Boating - Travels with Verne and Roy

Grey-water Blues

Life on a boat is not all champagne and roses. When your lovely new bath won’t empty – and neither will the basins, nor the kitchen sink – it can only be one thing: a problem with the grey-water tank.

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!

“Mayday”, if you didn’t already know, comes from the French m’aidez, or help me. And that’s probably as much as I’m going to remember from the VHF radio course that we’ve just done, so I sincerely hope that no one else’s life is going to depend on my radio skills anytime soon.

I’d been wanting to try The Bull Inn at Sonning ever since I read Jerome K. Jerome’s description in his comic masterpiece Three Men in A Boat – Not to mention the dog (1889): “If you stay at Sonning,” he advised, “put up at ‘The Bull’.”

Built in the 16th century, it is still owned by the neighbouring St Andrew’s Church (which rents it to Fullers).

Buying a Dinghy – Part Two: Getting afloat

An inflatable dinghy like this 2.7m Zodiac comes with a foot-pump, but £100 extra for a compressor was money well spent, says Roy.

Step 2: Use compressor pump (charged overnight) to inflate side-bits; then deflate side-bits

Step 3: At any time, you may need to fiddle mysteriously with valves and such

Step 4: Once sides are semi-deflated, insert and then inflate the deck

Step 7: Attach engine (while First Mate opens champagne), then christen ceremoniously

Step 8: Once First Mate has undergone necessary change of clothing, head off into the sunset

Buying a Dinghy – Part One: Why, and which one?

Our first trip by dinghy to the Tesco Express on the other side of the Thames was a revelation. This was such a cool way to do one’s grocery shopping! We simply had to get a dinghy, and soon.

After giving us a little tour by tender of the Thames & Kennet Marina, our generous D Pontoon neighbour, David, insisted we use his little dinghy for our next supermarket trip. By car, it’s six or seven kilometres away, through sometimes heavy traffic and over Reading Bridge. By boat, it’s a mile at most.

Like many others, no doubt, David shops online and gets his groceries delivered, so he only needs to pop across the river every couple of days for bread and milk and such. Generous to a fault, he’s also quick to offer a lift to King’s Meadow, just before the bridge, from where it’s only a five-minute walk to the train station.

That was how we got to Reading Station before heading to London to visit Chas Newens Marine Boat Co. Ltd, located on the embankment near Putney Bridge, in search of an inflatable dinghy of our very own. (David’s dinghy being temporarily unwell, however, he prevailed upon his friends Howard and Sarah’s son, Oscar (14), to take us in their much fancier and more powerful motorboat – shown at the top of this page.)