) during the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch rebels and the Habsburgs. They were floating bombs, also called “Antwerp Fire”, and did immense damage to the Spanish besiegers. Hellburners have been described as an early form of weapons of mass destruction.

Wikipedia

A Punting Story

This story actually relates to an event that happened in mid-2010, but I only recently got around to finishing writing about it.

Once upon a time there was a boy named Dan.

Dan lives in a big house with his friends Ruth and JTA.

(their other friend, Paul, lives in the house, too… but he isn’t in this story)

One day, Dan and Ruth and JTA went on an adventure. They packed up a picnic with all their favourite foods.

Big soft sandwiches, teeny-tiny sausages, cheese-with-holes-in, and a big box of chocolates. Then they got onto a bus.

Soon, they saw a big, wide river. “Let’s get off here,” said Ruth. JTA pressed the button to tell the bus driver to stop.

At the river, there was a man with all kinds of boats: boats with pedals, boats with paddles, and boats with poles.

“Can we borrow one of your boats?” Dan asked the man.
“Okay,” he said, and gave Dan a long pole.

Ruth and JTA got into the boat and sat down. Dan stood up on the very back of the boat. It was very wobbly!

Dan used the pole to reach all the way down the bottom of the river, and pushed the boat along. It was hard work!

They found a shady tree in a park, stopped the boat, and ate their picnic.

They drank some fizzy wine and felt all bubbly and dizzy. Soon it was time to get back on the boat and go back along the river.

One time, Dan almost fell into the water! But luckily he didn’t, and he, Ruth and JTA got back safely.

And they all lived happily ever after.

× × × × × × × × × × × ×

Injured

FireSpent last night on the beach with Andy, Alec, Paul, Claire, and others last night. Folks like Andy and Alec are in Aber for the graduate’s ball tomorrow, we we went out for a barbecue. I took along my new juggling gear and practised juggling flaming brands. I wasn’t very good at it. I need more practice. Today, I have burns all over my arms.

Later, Claire and I borrowed Paul’s dinghy and paddled around in the sea for awhile. That was fun, too. All in all, a good night.

Kit wasn’t feeling well and retired early.

Came in to work late today. This afternoon, in fact. I love it when I get a lie-in. Claire’s uncharacteristically less horny than usual. Down to about my level, for once. Hmm… Anyway: lots of work to do for the company’s presence at the Royal Welsh Show next week. Better go get on with it.

Feel strangely nostalgic. Perhaps a result of the retro-computer games I’ve been playing. Or the music Alex has put on. Or just too much caffeine. Ah well.

Fire×

Paul In Aber

Paul made it to Aber. Woo and indeed hoo. He, Bryn, Kit, Claire, and I went to the beach and drank beer and ate pizza to celebrate. Then Claire and I took turns in an inflatable dingy and I got soaked as a wave leapt over the side. You’ll probably see their reports of this on their journals, soon, too.

The wiki I was coding got finished. Sadly, only a few of you who read this will ever be allowed to see it, but it’s pretty sweet.

Plothole appeared in the story on Andy’s LiveJournal – he has me drinking tea, which, as everybody knows, isn’t going to happen on account of (a) caffiene being a really, really bad thing for me and (b) I don’t particularly like tea. Have reported this to him and await feedback.

This made me laugh: type Weapons of Mass Destruction into Google and you’ll get this page. I laughed lots.